There are many factors that determine your success in SEO. Even if one of these foundations are weak, you can’t expect to get maximum results:
- SEO-friendly templates: Instead of building everything from scratch, web developers and designers often use a template that can be modified based on client’s requirements. The template should make it easy and quick for bots to crawl the website. SEO-friendly architecture should be baked into the structure of the template.
- Crawlability: Search engines need to crawl your website to access and index all webpages. This is necessary to drive genuine and natural traffic. If your website serves multiple languages, Google should know that a portion of the website is dedicated for a language and another portion for another language. The goal is to ensure optimum indexation of your search engine. Non-indexed and nonperforming webpages will only become deadweight of your website. In this situation, you need to choose whether to optimize nonperforming webpages or you just remove them from the index. Your XML sitemap should be sufficiently clean, so Google bots know which page that should be indexed.
- Unique content: Unique content doesn’t only mean that it’s not copied directly from other websites. It should also have unique topic that’s not available in other websites. Although your write your content from scratch, it’s not entirely unique, if you are covering a very common topic.
- Optimized for mobile: Ideally, your website should work well for all platforms. Today, many Internet users access websites using their mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. If you are still using an old website platform, there’s a chance that it would not be displayed well on the screen. Poor mobile optimization can be a barrier to proper indexation and higher ranking.
- Reliable servers: Your SEO performance won’t be ideal if your server always return errors. 4xx and 5xx server errors could prevent Google bots from crawling your website. The Error 404 page of your website should be modified. So, your website is still displayed, but with an error message. Standard Error 404 page is a dead-end and bots can’t go anywhere. In Error 404 page, you may also display recommended and latest pages. So, bots can still go to other places of your website.
- Quick loading speed: You should always check whether your website loads quickly compared to competitors. There are tools that measure the speed of page loading in your website. Talk with developers about various speed enhancement methods, such as image optimization, code compression, caching, accelerated mobile pages and minification. If your website runs faster, it will convert better, rank higher and drive more revenue.
- Verified by various webmaster tools: You may use various webmaster tools to verify your website. As an example, the ownership of your website can be verified by Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console. When your website is proven to be developed well, you can be sure that it will perform better and rank higher. Verification will also ensure that there are minimal errors that can affect your website
