What makes an SEO-Friendly Website?

A website needs visitors to thrive, but with the millions upon millions of sites already in the World Wide Web today, how can your business ever hope to be found, much less reach its target market? This is how search engine optimization or SEO became a highly relevant term and technique in web marketing. SEO allows your site higher visibility through a successful first-page ranking in search engine results pages or SERPs. So how do you make your site SEO-friendly enough for Google or Yahoo (before anyone else) to rank you?

Keywords in Headlines

Don’t forget to optimize your headlines. While ultimately, the SEO value of your site will be determined by the quality of your written content, major search engines like Google give a high SERP rating to page headers or headlines that show relevance and high interest among readers. For the most part, it’s important to keep the text understandable and accessible to the general readership as much as to your target market.

No Flash

Flash media cannot be detected by search engines. To make things worse, flash media can significantly slow down the processing of data, so you’ll likely end up with a page or site that the search engines would bypass, and your visitors would disdain. Use high quality or rich media sparingly; focus, instead, on writing relevant and valuable content.

No Image Links

You can get just about any file in your page to have an outbound link, but you should keep from making links out of your image files. This makes it more difficult for search engine ‘spiders’ to archive your page for search. Moreover, this is simply not the conventional way of creating links, so your visitors probably won’t even notice it.