5 Tips to build a SEO-friendly Website

Many people have written about this topic, but there are still companies that don’t know how to get their websites promoted on the Internet. Here’s my two cents on the subject.

So you have a great website, but no one is able to find it on the web? Unfortunately, you’re not alone. I found myself today helping an advertising agency getting their website showing up on search engine results. If you’re experiencing the same difficulties, think about using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics. These are simple (and free) steps that will help your website rank higher on search engine results and get more visitors – potentially generating more sales:

1. Ensure your site is crawlable
2. Create several, high-quality inbound and outbound links
3. Provide good content and leverage the power of keywords
4. Use meta tags: meta titles and meta descriptions
5. Create friendly URLs

1. Ensure your site is crawlable
Search engines have evolved quite a lot on the past few years, but they still have some problems reading specific formats such as flash, video and images. To ensure your website can be accessed by search engines, build your website on a search engine-friendly format, such as html.

2. Create several, high-quality inbound and outbound links
If you’re new to the web, you can think of the Internet as a spider web, where relevant websites are the ones with most inbound and outbound links. Search engines crawl the web and only find a website through another website (and so on). This means that if your website doesn’t have inbound or outbound links, search engines will likely miss it. There are several ways to generate inbound links:

Directory submission: there are literally millions of free (and paid) directories on the web, organized by region (city, state or country), type of business (for instance, retail) and specialization (clothing). Think of this as the Yellow Pages, but on the Internet.
To be featured on a directory, you just need to submit the name of the business, URL and, usually, a small business/website description.

Join discussion forums: if you have the habit of writing in discussion forums, why not include a link to your website at the end of your comment? This is highly effective, easy and… free

Participate in blogs (same rationale)

Create social media profiles for your business: for each profile you create in social media websites such as Facebook and Linkedin, you can add a link to your website.

It’s a bit trickier to create outbound links. Companies usually don’t want visitors to leave their website (who does?) and most decide to just don’t link to other sites on the web. If you have business partners – and they have a website – then it’s a no-brainer: you can simply link your site to theirs and create a quality outbound link. Several businesses have decided to create a blog for the same reason, since it’s a common practice to generate one or two outbound links on a single blog post. If you’re a social media fan, you can also create an outbound link to your company’s profile. Your website will be linking to an external site, but users will still go to a page related to your company.

3. Provide good content and leverage the power of keywords
Search engines don’t only look to the number of inbound and outbound links your website has. Companies like Google and Yahoo want to provide only the best content for their users. When you search for, say, “Top 10 tricks to cook a delicious Thanksgiving meal”, you won’t find websites that sell the latest HP laptop. This is why keywords are so important for your website. Your company’s website should have quality content and specific keywords that accurately describe your business and your products/services, on each and every page of your website. For instance, if you own an organic clothing line and you’re based in Vancouver, some of your keywords could be:

- (business name)
- Trendy women organic clothes
- Local women clothing
- Organic fashion Vancouver

The trick is to find keywords that are unique (or practically unique) to your business. To that end, you may want to research what your competition is doing and what keywords users type when looking for, in this case, an organic clothing line. There are numerous websites and free tools that will help you find the right keywords for your business.

But having great keywords is just the beginning; you need to use them on each and every page, so search engines know your website is truly relevant and not just a sham.

4. Use meta tags: meta titles and meta descriptions

This is an easy step and doesn’t take much time to setup. Each individual page on your website should have a relevant meta title and a meta description. These tags ‘tell’ search engines what that page is all about so, when a user searches for, let’s say, ‘organic clothing’, the search engine knows your website should show up on the page results. Obviously, it is vital the meta title and meta description correspond to the content of that specific page (which means you should use your keywords on meta tags). If you don’t create relevant meta tags, most likely the search engine will just go through your website without knowing it’s relevant.

5. Create friendly URLs
Here’s another easy step. Each page should have its unique URL, indicative of the content of that specific page – and consistent with the page’s meta tags. For instance (and still using the same example), the URL for the ‘About Us’ page of that organic clothing line should be www.businessname.com/about-us. This is especially relevant for important pages, such as “Products” or “Services”.

While these 5 steps look as simple, incremental changes, they will have a great impact on your website search engine results almost right away.