99% of users search for information before making a purchase, and 73% of users only visit the top 10 websites, perceiving them as reputable brands. These figures are a powerful testament to the importance of an SEO-friendly website in today's digital marketing landscape. However, many people remain unclear and do not fully understand what an SEO-friendly website is. The journey to achieving SEO-friendly website standards is incredibly meticulous, requiring significant technical skill and persistence from SEO professionals.
What is an SEO-friendly website? Let Markdao define "SEO standards"
An SEO-friendly website is, simply put, a site designed with configurations and features that make it easy for Google to crawl and understand the entire site. You might have an attractive, engaging website with a beautiful, aesthetic design and high-quality content, and think that is enough. In reality, a beautiful exterior is not necessarily enough, especially when you are competing fiercely on the internet against other businesses. Businesses need an SEO-friendly website, or in other words, one that "beats" the standards of an SEO-friendly website.
What are the criteria for evaluating an SEO-friendly website?
- Unique titles and descriptions for all pages. Titles should be around 60–65 characters, and meta descriptions should be around 150 characters. Titles and descriptions are the two primary elements that accurately describe page content without keyword stuffing.
- Website URLs must be clear, formatted in lowercase, and separated by hyphens.
- Fast page loading speeds will create favorable conditions for achieving high rankings on Google's search results pages.
- An SEO-friendly website must have unique and useful content. This means the content on your website is original and cannot be found anywhere else. In particular, the information provided must be high-quality, accurate, easy to understand, and should use bold, italic, or underlined formatting for primary keywords within the article.
- Include SEO-friendly images to make the content engaging and appealing to readers. However, images must be optimized for size while maintaining quality, and ALT text should be used. Additionally, images must be relevant to the article's topic; it is recommended to design or edit them yourself before use.
- Layout SEO-friendly website must be clear and consistent. Specifically, it should include a Header, Breadcrumb menu, Page Title (only one title per page), text formatted in short paragraphs with subheadings, author information, and a Footer.
- Create an XML Sitemap and use a Robots.txt file.
- The interface must be compatible with all devices, from desktops and tablets to mobile phones, providing an enjoyable user experience.
- Have a sitemap.
Reasons why businesses must have an SEO-friendly website
With the fierce competition in online marketing today, website design is a prerequisite for any business. So, what are the reasons you absolutely must design an SEO-friendly website ?
Markdao has listed several significant benefits below:
- Build credibility and increase brand awareness.
- Increase organic traffic to the website from search engines, thereby improving the potential for higher rankings on Google's results pages.
- Maximize savings on marketing costs on Google as well as other channels.
- Make the website more user-friendly, ensuring ease of use, professionalism, and an enhanced user experience.
- Optimize the website for mobile devices to improve traffic.
- Increase opportunities for organic top rankings by combining quality content and images.
- Boost sales and performance through high traffic and by targeting the right potential customers. This is also considered the most important goal among the reasons for designing an SEO-friendly website.
- Additionally, an SEO-friendly website helps you understand what your customers want. For example, how they access your site, what they click on, how they leave, what content they prefer, and more.
7 Google standards for an SEO-friendly website
It is very difficult to check an SEO-friendly website without extensive experience or knowledge in this field. Efforts to build an SEO-friendly website are only meaningful when they go beyond Google's basic standards. Below are Google's requirements for a truly "SEO-friendly" website.
SEO URL optimization - the first task when designing an SEO-friendly website
- Automatically generate URLs based on Product or Post titles to help optimize SEO URLs
- Customize URLs to meet SEO requirements when needed
- Automatically generate SEO Titles and SEO Descriptions for products and posts during creation
- Avoid using auto-generated URLs containing numbers, such as www.example.com/?p=578544
- Use rewritten URLs for links and separate each word with a hyphen "-"
- Include a standard robots.txt file to help crawlers easily read your content
Use HTTPS to meet SEO-friendly website requirements
At the 2019 Google Search Console event in Ho Chi Minh City, Google provided data on HTTPS and confirmed it as a ranking factor for SEO. Imagine if your website lacks security; it would be very difficult for Google to trust it.
An SEO-friendly website must have optimized content hierarchy
Search engines require a unique URL for each piece of content to crawl and index it, as well as to direct users to that content. Different content should have different URLs, and there must be a clear hierarchy between the content on the page.
What are the Title and Meta Description tags of an SEO-friendly website?
The title, meta description, and URL are the three most fundamental pieces of information Google displays in search results to represent the content of a page. Imagine if a URL had no description; Google would likely not want to display it at all.
Google updates its criteria and recommends that meta descriptions for an SEO-friendly website be as follows:
- SEO Title - Approximately 70 characters
- SEO Description - 160 to 200 characters, depending on varying display limits over time
These display elements should be customizable to be more search-engine friendly and reflect content in a way that is easy for users to understand.
404 page linking to a redirect page
Sometimes users will land on a non-existent page on your site by following a broken link, mistyping a URL, or simply because of a minor change that broke a link. Using a custom 404 page to guide users back to an active page on your site can improve the user experience. Your 404 page can include a link back to the homepage and provide links to popular or related content on your site.
An SEO-friendly website design must be mobile-friendly
The world today is mobile-first. Most people search on Google using mobile devices. A desktop version of a website can be difficult to view and use on mobile.
Therefore, designing an SEO-friendly website for mobile devices is crucial for your online presence. In fact, since late 2016, Google has begun experiments primarily using the mobile version of website content for ranking, parsing structured data, and generating snippets.
Setting up H1, H2, and H3 tags on your website
Easily setting up custom H1, H2, and H3 tags on your interface helps Google understand the main content of your articles and products.
