What is a SEO Friendly Website and Why do you Need One

 Many times you hear the term “SEO friendly” or “SEO friendly website” but what does this really mean and why do you need one? How can an SEO friendly website help your business grow?

These are the questions I will try to answer in this post by avoiding technical terms or advanced SEO practices and theories.

What do we mean by a Search Engine Friendly Website?

What is an SEO Friendly website? An SEO friendly website it’s easy for search engines to crawl and understand the structure and its content.

The most important characteristics of a SEO friendly website are:

#1 – It has Unique titles and Descriptions for all pages

Each page of the website (including the home page) has a unique title and description.

The titles are between 60-65 characters and the descriptions are aprx 150 characters. Titles and descriptions accurately describe what the page is about without being keyword stuffed.

#2 – Well formatted URLs – URLS

Permanent links or slugs (that’s the url of a webpage) are descriptive, all lower case and separated by dashes.

#3- Fast loading web pages

Neither people nor search engines want websites that are slow to load. On the contrary fast loading websites are SEO friendly (meaning they have an advantage in ranking algorithms over websites that are slower) and generate more user interactions (sales, newsletter signups, contact forms submissions etc).

 #4 – It has unique content

Content on the website is not found anywhere else on the web, all pages have unique and useful content. This means a website cannot be SEO friendly if it has content copied from other web sites.

#5 – Includes images that are optimized for search engines

Search engines prefer text that’s the truth, but you also need to have images to your pages because people like it, it makes your content more interesting, easier to read, sharable etc.

When you do so, make sure that the images are optimized for size and also that you set a meaningful image filename and ALT text.

#6 – Pages have a meaningful structure

A web page usually has the following elements:

• Header
• Breadcrumb menu
• Page Title (that’s the H1 tag – there is only one per page)
• Well formatted text – text is separated into a number of short paragraphs with subheadings
• Author information
• Footer

There are of course many other characteristics that make a website SEO Friendly, you can read them here: The Ultimate SEO Checklist.

Why do you need a SEO friendly website?

Something that most CEOs, small business owners or new webmasters don’t easily understand is why you need a SEO friendly website and why make the effort to make your website friendlier to search engines.

Well, the reasons are a lot but those you need to know are:

#1 – Increase in organic traffic (that is traffic from search engines)

As expected, a SEO friendly website will get you more traffic from search engines as it is likely to run higher in the SERPS (search engine results pages).

If you take into account that the majority of people who use the search box tend to select one of the first 5 results, you can understand the importance of SEO.

#2 – It will make your website user friendly

SEO is not only for search engines but good SEO is for users as well. Applying the principles of SEO to your website, will make it easier to use and this will enhance the user experience.

#3 – It gives you brand credibility

Users are more likely to trust websites (businesses) that are found in the first pages of Google, Bing or Yahoo. This is good for both brand awareness and brand credibility.

#4 – It is cost effective

A SEO website will drive targeted traffic 24×7 without needed to spend money on PPC or other forms of online advertising. While there is a cost to reach that point, the long term benefits are bigger.

#5 – It helps you understand what your most important customers want

SEO drives quality traffic and by analyzing the behavior of those users (how they enter your website, what they click, how they leave, what they like etc) is a great way to understand what your customers want and adjust your website or products to match their needs.

#6 – SEO is even more important on mobile

A website that is mobile friendly and has good rankings on mobile search can get more customers and traffic that websites that are not mobile SEO friendly.

More and more users are using their mobiles to search for information or products while on the go it is important to be on top of the search results otherwise you are losing customers to competition, especially those searching for local products or services.

 Conclusion

A SEO friendly website has certain features and characteristics that helps search engines understand what the website is all about and this increases the chances of achieving better rankings in the SERPS.

The most important advantage of having a SEO friendly website is that you will get more targeted organic traffic from search engines.

Reasons You Are Not Getting Enough Traffic To Your Website

 There are many reasons as to why a website or blog may not be getting enough traffic.

A lot of people are asking in SEO forums “Why is my blog not getting traffic?“, and it’s perhaps one of the most popular questions ever asked.

Fortunately, there is an answer to this question, not a simple one but still it’s an explanation as to why some websites fail to attract traffic.

Things like the age of the domain, the reputation of the author, number and type of references (incoming links), social media strategy and content freshness play their role.

BUT, for the average website the problem lies in other areas.

What you will read below are 5 areas that are often neglected by website owners either because they don’t understand their importance or because they are not sure how to handle them.

Before getting into the details, don’t forget that when you make a change it may take a couple of months (or more) before you see any positive or negative results, so you need to be patience before you decide if something worked or not.

1. Your content is not good enough

Believe it or not search engines and especially Google have become very efficient in recognizing good content.

So, if your content is not good enough and your website is not of high quality, the chances of ranking high in the SERPs and getting traffic are minimized.

Back in the old days you could ‘easily’ trick search engines by sending a few backlinks to your content and get high rankings, but this is no longer the case.

Besides search engines, let’s not forget about the indirect influence of social media on rankings and traffic.

Content that is not of great quality is very unlikely to perform well in the various social media channels.

What is good content and more importantly what type of content can get you traffic?

Content that attracts website visitors has the following characteristics:

#1 – It satisfies all SEO content tips that are known to work after Panda and Penguin.

#2 – It is published on a website with an existing number of quality (indexed) pages.

If your website is new, even if you have the best content it is difficult to rank high, especially if there are older and bigger (in terms of indexed pages) websites on the same subject.

#3 – It is unbiased and well-researched. If you always write in favor of a particular product, method or service or if you just publish re-written text, you are losing your time.

Good content is original and describes both sides of the story.

#4 – It is fresh. Users want to read fresh up-to date content and so do the search engines and social media.

2. You are targeting high competition keywords

This is a very common mistake and one of the most important reasons why a web site is not getting enough traffic (at least from search engines).

Consider these 2 factors:

#1- There are only 10 places available in the first page of the SERPs for every keyword.

Search engines are trying to display in those places pages from trusted websites that meet their ranking criteria.

If you have a new website or even a mature website but it is less trusted than others, then your pages will not be shown in the first pages (if you are both targeting the same keywords).

#2 – The competition for all popular keywords is very high so if you are targeting popular keywords only, it will be very difficult to achieve a good ranking.

So, if popular keywords are out of the question, how can you get traffic?

The answer is in the long trail. When you use the Google keyword tool to make your keyword research, you should aim for low competition, long tail keywords.

For example:

Let’s assume that you are writing about weight loss. The most popular keyword in this niche is “how to lose weight fast”.

If you write a post with title “How to lose weight fast” and publish it on your website then most likely that particular post will never drive organic traffic to your website since there are already thousands of other articles with the same title and from more trusted sites.

If on the other hand you go after low competition, long tail keywords like “How to lose pounds” and you change the title a bit to “How to lose 5 pounds quickly” then your chances of ranking in the first page, provided that you promote your blog post correctly are higher.

The traffic gains are less compared to high competition keywords but ranking for several terms (even if they are of low competition) is a great way to increase website trust.

You can also read how to choose blog post titles for a step-by-step example on how to use the Google keyword tool to find low competition, long tail keywords.

3. Your website is slow

We know for sure that page speed is a ranking factor and various studies have shown that users are more likely to make repeated visits to websites that load fast.

The opposite is also true: users are more likely to exit a website if it does not load in 4-5 seconds.

So, your website may be ranking and getting traffic from search engines or referrals from social media but as soon as the users land on a slow loading page, they leave without entering.

What will happen when I make my website to load faster?

From my experience if you improve the loading time of a website that already has some rankings, traffic will increase because rankings will improve.

If your website is slow but does not have any first page rankings, by fixing the page speed problem you increase your chances of having a page or pages in the first 10 positions.

4. You were hit by Panda or Penguin

The average webmaster or blogger may not be aware about Panda or Penguin and how these algorithmic changes affect the ranking position and traffic a website may be getting from Google.

If this is the first time you hear these words, then I suggest you read these two quick guides from Wikipedia:  Panda and Penguin

In terms of traffic, if you were hit by Panda or Penguin or any other algorithmic changes, then you will see your traffic to drop dramatically from one day to the next.

You can open your Google Analytics report and find out the actual date that traffic changed and compared that with this page that shows the dates Google changed their ranking algorithm.

If there is a matching date and depending on the changes, you may have to take several actions to recover your traffic.

It was not panda or penguin but I still don’t get enough traffic, why?

If you are in a situation that your website never managed to get a considerable number of visitors then maybe it’s because:

• It is still young (less than 6 months old)
• You don’t have a lot of content
• You don’t use social media to promote your website
• You are doing any of these SEO mistakes
• You concentrate only in getting traffic from search engines without looking for alternative sources of traffic.

5. You hired the wrong SEO firm

Unfortunately this happens very often as well. The web is full of ‘SEO companies’ promising first page rankings but in reality what happens is that their methods and techniques destroy every opportunity your website has for getting organic traffic.

How to choose a reliable SEO firm?

I have summarized some general guidelines on how to outsource SEO with spending a fortune but as a general rule of thumb don’t believe anything you read on the web before double checking their claims.

Conclusion

The purpose of every website is to get traffic from search engines, social media sites, direct visits etc.

When this is not happening you feel that you are losing your time and you lose faith in the Internet as a whole.

There are billions of Internet users around the word and as you read this article, there are thousands of people searching for information or hanging out in social media platforms.

The fact that none of them (or only a few) visit your website then this means that you are doing something wrong.

In my opinion this could be due to one of the 5 reasons explained above.

Hopefully by reading this post up to this point you have a better idea of what you might be doing wrong and more importantly you have some thoughts on how to reverse the situation.