Search engine optimization has been one of the most powerful tools for digital marketers. And whenever an entrepreneur embarks upon a journey in the E-commerce industry is well aware of the importance of adopting the right SEO strategies. But unfortunately, what many people fail to understand is that SEO is not something that you can incorporate later to your website for the best results. If you want to see a good ROI right from the initial stages, developing a website that is always “search engine ready” is crucial.

What is a website that is SEO friendly?

A website that is SEO friendly is basically one that will allow web crawlers to scan through the web pages of the website. Unless the web crawlers explore the content of your website, it will be difficult for your online business to get visibility and gain prominence. As such, for a website designer, it is important that he develops the website keeping in mind the requirements of the web crawlers too.

What are the prerequisites for an SEO friendly website?

In order that your website is compatible with the search engines, there are few fundamental aspects that are required to be addressed. And these fundamental factors ought to be incorporated into the website’s design by the website developer right in the beginning. Let us find out what the fundamental requirements are exactly.

First and foremost, a digital marketing plan has to be worked out that will essentially have a business model that has clarity of thought and most importantly valuable proposition.

Hosting

Website hosting is one of the aspects that you have to keep in mind. After all, you cannot afford to suffer frequent downtime. Strategically, it is a wise move to be “platform specific”.

Image SEO

When you are optimizing images of your website, it is best to alt-tag each picture that you have in your website. However, remember, that unless you use the right file format for your images, your website might become slow if the page load time is too high.

Consequently, this will make your website slower. As such, scaling down the images in an appropriate manner is what you need to emphasize on.

Updating website regularly

The search engine major Google, prefers websites that are useful to users. As such, when web crawlers scan through content, they try to find out whether or not the content has been updated frequently or if the content has been the same over several months. As such, just make sure that content on your website is updated on a regular basis.

Ensure easy access to content

You will come across many websites that want you to sign up or subscribe to allow you to view content. Also, few of the websites will require you to complete information in a form or restrict few segments of the content only for the registered members.

In this way, you are not allowing access to viewers. This adversely affects the rankings of your website and is in no way an SEO friendly approach. And if at all you have to do so, ensure that just as you have prevented viewers from getting access to few sections, you have given access to quite a number of sections too.

Mobile friendly

These days you will find very few people actually sit in front of desktops to browse the virtual world or make payments online. Hand held devices are in vogue and it is vital to allow users to access every bit of crucial information while they are on the move. As such, while development of SEO friendly website design is underway, ensure that you have the mobile version of it too.

Opt for responsive web designing strategies and techniques. Experts believe that if you want to make your website interactive, by all means you ought to incorporate a tutorial section or Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section for better visibility. In fact, these days, websites also have provision for voice searches.

Develop a website that loads faster

Even if you have used some of the best and most appealing images and text content the quality of which is unparalleled, if the loading time of your website is slow, be prepared to get penalized by the search engine major. So, it is important that you refrain from using any such plug-ins, social media buttons or Javascript that might cause your website to slow down.

Audits

To find out whether or not your website is performing well, it is essential to carry out audits at frequent intervals to assess the drawbacks and necessary steps that you ought to take for the website to work for you and your business goals.

Optimizing URLs

Last but not the least, regardless of the website design and layout, you have to optimize the URLs too. You won’t get the desired results if you don’t do so. The domain name you opt for makes a lot of difference. Keep it simple and one that will be easily understood by the users and allow them to know what to expect from that website.