There are many lessons and core pillars when it comes to finding a solid SEO strategy that really works. These days it is becoming harder to carve out some traffic using SEO because most of the big-name brands are ranking and producing so much content with AI or just getting so many high-quality backlinks that smaller sites simply can’t compete with them. However, if you understand the basics, you could find yourself in a very good spot to find a weak keyword and establish some revenue for your site.
The most important part of any site is ensuring that you get the right setup from the outset. If you have a very slow framework and bloated coding, then your site will be extremely slow and not rank well for search terms in Google. Having a poor website design and navigation is really something that Google wants to avoid promoting simply because a site that takes a long time to load usually makes users feel very frustrated, which promotes a poor user experience and makes them more likely to hit the back button on their browser or use another search engine.
Having a really solid knowledge of how a website is crawled by Google is perhaps the best overall strategy for SEO. Once you begin to really understand how search engine technology works, you can start to improve your process piece by piece and gain massive traction over other search engine optimisers because you have gone deeper into researching the fundamentals and started to understand how to start things off correctly. Getting a solid foundation with an established set of rules is a great way to ensure a good start with Google and other search engines.
Website crawlers are built so that they can gain access to your site and crawl the content. Search engines then look at certain signals within that text to determine where your site should rank from the outset, so what you need to do is make your site extremely well designed and make it easy for search engine spiders to find what they need and navigate your website.
Being able to fully render your content is the name of the game, and it’s something you need to focus on when it comes to creating a good site structure. Having a good site structure is vastly important for search optimisation but also for users in general. If your site is confusing to navigate and contains too many subfolders or a terrible search function, then finding the content they need will take too much time, and they will likely bounce off your website.
In terms of helping users out, it’s always a good idea to think about how to spin off each of your content sections. For example, a major news site like BBC News has separate sections for each topic, such as business news, trending news and major breaking news topics such as current cycles about the economy and general elections. Getting your site topics and themes right from the outset and leaving room for your site to grow is a good idea to plan for ahead of time.
As your site becomes more established, you might have a meltdown when you realise that you need to create a whole new site structure because you never planned on having thousands of pages on your website, and you can also see that there are so many new areas you could expand into and even new ways of creating content. New content mediums could be added to your site, such as presentations, infographics, videos and audio. Again, a good framework and correct site design will prevent indexing and crawling issues when you start to venture into richer media.
Getting a good balance between the content is very difficult these days; some sites are ruined by having too many adverts or content that is sponsored or heavily biased against certain companies. A good website should provide impartial content that is both informative but also has some good structure and a readable format to it. Ensuring that search engines can pick up and easily read your content is all part of your investment in getting a good site structure established from the outset so that you can start off on the right foot.
Getting this kind of balance will take practice, and you should always be very careful to strike a good balance. Search engines like a good blend between good informative content and ads or commercial content which should be labelled. You should avoid filling your website full of product pages and instead focus on the user first, promoting good quality information and trying to really think about what kind of questions a marketplace might want answering. Then you can really build a content resource very quickly which will give you a unique reason for a visitor to come back to your website.
Ensuring that you have correct labelling for commercial content is also critical; the law is different for each country, but you must label any ads or disclose any compensation that you may receive if someone makes a purchase from any of your links.
User experience is simply not talked about enough when it comes to actual site design and technical SEO. Having a good user experience is essential for your website because it allows Google and other engines to continue to promote you. If a user had a bad experience and they have to visit another website, then that reflects badly on Google based on the fact that they have to serve up another option, which is a real waste of time for consumers.
Part of the user experience these days is getting a mobile-first design. This means that you should test out and code your website onto various mobile devices first because mobile is now overtaking desktop, laptop and tablet searches and has created a wider range of different searches online, such as more localised searches and way more long-tail variations, such as questions and answers. If you have a fast-loading, mobile-friendly website, then you can really gain some trust with Google, as it likes to see investments being made in the future of search and how users display your site.
With more searches being done by voice and sites being viewed on mobile phones, it’s vastly important to learn how to code a good mobile design, and it will become more important to really focus on building a strong mobile design which may display certain parts of your website so that you can make it easier for the user to do things quickly and easily when travelling around.
You should also put some emphasis on design for mobile and make sure to include a phone number so that they can contact you quickly if they need to be on the move. Part of the reason mobile-friendly sites are being pushed is because so many sites failed to adapt and think about how site interactions would vary across things like different screen sizes, mobile operating systems and different resolutions. Making a clutter-free design that loads quickly and has standout calls to action is the way to win with technical SEO.
While you should go for a mobile-friendly approach first, you should always have a site that functions the same for all users; you don’t want a completely different experience. But what you should do is focus more on how you can make life easier for mobile users; by thinking about the most difficult device to design for, it will often be easy to then use the site on desktop, tablet and laptops.
URL structures are another important step when it comes to technical SEO; making sure that your URLs are kept clean and actually contain your keywords and other descriptive words is one of the best practices when it comes to SEO. Don’t just stuff your keywords into the URL; instead, create a description containing your keywords. You should also have a very structured approach which may include named folders or subfolders which are accurately named so that search engines can understand your content structure.
The use of canonicals is one of search engines’ latest developments when it comes to technical SEO. Canonicals can be used to avoid having a duplicate content penalty by having multiple versions of the same page indexed by search engines. You can think of this as a way to avoid having 3 pages that all have the same content but a different address. With a canonical, you just serve up one page for each rendition, which helps both users and search engines to find the correct URL.
Site redirects, or redirects in general, are another way that you can help signpost and shuttle traffic in the right direction. An example of this would be a business that has had a name rebrand and wants all traffic that types in the old address or finds the old website in a search to be sent directly across to the new brand name business.
Companies can spend so much time building up a brand name, and they can invest heavily into a good domain name or building up a brand via social media. After a while, they might change ownership or want to purchase a shorter domain name to make the name more consumer-friendly or easier to spell. This could spell disaster if the company doesn’t use a redirect, as the traffic is still going to the old site with the old name, or even worse, the site has been taken down. A good redirect structure prevents lost traffic.
The last 2 components to consider are pagination and site security. When dealing with large-scale content or e-commerce websites, you really need to break up your content or product search results into faster-loading blocks. An example of this would be placing hundreds of thousands of products onto one scrolling page; it would slow loading time down to a crawl and likely crash so many browsers because the data is displayed all at once. A good pagination structure can help prevent this, as it breaks the content down into nice digestible chunks.
Website security is really the last piece of the puzzle when it comes to solid site structure. Having a safe and secure website is absolutely essential these days, so you need to ensure you have a safe SSL security certificate installed on your domain name, which tells Google that all information that is being passed from your browser to the site you’re visiting is secure and protected from hackers and thieves. SSL used to be used on payment pages to enable credit card transactions, but since then users have addressed greater privacy concerns for their data, so Google has ensured that SSL is now the standard.
A valid SSL certificate can be displayed by clicking in the top left of the screen, located next to the website address. If you run across a site that has no SSL certificate, you will usually get a warning from many modern browsers that any data you submit is not secure. Having a valid SSL certificate is essential even if you don’t sell anything online. If you want to rank in Google and other engines, you need to show them that your site values a visitor’s privacy and also shows to the visitor that you can be trusted and provide a safe website which is not prone to data leaks, hacker attacks or malware installation.