SEO Design & Architecture - Making your website Search Engine Friendly

Hi Learners,

Great to have you back. Our previous post was about planning a navigation strategy of your website. If you missed it, you can read all about it here. This post is highlighting factors that will make your website easy to understand and likable to search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. So lets dive straight into the factors that make this possible.

Do not have broken links

Google and other search engines do not appreciate a site that has broken links or non functional links. This not only breaks the user experience and causes loss to a business, it also hurts the trust a search engine bestows upon a website. A few reasons why broken links can hamper your ranking are...

1. Search bots follow link to link in order to "discover" content on your site. Broken links result in non indexed content which means no ranking of pages.
2. Complicated links can cause the crawling rate to slow down resulting in slower indexing / time-outs.
3. Incomplete indexes do not allow google to understand the most important and content rich pages of your website, hence it loses credibility and popularity when compared with other sites during the ranking process.

To check if your website has any broken links follow the below steps...

Step 1: Visit www.brokenlinkchecker.com

Step 2: Add your website URL to the field

Step 3: First check for distinct broken links (only instances where no redirects are defined)

Step 4: Alternatively check for every dead link

Step 5: Monitor results

If you see broken links on your site, get your developer / content writer or your SEO team to fix it. 

Be Mobile friendly

A lot can be said about it, but this post would be too short to express the importance of being a mobile centric site. According to Google India mobile report, smartphone ownership has tripled over the last 4 years. 

The best way to start being "mobile friendly" is by using site evaluation tools. Some of the most common ones are...

1. Google's PageSpeed Insights
2. Google's Mobile friendly test
3. Google Speed Scorecard
4. Google Test my Site 

Some common expectations from a mobile friendly page are as follows

• Your web pages should load fast
• Simple layout - your website should be clutter free
• Easy navigation - most important content of your site should be accessible with least efforts
• Images should fit the screen and should not pixelate
• Videos should provide a rich experience, and should be optimised for mobile screens
• Design for touch - Smart phone users use fingers to browse, hence your template should facilitate touch. like broader buttons, adequate spacing, previews, pinch zoom content and tappable links
• Shorter links

Manage duplicate content

There might be a lot of sections on your websites that have similar content. Google and other search engines do not know which versions to include / exclude from their indexes, hence they prefer a website that clearly marks content as unique or duplicate. Some of these could be, your contact us forms appearing on various pages, testimonials and reports appearing on products / services page and more. 

Read Google's version of duplicate content here. Some of the common situations are as below...

• Printer only versions of web pages
• Forum or discussion pages that are generated separately for mobile and desktop audiences
• Product page that are selling the same product but with different URLs
• http & https versions of the sites
• www and non www. versions of the site
• Copied content from other websites

To identify the status of duplicate content on your website, follow the below steps...

Step 1: Visit www.siteliner.com and submit your website URL on the tool.

Step 2: Evaluate your top website content issues as suggested by the tool.

Step 3: List down priorities from the graphs presented

Step 4: Download detailed reports and send them to concerned departments / teams to evaluate and fix

There are a few measures that you can take to control / manage duplicate content on your website. These are as follows

1. Delete copied content: Authentic content is the hallmark of a successful website. Deleting copied content and replacing that with original one is a first step towards creating an engaging site. If deleting is not and option. Be sure to place credit link below your content which points to the original owner/source of the content.
2. Update duplicate content: Enabling user generated content and working towards providing valuable links and conversation to the content works in the site's favor.
3. Adding Canonical link elements to your page. Canonical commands are used in the html structure of your page, we will discuss this further when we cover the HTML aspects of SEO
4. Provide re-directs: Google Search console enables webmasters to provide re-directs. As mentioned in the earlier posts, there are 2 distinct levels of re-directs i.e.

• 301 redirect - When you are moving permanently to a new version / domain of your website.

To add redirects to your website from the Google search console follow the below steps...

Step 1: Login to your search console site dashboard and click on settings wheel icon.

Step 2: Select change of address from the menu that drops down

Step 3: Pick the website profile on step 1 of the page and choose your website

Step 4: Choose the redirect type (301 or 302)

Step 5: Submit your site

Above three factors lay the foundation of being search engine friendly and considerably improve chances of ranking higher on SERP results

I hope you enjoyed todays post. I would love to hear back from you about what else would you like to learn about or just plain thoughts or queries. See you next week as we discuss more SEO parameters related to the content of your website.

Have a great day ahead. Happy learning

Mitul