How to Create a Search-Engine-Friendly Website

May 23, 2024

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A search-engine-friendly website means that it is easier for search engines to crawl and to index.

Crawl – find, update, and download info from web pages

Index – analyze text, images, & videos and store them

To begin creating your SEF website, choose a hosting provider such as Bluehost, choose a Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress.org, and integrate the Elementor Pro and Yoast SEO plugins.

Use Keywords in Headings H1-H6

Not only are keywords search engine friendly and user friendly, they make your site more accessible for people with disabilities. According to WebAIM – WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind) who has been providing comprehensive web accessibility solutions since 1999 – “… headings are the primary mechanism used by screen-reader users to navigate content…”

To find which keywords people are using, simply use the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool.
Using keywords in your title tags makes it easier for search engines to find your content and present them as search results.
Therefore, title tags make it easier for visitors to find you, as well. A higher CTR can improve your ROI.

Schema is code for search-engine language.
Schema is a “shared vocabulary between webmasters and developers.”
Fortunately, Google made it its mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
It allows web creators to ‘structure’ information in a way that is not only search-engine-friendly, but user-friendly, as well.
Schema allows web creators to assign tags for identification to content such as a recipe, a book, price, a color, location, an author, etc…
There are a few types of schema markup, but Google prefers JSON-LD.
Use the Yoast SEO Plugin and let Yoast handle schema for you.

Site structure is more than simply having an efficient navigation menu for your visitors.
According to Yoast, (The #1 WordPress SEO plugin) while “visitors are looking for content, Google is looking for related content AND looking to determine its value.”
Your website’s content should transition easily via headings, subheadings, internal links, structural links, contextual links, and breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs are like a subheading for the URL of a particular page – similar to using a slug.
Classifying your content is also a SEF practice.
Yoast recommends creating categories and tags to better classify your content.

Internal Links - Connect information from pages within the same website
Structural Links - A logical, sequential order of links throughout your web pages
Contextual Links - Linking information from your site to another site for educational purposes (aka hyperlink)
No-Follow Links - A descriptive attribute in the HTML code that tells search engines not to scan a page
Redirects - Tells visitors and search engines that a URL has been deleted or moved
Categories - Groups your post topics together and allows for subcategories
Tags - Similar to subcategories but are not hierarchial

HTML, XML, and IMAGE

I love the following quote from John Mueller, Google Search Advocate, that I found on a Yoast blog about sitemaps:

“If you feel the need for an HTML sitemap, you should spend the time improving your site’s architecture instead.”

With that being said, let’s explore Yoast XML Sitemaps. 😊
First of all, XML stands for Extensible Markup Language.
We learned earlier that markup language is a code that search engines read that allows web creators to assign particular identifying attributes to content. WHEW! 😊
These attributes are called tags, and they look like this: <recipe>, <book>,<price>, <color>, <location>, <author>, etc…
An XML sitemap is a list of a website’s URLs and is created for search engines.
If you’re using the Yoast SEO plugin, “Yoast SEO creates XML sitemaps, which by default include an entry for every public post and page on your website. If those pages contain images, we include information about them in the XML sitemap entry.”
Be sure not to have any ‘No-Follow‘ Links unless you specify certain pages in your Yoast SEO plugin.
It is important to have NO orphaned pages in your sitemap!
Orphaned pages have no internal links to them.
If you do not have the Yoast SEO plugin and are tech-savvy, you can learn: How to Create an Image Sitemap for Google.