How to Design a Website That Boosts Your SEO Rankings

So, you’ve created a beautiful website. You devoted all of your time and effort into it, filled it with some amazing content, and yet… you aren’t getting any visitors. No visitors, no traffic, and certainly no customers. And then you’re left wondering, where did I go wrong?

Well, let us break it to you. Your website wasn’t optimized for search engines.

SEO might sound a bit boring but it’s really important. Having an amazing site isn’t enough to get people to notice you. The truth is, you have a lot of competition. There are around 1.13 billion websites around the world, and if you want yours to stand out, you have to do everything in your power to make that happen. That definitely includes optimizing it for SEO.

If you don’t know much about SEO, finding someone who offers web services and has experience with this aspect of marketing is a great way to get started.

Otherwise, if you’re up for the challenge of trying it yourself, today’s article is all about why it’s important to optimize your website for SEO and how to do it.

Why Your Website Needs to Be Optimized for Search Engines

Here’s the thing. Creating a website that’s optimized for search engines will help you gain visibility. When you are selling any product or service, you need one thing. You need people to see your offer.

Visitors can be converted into customers, but first, they have to find your site. Plus, if you are working on enhancing every step in their journey, success is bound to follow you.

No matter how great your website is, it needs this optimization. Apart from visibility, it can help with:

Organic Traffic

You can always pay for ads, but attracting visitors through search engines is free. By optimizing your site’s content, structure, and some of its technical aspects, it will be ranked higher and lead to more visitors and potential customers without any costs.

Better User Experience (UX)

An SEO-friendly website is typically faster, more accessible, and a lot easier to navigate. This kind of site reduces bounce rates, encourages engagement, and makes sure that users can find the information they need quickly and completely effortlessly. This makes their experience (UX) way better, increasing the chances that they will be back.

Increased Credibility and Trust

If your website ranks high in search results, people automatically see it as high value. It makes it seem more authoritative, reliable, and relevant.

Competitive Advantage

A lot of people are using the benefits of the Internet, and trust me, no matter what you do, your competition is out there doing their best to stay ahead. If you miss out on this opportunity, they’ll get the traffic and customers that could have been yours. That’s why you need to do everything in your power to stand out.

How to Create a Website That Improves Your SEO

We’ve talked about why your website needs to be optimized for search engines, but here’s how to actually do it:

1. Having a Mobile-Friendly Design Is Important

Here’s a fact: Google ranks websites based on how they perform on mobile devices. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re losing out on potential rankings.

Plus, around 62.2% of global internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Some people will interact with your website for the first time from their phone. So you need to do your best to make a good impression.

Here’s how to make your website mobile-friendly:

• Use a responsive design that automatically adjusts to different screen sizes.

• Avoid fonts and buttons that are too small. You need to make everything easy to tap and read on all devices.

• Optimize images so they can load quickly on mobile devices.

A mobile-friendly website will help create a better user experience for your customers and higher SEO rankings. Sounds simple, right?

2. Optimize Your Website’s Speed

Around 40% of users will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Even worse, Google penalizes slow sites by pushing them lower in rankings.

How to speed up your website:

• Compress images without losing quality (you can use tools like TinyPNG or ShortPixel).

• Choose a fast and reliable web host.

• Don’t use too many unnecessary plugins and scripts.

• Enable browser caching so that when your visitors return, they don’t have to reload everything.

• Use a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute your site’s content faster. A CDN is a group of servers that helps load your website’s content faster by storing it in locations that are closer to your visitors.

3. Have a Clean and Simple Website Structure

If your website is messy and unorganized, people (and search engines) will have a hard time understanding it and finding what they need. A clear website structure improves user experience and helps search engines go through your site efficiently and comprehend what it’s about more easily. When search engines can do this, they rank you higher.

Here are some tips on how to do it:

• Keep your navigation simple and clear.

• Use URLs that are descriptive (for example, you can use yourwebsite.com/best-coffee-in-town instead of yourwebsite.com/page123).

• Organize your content with clear categories and subcategories. It will help users find their way around your site and just make it much more organized.

• Create an XML sitemap (you can use tools like Yoast SEO for WordPress to create one).

4. Add High-Quality Content with Proper Formatting

The content on your site plays a huge role. It needs to be informative, relevant, and digestible. High-quality content will not only build trust within your target audience, it will also help search engines rank your website higher.

Valuable and engaging content will help you establish yourself as an authority, encourage visitors to stay longer on your site (and come back to it), and help you get backlinks. All of this will help improve your SEO ranking.

But your content also needs to have the right formatting. Here are some SEO-friendly content tips:

• Use clear headings (H1, H2, H3) to structure your content.

• Write in short paragraphs (no one likes to read a big block of text). You need to understand that your viewers don’t have a lot of time. So, everything needs to be skimmable.

• Use bullet points to engage your visitors and help them skim through the content.

• Answer common questions and provide value. Both Google and your visitors will appreciate content that solves problems. Make sure that your content provides real value to your readers and they will just keep coming back for more.

• Also, do your best to stay away from content Google might see as spammy. Avoid keyword stuffing and misleading information.

• Follow E-E-A-T principles. E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, and Google uses this framework to assess the quality of your content. So, you need to make sure that your content is well-researched and backed up by reliable sources or your experience.

A well-structured blog post that offers your readers value will help keep your visitors engaged and also increase the time they spend on your site, which is important for your ranking.

5. Optimize Your Images

Using the right images will make your website visually appealing, but they can slow down your site if you don’t optimize them correctly.

Here’s how you can do that:

• Rename your files by describing what the image is about so that Google can understand it better (for example, rename your file to fresh-apples instead of just using IMG22445.jpg).

• Add alt text (this helps engage your users and boosts SEO). An example of an alt-text could be:

alt=“A young girl taking online classes at home”

• It’s also important that you choose the right file format. Go with JPEG for photos, PNG for graphics with transparency, and WebP for a mix of both.

• SEO experts say that you should keep your image files under 70 KB (in order to keep your loading times as fast as possible).

6. Use Internal and External Links

You can use internal and external links in your content. Internal links link to other articles on your site, and external links link to other websites. Internal links help search engines understand the content on your website, and external links can help you gain authority (especially if you link to sites that are performing well).

Internal links can also help guide your viewers to other articles on your site. You can use a variety of anchor texts because it creates a natural linking profile. For example, you can use long-tail keywords, exact match anchor text (the exact keyword that you’re trying to rank for), the naked URL (simply the raw URL), branded anchor text (when you use your brand’s name), and so on.

When you can, link to reputable sources for your external links. Also, avoid linking to spammy websites. This can hurt your credibility.

7. Secure Your Website with HTTPS

If your website isn’t using HTTPS, Google flags it as “Not Secure.” This can scare visitors away and hurt your rankings. Switching to HTTPS is simple, and it can make a big difference for your website.

Here’s how to do it:

• Get an SSL certificate (a lot of hosting providers offer them for free).

• Update all internal links to use https:// instead of http://.

• Redirect old HTTP URLs to the new HTTPS versions.

8. Optimize It for Voice Search

With the rise of voice assistants (like Siri and Alexa), more and more people are using voice search. That’s why you also need to optimize your website for more conversational questions.

In order to do this, you need to focus more on writing naturally and use longer keywords. You can also answer common questions directly in your content. The best way to do this is by adding FAQ sections to your articles.

Wrapping Up

We know that learning more about SEO can be stressful, but you don’t have to make all of these changes right away. Start small and build your way up. When you see how well you’re doing, you’ll feel inspired to take more action.

This may seem like a lot of information all at once, but when you get the hang of it, it really is quite simple. Just keep improving, stay consistent, and then sit back and watch your rankings go up.

So go out there and create a website you will be proud of. We are rooting for you!