In this digital age, it’s common knowledge that you need a website. But, is it all? 

Does having a website makes you elidible to sell online and consider having a strong online presence?

No. It was before like that. But, not anymore. 

Do you know there are over 1 billion websites worldwide? and they are increasing as you are reading this article. 

So, you must have something better than what others have in order to be visible online and get seen on the internet for what you offer. 

What is that? SEO. Yes, you might have already heard about SEO. That is the thing which can help you to beat your competitors and get more customers. 

SEO is a huge topic which we are not going to discuss today. As a whole. 

What I am going to share with today are the essential things of an SEO Friendly website. Which is the first and most important factor in whole SEO. 

If you are not doing much in the SEO and still have a good website with all the essentials even then you will rank and get more traffic than those who just created the website for the sake of it. 

After reading this you will know exactly how to make SEO friendly website?

Let’s start.

1- Using HTTPS

This was the most contradicting topic for all the SEOs. Does having an SSL or not affect SEO? 

Yes, It does. Google wants to serve the best, relevant and safe sites to its users. Not some spammy and suspicious site.

Even if you rank somehow. The browsers will start to warn about your website with a whole red screen. 

This is the most basic and easy thing you can do to improve your ranking.  

Nowadays most of the hostings come with a Free SSL. If not you can buy them for a very cheap price. Still, if you can’t even afford that then you can have a get a free SSL. 

2- Proper XML Sitemap

If you want to visit any particular location you need the help of a map. Otherwise, you will wander around and go back.

Similarly, if Sitemap is a map of what to crawl for Crawl Bots of Google, Yahoo or Bing. 

If you want them to crawl properly and get the right info to index then you should provide a Sitemap. 

If you are like me a WordPress user then you don’t have to do much about this. You can simply install any plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math or any other sitemap plugin and it will create one site for you. 

You can also use free XML Sitemap generator sites too if you are not a WordPress user. 

3- Robots.txt for better crawling

If a sitemap is a kind of security guard of your website. It tells Crawl Bots what to crawl and what not to. And if you want it can also decide how they should crawl each page of your website. 

You can also block any particular bot from crawling your website. or allow some pages but block some pages from indexing. 

It is very important to have this in place. Again if you are a WordPress user it very easy for you to create and handle. 

Otherwise, you can use any free online tool which you can find just by googling it. 

4- User-friendly URLs

Say, this is very easy and no explanation needed point. If you want your URLs to be User Friendly then it should be something meaningful and understandable. 

Suppose your url is like: www.darshanpatel.co/id-5960

What is this? Your user will not understand what is this and what you are trying to show here.

Similarly, bots are also confused when they see these type of URLs it better to use user-friendly URLs like:

www.darshanpatel.co/SEO-checklist

So, make sure your URLs are User-Friendly and Search Engine friendly too.

5- Work on all devices

Do you think you are spending lots of time on your mobile? If yes, your users are the same as you.

And chances are that they will come across your website searching for whatever product or service you provide.

Now, if your website is not loading properly and not mobile optimized(responsive) then you are done.

They will move to another website cause there are lots of other sites on the internet. (Over 1 Billion)

Google also know this and they have a testing tool which tests your site for mobile usability. If you failed then simple your site will not rank in mobile.

And this year in March they will officially use mobile-first indexing. That means if your sire in nor visible in mobile then you won’t rank.

So, make sure your website is mobile-friendly or responsive.

6- No Duplicate Content(Or Very Low Content)

Okay, gone are the days when you can just copy-paste the content from one site to your site and save money.

In 2011 Google specially updated one Panda Algorithm which does exactly this. The only work it has to do is find the sites with duplicate content or very low content which not valuable to the users at all. 

And de-rank them. Yes, this all the things panda does. Find sites with duplicate content and decrease their ranking. 

If it stops there only it might be okay. But, you may receive a penalty from Google For Duplicate content which is not very good to get. 

So, make sure you have proper unique and valuable content on your site. Your page should have a minimum of 300 words to meet the Google Guidelines of too low content. 

There are various duplicate content checker tool on the internet just search for them and you will have the list of them in-front of you.

7- Optimized Images(Size & Alt Text)

Images are a great way to represent anything you want in visual and easy to understand form.

But, not properly optimized images can do harm to your site rather than any help.

When I say optimization here I am not just saying about adding Alt attribute I am also talking about its size and formate. 

If your images are not properly sized and compressed then it will directly affect your site load speed which is not good at all. 

So, make sure you upload properly sized images and with good alt tags. 

8- No Keyword Stuffing

Don’t Don’t do this. No matter how desperate you are or whatever so-called SEO Expert told you to do this. 

Keyword Stuffing is considered as bad practices by Google if you are doing it then stop right now. 

You might be tempted to do this. Because you want to rank higher than your competitors. But, this thing can also lower your website ranking.

If you think you have made the mistake then correct it by updating new content which is better and without any keywords stuffing. 

9- Easy Site Structure

I have seen web developers creating a really amazingly hard to navigate websites. 

Your site structure should be more like a tree. Your main home page then your main pages and then your subpages. 

If your site structure is easy then your users will like to interact more with your website. 

Similarly, crawl bots also like easy to crawl the website. Which is depends on your site structure. 

You can refer the image below to create your site. Or you can check if your site is like this structure or not.

10- Proper Internal Linking

Sometimes we are so busy creating backlinks that we ignore our own internal link building. 

Once the user lands on your website he/she might want to check all the things. If they are reading a post then you might want to link your previous articles. 

Backlinks are important but internal linking on the website is also very important and easy to do. 

11- No Broken Links

Suppose you found an amazing article or website. You want to know more about them and you click on the About Us page.

But, it gives you a 404 or any other error due to which page is not opening. 

There are tools that can help you check the broken links on your website for Free. Make sure you use them and make your site Broken Link Free.

12- Proper Title and Meta Tags

Good Titles are the key to get clicks. But, what if your tile is perfect for some users but not good for the Search Engine where your potential users search for you or your content.

The first thing your users see when they search is title and meta description of that particular page. 

Using a proper keyword in your meta title is also a good practice to follow and improve ranking. 

Similarly, just below the headline, you will see some text which is called meta description which is also very important. You can also use the keyword you want to rank for in the meta description. 

But, you have to make sure you fit everything in 150 characters. Cause in Google Search users will not anything beyond the 150 words. 

So, make sure your title tags and meta tags are properly set up and optimized.

13- Site Load Speed

Who doesn’t know about this?

There was this study on Amazon’s site. Where they said that even 1-second delay in page loading makes them loos a lot of money. 

Now, in 2021 Google is going to focus more on this. If your site meets Google’s Core Vitals then you might get improvement your ranking. 

You can check if your site is okay or not with Google’s Page Speed Insights. Speed does not affect dramatically in ranking but it still has a say in Google’s ranking factors. 

If you are a WordPress developer then there are lots of Free as well as paid plugins that can help you improve your page load page. If you need help to increase your WordPress Site Load Speed then feel free to contact me. 

Conclusion

Having a website is not all nowadays. There many things you have to do after creating a website. The part we covered today is basically considered as on-page SEO optimization but this is not all in that. On-Page SEO is a whole new topic in itself. But, these 13 things are essentials for any website in 2021 to rank and get indexed properly on Google or any other search engine. 

Bottom line is you must have optimized your technical parts such as Sitemap, Robots.txt and URL Structure. 

How do you make your website SEO Friendly? Let me know your views in the comments below.