When you use a search engine and type in keywords, you notice the top-ranking content. Similarly, when creating content, you want your website to rank higher in search results to attract more traffic. RÉFÉRENCEMENT, or Search Engine Optimization, is key to achieving this. It improves your website’s visibility, attracts visitors, and increases traffic. Whether it’s a blog, e-commerce site, or corporate page, following core SEO principles helps build a search engine-friendly website.
We’ll provide an SEO audit checklist covering essential SEO elements during website development. We’ll give recommendations on content optimization, keyword analysis, link building, and social media integration for a strong foundation.
Step 1: Plan a logical website structure
Designing and planning a website’s structure can be a complex task. Creating a clear and hierarchical site structure ensures that visitors can easily navigate and find the information they need. Consider various factors carefully.
Meanwhile, when considering SEO for your website, these three key factors are crucial:
- Optimize the depth of site structure: Make sure that important pages of your website aren’t too far from the homepage. Ideally, they should be within two to three clicks away to ensure easy access for visitors. This is especially important for larger websites as excessive nesting levels may lead to lower crawl frequency by search engines.
- Keyword optimization for top-level pages: Top-level pages are usually the core pages of your website, such as the homepage or key category pages. By optimizing these pages with keywords, you can improve the ranking of category pages related to specific themes in search engines. Search engines are more likely to associate these category pages with keyword-optimized top-level pages, increasing their visibility and ranking in search results.
- Internal linking strategy: Internal links play an important role in SEO. They not only help users navigate through your website but also send signals to search engines indicating which pages are more important. By optimizing the quantity and quality of internal links, you can enhance the SEO effectiveness of key pages, making them more prominent in search engine results.
These factors form a comprehensive SEO strategy improving visibility, driving traffic, and enhancing user experience.
Step 2: Build an SEO-friendly website
After designing the website structure, you can start building a website with strong SEO optimization features. WordPress is a powerful and user-friendly content management system that offers numerous SEO-friendly functionalities and plugins to help you easily create and optimize your website.
For beginners, WordPress offers the following advantages:
- Free and open-source: WordPress is free to download, install, use, and customize according to your specific needs. This makes it an ideal choice for creating various types of websites.
- Abundance of free themes and plugins: For non-tech-savvy users, WordPress provides thousands of free themes and plugins suitable for various types of websites including blogs, corporate sites, and online stores. You can easily choose a theme that suits your needs.
- Excellent SEO performance: WordPress is coded with high-quality standards-compliant code that generates semantically meaningful markup. As a result, search engines like Google prefer WordPress. The same content published on a WordPress website is more likely to be indexed by search engines and rank higher.
WordPress makes it easy to create an optimized website that’s visible in search results and offers great user experience.
In upcoming articles, we’ll discuss building a solid technical foundation and creating engaging, SEO-friendly content.We’ll guide you on establishing a strong technical foundation while creating high-quality content. In the final part, we’ll explain how keyword strategies, internal and external links, and reporting analysis work together for SEO success.