SEO Fundamentals and Tips to Help Design a SEO-Friendly Website

When building a website, most webmasters concentrate more on the web content and web design with the hope of pleasing the website visitors but at the expense of search engine optimization, no wonder many critical points that concern SEO are always missed out. Keep in mind that the search engines are simply programs that expect to see certain things in a website to be able to rank the website. Therefore, if the factors are in favor of the search engines, your website will get high rankings and if the factors contradict what the search engines expect, the website is bound to get poor rankings.

This is to say therefore that when designing a website, you have to factor in both the search engines and the human visitors. Here are some key elements that will help you put these two aspects into consideration when designing a website. First and foremost, you have to include Meta information on your web page, which is composed of data that clearly defines the subject matter of any given page. Meta information is composed of three major items:

• Keywords – even though this category of Meta information is becoming obsolete today, it is meant to define the basic keywords found in a given webpage.
• Meta Description – this comes immediately after the title and is meant to describe what the web page is all about. The meta description describes a webpage’s content more broadly than the title and it also has to contain the major keywords that people are likely to use when searching for the website
• Title - the title defines the theme of the webpage hence when designing a website you should create an attractive, catchy title composed of your primary keywords since the title is visible in the search engine results page.

Still on point, you should design the website with good and easy navigation. Ensure the navigation from one webpage to another within the website is easy for your visitors and also for the search engine crawlers. The next point that you should factor in is content; ensure your website has unique and informative content that will keep your visitors coming back for more information. Equally, the search engine crawlers love fresh content that cannot be found in any other website. You should also try to update your web content on a regular basis.

While the abovementioned tips are for onsite optimization, you should also do some offsite optimization, which increases the visibility of your website. This you do by building quality back links. The concept behind back linking is that current algorithms used to rank websites by the search engines rely mainly on identifying external links to a website that points to different pages in the website.  

The links can be viewed as votes whereby a website linking to yours can vote for your website based on its relevance and whether or not it is considered an authority site. The more links to a web page means more votes for that particular web page. When backlinking, ensure the keywords are well represented in the anchor text. This helps in boosting your search engine rankings when these keywords are searched for.