When building out your website, you’ll want to keep search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. You want your site visitors to be able to easily find what they’re looking for, so it’s important that Google can follow all of your links correctly. To do that, web developers often follow these simple 10 best practices when creating a new website.
Get Rid of Flash: Flash was popular once upon a time, but its shelf life has passed us by. Today, it just makes it more difficult for both humans and computers to read your website content and is especially problematic when your user base is internationally dispersed or using assistive technology.
Use Semantic HTML5 Tags: Tags like
<b>
<i>
<u>
<strong>
have been deprecated with HTML5 in favor of tags like
<em>
which already convey context.
Don't Forget About Indexable External Links: If a site visitor wants to contact you, consider adding a link below your navigation bar so they don't have to guess where to click. When making those link decisions, don't forget about indexable external links – Google's crawlers won't be able to index them if they aren't on your page.
Choose Suitable Keywords: Keywords are great tools for human searches – people understand them well – but there's an art form that goes into choosing good keywords from organic searches.
Redesign Existing Pages Instead of Adding New Ones: Filling up your site with duplicate information is just going to frustrate users who didn't know better than to look for it in more than one place.
Use Proper Anchor Text Every Time
Move That Navbar Up Above: It can make sense to put secondary navigation at the bottom of every page, but do make sure each primary header above each major section starts with
<h1>
Include Robots Meta Tag Within Header Files
Stay Away From Frames Unless Absolutely Necessary,
Avoid Frame Busting Scripts, They Disrupt Your Page Flow: Historically, frames were a useful method to create extra real estate within a single window. These days however, most browsers will attempt to resize themselves to fit larger pages – including ones that use frames. An additional issue occurs when some scripts mistakenly break frame-based pages as soon as they load, but scripts can easily check whether your website is already framed before breaking everything.
How to ensure good SEO for any site?
1) On-page Optimization
The goal of on-page optimization is simple: ensure that a website’s content includes all of the necessary elements for search engines to locate, index, and correctly rank it. When done correctly, on-page optimization helps websites provide an exceptional user experience while also being discovered by searchers. So why isn’t every site optimized? In short, because optimizing a website requires knowing what matters to search engines—and even Google itself admits that understanding SEO can be challenging.
2) User Experience and User Interface
If you’re building a website, focus on its user experience. Visitors should be able to quickly find what they’re looking for. If you have a high-quality product or service that fits into a competitive market, chances are there are going to be plenty of people trying their best not just to take business away from you but also just curious about learning more about your company. Google Analytics can tell you how many visitors land on specific pages within your site as well as how much time they spend there before moving on or leaving entirely.
3) What Google Does Not Like
Google is a machine, but it does not like spam. It doesn’t take much for a website to be flagged as a black-hat website in Google’s search engine. If your page ranks high on Google, it helps build trust in your site. When people see that you are an authority in your field, they will likely click through from another site to view content or buy something from you. However, if they click through and see that all of your pages have been created automatically with no human involvement whatsoever, your web design may not have met all of Google’s standards.
4) Watch Out For Cloaking and Spamming Techniques
Cloaking is a technique that shows a search engine a completely different version of your website than a human visitor. A great way to spot cloaking is if you notice that certain pages of your site have been tagged as spam by search engines. Cloaking can negatively impact your search engine optimization efforts, so it’s important to stay on top of those things. While you may think it’s easier said than done, remember that if you don’t pay attention, competitors who do could gain an unfair advantage on your business.
As always, thanks for reading and have a great day!
Top comments (3)
Just a quick note that none of
b,i,u, orstrongare deprecated in HTML5, and all of them have semantic meaning.Great article!
Thanks Ashish