How to Optimize a Website for SEO

Welcome to the world of SEO. The art and science of search engine optimization (SEO) are, at its core, about getting free web traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines. While there are similarities between the different search platforms out there, it’s important to tailor your approach for each platform. This is why many companies focus on optimizing their websites for Google.

Web developer optimizing website
photo credit: Christina Morillo / Pexels

Optimize for crawlability

Crawlability is the ability of search engines to access, index, and understand a website. This includes both technical factors (e.g., HTML validation) and navigation/structure strategies that make sense for search engines.

The most important thing you can do for crawlability is to ensure your HTML is valid. If it’s not valid, then chances are good that your site won’t be crawled by Google or any other search engine (and in fact, it may even get filtered out). S

Next, make sure your website has a structured navigation system based on meaningful URLs so that users can easily navigate through the site without getting lost or frustrated—which means they’ll spend more time there and then come back again.

Getting all of this sorted is difficult, which is why you need to hire an SEO industry with specific experience in your industry. For example, if you are a SaaS company, you should consider hiring a SaaS SEO agency that can help you better optimize the crawlabilty of your website for both Google and SaaS users specifically.

Use page titles and meta descriptions to your advantage

Page titles are the first thing that search engines display in their search results, so it’s important to use them to describe your content.

Meta descriptions are used by search engines to display a summary of the page’s content. They’re not used by search engines as a ranking factor but can increase click-through rates and help build trust among users.

Write compelling CTA buttons

CTA buttons are the most important part of a conversion funnel. The first step in optimizing a website for SEO is to make sure your CTAs are clear, relevant, actionable, and easy to find. A good CTA button should be easy to read, stand out from the rest of the page and encourage site visitors to click on it. If you’re optimizing for mobile devices, there should be no doubt about what each link does when tapped upon.

Website design

Add structured data to your website

Structured data is a common language that can be used to represent a variety of information about people, places, and things on the web. Structured data can help you indicate your content’s intent to search engines so that they know what kind of pages are on your site and what each page is about. This allows you to get more traffic from Google in the form of rich results (such as images), carousels, knowledge panels, etc., which improves both user experience and SEO.

If you want your website to be found when people Google a relevant search term, you need to make sure it’s optimized for SEO either with the help of an SEO agency or online tools. There are many tools out there that can help you find the best keywords and see how competitive those words are.

Once you know what keywords you want to target, don’t forget to embed those into your copy—your website’s meta tags, as well as its URL, should include the keyword for these strategies for optimizing your website for SEO to work.