5 Tips in Creating a Fully Functional and Optimized Website that Ranks

Having an awesome website design is not enough. To make your website work for its purpose it needs to be fully functional and be visible on search engines.  You’ve got to apply some SEO or search engine optimization strategies with website development.

Through SEO, it can help your website be easily noticed by search crawlers.  You need to take advantage of the top position in search results especially in Google with over 90% search market share. In this way, you can attract more visitors to your website.

Here’s how to create a website that is fully functional and optimized

As a trusted provider of website development in Clark, PH, we will share with you the key tips that can make a website both user and search-friendly. So, don’t be left behind over the competition.

Tip #1 – Make Your Website Secure and Accessible

As an expert in website development in Clark, PH, one of the first things that we do is make a website accessible to search crawlers e.g. Google bot.

To help search crawlers to easily find your website, make sure that the following are present:

• A Sitemap that contains all your pages ready for indexing
• A Robots.txt file which features the pages allowed and disallowed for crawling

If you’re now prepared for your website accessibility, don’t forget about its security. Nowadays, as we open a website on various browsers we can notice the lock icon – informing users if a website is secure or not.  Google Chrome has even rolled out an update effective July 2018, that it will tag a non-HTTPs website as “not secure’.  

Although HTTPs is not a deciding factor if it will crawl your website, Google has confirmed it as a lightweight ranking signal. But we can observe it on search results and even saw it on news that Google is giving ranking boosts to HTTPs websites. 

Therefore, don’t forget to enable SSL on your website.

Tip #2 – Create a Highly Relevant & Unique Content 

A website is ideal if it can answer the search queries of users. Crafting a relevant and unique content is a must. Containing vital information that your users are expected to see is integral. Your website’s content must be dedicated to your target users. 

Before starting to create a content make sure that you have done keyword research. Identifying valuable keywords is essential in making your website rank. Make use of these keywords to craft a content that can easily tell what your website is all about. 

Another thing that you have to consider is that it must contain your website uniqueness – setting you apart from competition. 

Google even has specific algorithm updates for content e.g. Panda Update which tells us that it highly values content. Content is still the King.

Tip #3 – Speed Up Your Website

Website loading speed matters. Definitely, who would want to see a slow loading site? No one wanted to wait for seconds, minutes or an hour just to load a webpage. 

Both users and bots wanted to have a website that is fast. Google has even rolled out a “Speed Update” as a major ranking factor on mobile searches.

Practically, having a fast loading site can set you apart from competition. If you give more importance to your loading speed, it also aligns to providing fast customer service. 

As a provider of quality website development in Clark, we make use of Google page speed insights, Pingdom’s Website Page Speed tool or Gmetrix for speed testing.

For example, Google page speed insights provides opportunities for your website. 

Tip #4 – Make it mobile-friendly

One of the key facts that you need to consider is that over 60% of the searches right now is coming from mobile. Most users are now using mobile devices in making search queries and visiting websites. And it’s not surprising since we can observe the growing number of mobile users.  

Ensure that your website is fully responsive across mobile devices. Start by doing a test using Google mobile-friendly test tool. 

Tip #5 – Apply On-page SEO Techniques

As you do some random search on search engines, you can notice the search snippets. Ranking pages contain Meta titles and descriptions. And these are among the key elements to consider when working with on page SEO. On page SEO elements do affect website’s visibility on search engines. 

Here are the following top considerations when working with on-page SEO:

• Each webpage must have a unique title and descriptions. Remember that it will serve like an ad copy for a website. It contains a short preview about a specific webpage. Therefore, it must be concise and compelling. 
• Take advantage of the headings. Each page must have a single h1 tag serving as the title of the website. To present an excellent content structure, it is important that your content is divided using subheadings. In this way, sections can be read and understood easily.
• Add relevant internal links to each page. Internal links will also tell search bots the hierarchy of a website and will guide users in navigating to relevant pages.
• Optimize your images by adding an alt tag or alt text – this will serve as a keyword for your images. Take in mind that an image alone is not readable by search crawlers.
• Create search friendly URLs.  It must be short and keyword-rich. A website has search friendly URLs if it is readable and you can easily identify what the page is all about. 
• Don’t forget to apply the schema data. Schema data tells search engines about your website in a structured manner. Richer content is a plus factor for a website. You can apply various types of schema data for a web page. Notice also that Google loves schema data and you can see various types of it on search results. 

For example, Google can read and feature an FAQ schema:

Google search featuring pages with recipe schema:

Your journey in creating a fully functional and optimized website is not yet over. You will still need to observe it. Add your website to search console and analytics to see your customer or user journey. From that point, you can still make more improvements. 

SEO simply works as continuous improvements to your website. Don’t stop to make your website grow. 

Hope these tips help you in creating a fully functional and optimized website that help you rank on search engines.

On the other hand, if you need a hand in creating a website for your business or profession, we, at Digital Strategists are always here to help you.

Website Development in Clark

Digital Strategists offers website development in Clark, as well as, software development, SEO, content management/marketing and social media management/marketing. Just send us a message using the Facebook chat icon below or email us at info@dgstrategists.com

May you have more clients to come,

The Digital Strategists Team