Building a successful website is a balancing act between the need to appease the gods of the search engine and making your site useful and pleasant to your potential customers. Everybody realizes that your website is not going to receive much traffic if the search engines are not promoting your domain. Thankfully, a lot of the features that the search engine is looking for are also beneficial to your visitors so let’s focus on those:
Write short paragraphs.
The text should contain keyword search phrases. If you are writing a page on the health benefits for strawberries be sure to use the words like “strawberry”, “health” and “benefits” at least a couple of times on your page. Include it both in the heading and in the paragraph text. The only trick is that the words need to flow naturally in the text.
Create an outline.
Every good essay starts with a clear outline. Same is true for your webpage. There should be only one h1 heading on the page, followed by a couple h2 headings and maybe some h3 headings for each h2 heading. “HeadingsMap” extension (exists for all major browsers) is a great way to check on your page outline and spot out of order headings.
Mind the page load speed
The most common reason why pages load slowly is the use of very large images. Be sure to compress all the images on your website to below 350Mb. You can easily check your website load speed using online testing tools like Pagespeed for example.
Add links
Referencing other resources on your website can greatly benefit your audience. You are enabling them to expand their knowledge and feed their curiosity. Adding both internal (pointing to other pages on your website) as well as external (pointing to other website) links shows the interconnectedness of the web. This, in turn, allows the search engines to place your website in the right context. If your website is linking to a lot of other recognized health sites, the search engine will know that you are an expert of health matters and rank you accordingly.
There are many other great techniques to ensure your website “speaks” both the language of indexing machines and is pleasing to the humans. The four techniques listed above will give you the most bank for your buck as you are getting started.
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