How to Make a Website SEO Friendly from the Start

We are here to show you how to make a website SEO-friendly from the start.  Whether you are starting a business or just making a website to provide information about a certain topic, it will benefit you to know how to make a website SEO friendly as your building it. 

One of the keys to making a new website “SEO friendly” is to follow a few basic but needed principles. First off, “On-site” Search engine optimization is the process of making changes to a site in order to get it on top of the search engines for certain keywords or phrases that have a lot of inquiries. That is called search engine marketing. So let's go over the main things you need to do to help your site get a great start.

These tasks include putting together a domain name and URL, using keywords effectively, specializing in niches that have low competition and high inquiries, adding pictures with ALT Tags, using sales funnels and tracking the results of those funnels.  By doing these tasks, a number of website owners will be in a very good position to make a website that will be visible in the search engines and making money within a matter of months. Let me show you how to make a website SEO-friendly.

1) Domain Name

When one is learning how to create a website, the first thing you will want to do is get an easy-to-remember, useful domain name and URL.  A domain name is the actual title of your given site. For example, if you are looking to sell sporting goods and your business name is Dave’s Sporting Goods, the domain name would likely be www.daves-sportinggoods.com. It is important to make a domain name that is relevant to the content of your site along with being easy to remember. If you are making a website, it will be in your best interest to avoid using domain names that are long and have complicated spelling. You can also use a keyword in addition to your domain name to target a specific portion of the niche if that works in your favor. Example- www.daves-USED–sportinggoods.com. Just be sure to research out a good name and how you're going to structure the URLs so they work in unison to describe your page.

Example Good – www.daves-sportinggoods.com/used/basketballs.   

Example Bad – www.daves-sportinggoods.com/used/orange/regulation/basketballs

2) Keywords

The next step in making an SEO-friendly website is to use keywords. With keywords, you will have a number of terms that create relevance to the content of the site. An example of keywords would be if you have a sporting goods website, it will be important to include terms such as discount sporting goods, new sporting goods, and quality sporting goods, etc. By having a number of keywords that make up the bulk of your website, you will be in a position to have a web asset that will move up the search engines. Keywords in the URL of the website are the best thing to do if you're looking for more niche traffic. If you have a few keywords that need to be placed in the URLs, then make sure to use the hyphen and separated dashes.  When using keywords in your articles and pages be sure to use synonyms and other variations of the target keyword as testing show this works.  Example – tour, tours, excursions, outings, touring. 

3) Target a Niche

When looking at how to create a website, another way to make one that will rank and bring in some profits, is to make a niche site that specializes in a certain part of services or products. With a certain niche, your site will appeal to a smaller but more “qualified to buy” group of inquiries. For example, you groom dogs, you're wanting to start a website, do a keyword search and see that poodle grooming gets 200 more inquiries a month than dog grooming. 

Then placing that keyword “poodle grooming” in your domain or URL structure will increase the likelihood of that page getting more traffic to it by ranking higher in the search engines for that keyword group. Better to get on the front page for a keyword phrase that gets 300 inquiries, than to be on the 2nd page for a term that gets 10k inquiries.

4) Useful Appealing Content

Another way to make your website appealing is to answer people's questions on the niche you are in with articles. Everyone has problems from time to time and you can gain a lot of traffic from writing articles to place on your site to answer these questions. You can also market your services or product at the same time you're solving a problem people search for. Be sure to add pictures (not too many one or two per article) that best represent the content of your website. 

You will be in a position to create a site that will stand out and also be quite visible in the search engines, as I have gained a lot of traffic from pictures ranking well in Google Images. Be sure to add the keyword as the ALT TAG to the picture. You can also use long-tail keywords for the ALT tag names in the pictures as you don’t want to overuse the keyword on a page. This is the fourth aspect of how to make a website SEO friendly.

5) Use H-Tags Correctly

During the process of making a website, you will want to include headlines on all of the pages called H-Tags. With headline tags, you will have one or more words that will state what the content of a page entails with the H1 tag, and then breaking up the page into paragraphs that use the H2 and H3 tags to show the importance of the information on the page. Don’t use H1 more than once per page. These headlines will need some sort of variant of the keyword in them or you can use long-tail versions of your keyword too. These keywords and other terms will likely stand out in the search engines. So when you put together a new website that will appeal to search engines, you will benefit by putting in a number of headlines on each page from H1 to H5 if needed to help the SEO. 

6) Conversions

As you are thinking of building your site you will have to design your pages in a way to convert your traffic into sales, contact emails, and testimonials. This is called a “sales funnel”. With a sales funnel your site will be in a position to monitor traffic and sales conversions per funnel. By making and tracking sales funnels it will let you see the needed information to adjust a page's look, move a button for a better view or change the wording to make it improve the conversions. You want to start off with a good landing page that will entice visitors to click through to the next page, the next page is where you have your pitch and offers. After the purchase or sign-up, have the email or payment confirmation page redirect to a “thank you page” on your site. That way you can see how many visits you have to the ‘thank you page” then you have a count of the actual conversions you get from visits.

By monitoring traffic intent, click through and what pages have high exits, the site owner will be in a position to know how their site is doing, adjust where needed, and have a good understanding of sales and whether or not the page is reaching its goals. There are WordPress plug-ins that help to track and record the sales results and will provide a site owner with sales figures, income, and traffic reports.  Another key part of the sales funnel is helping the site gather emails and vital information from interested consumers. With this feature, a site owner can have a list of individuals who visited the site, what they bought or didn’t buy, and who are interested in making future purchases from the site. With a well-developed sales funnel, your site will help you generate more sales and bring in more customers emails for better conversions and repeat sales. This is the sixth aspect of how to make a website SEO friendly.

7) Tracking Your Site

Once you complete the construction of the website, it will be important to track the results of visitors coming to the site. This will allow site owners to see how effective their site is and whether or not it is visible enough in the search engines. Having a tracking system can help a number of site owners see how many people are visiting the site each day and each month. They will also be in a position to see what time of day the site is getting the most visitors as well. A great way to do this is with Google Webmaster tools, this will show you where you sit in the search engine as far as page placement to certain keywords.

You also want to use Google Analytics for a FREE tracking reporter, as this will show you actual visits and were there going, what page they exit on, where they came from etc. Google Analytics is what you use to place your “Goals” in, a Goal is a page you make and place in your analytics so when a visitor hits that page, you know that they have completed a purchase or whatever you measure. Tracking is very important for those who are looking to make a website that is SEO friendly and converts well. It will enable site owners to find out which words are getting the most visitors and which ones are not. As a result, a site owner will then have an easier time making changes and adjustments to the site.