11 Ways To Become A “Google-Friendly” Site

Do proper keyword research

Keyword research is important in knowing what your potential customers are typing into search engines when they are searching for your products or services. Keywords also serve as guide for your writers to come up with relevant and useful content around a particular keyword.

Use Meta Tags

Title, description and image alt tags are helpful in declaring what your page is about and what search keywords you are focusing on. These are particularly helpful with key pages where a topic is mapped with your key terms. Since search engines can’t read images, putting alt tags on your site images tells them what these are about. If your site is using WordPress, there are useful plugins like Yoast that are effective for meta tags and the overall SEO health of your site.

Add structured data to your web page for a richer search listing

Google can display rich results or snippets if you add structured data to your site. Structured data is a piece of code in a specific format, written in such a way that search engines understand it. Search engines read the code and use it to create rich results.

Imagine you have a website with many several products across categories. Once you add structured data to a page within a certain category, your result in the search engines might change. It will be much “richer” regarding content that’s shown. That’s the reason we call these results rich results or rich snippets.

Create an XML Sitemap

A sitemap is the blueprint of your website. It helps Google and other search engines find, crawl and prioritise key pages - and exclude those that should not be included in the crawl (no- index).

You can easily create a sitemap by going to https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and uploading the generated file to the root of your site directory.

Create a robots.txt file

The robots.txt file, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or standard, is a text file that tells web robots (most often search engines) which pages on your site to crawl and not to crawl. In creating the file, you can do it manually or using a WordPress plugin like Yoast. In its basic form it should look like this:

User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/

Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Sitemap: https://yoursitedomain.com/sitemap_index.xml

Install Google Analytics and Google Search Console

These are crucial in knowing how your pages are indexed and how your site visitors interact with your content. Check out these links to learn how to properly install Google Analytics and Search Console on your website.

Implement internal linking

Internal links help establish relevance on content pieces around your website. These type of links are useful for three reasons:

• They allow users to navigate a website.
• They help establish information hierarchy for the given website.
• They help spread link equity (ranking power) around websites.

Follow URL structure best practices

A URL is human-readable text that was designed to replace the numbers (IP addresses) that computers use to communicate with servers. They also identify the file structure on a given website. A URL consists of a protocol, domain name and path.

A general rule of thumb is to make your URL format in such a way that it follows your site architecture containing possible keywords relevant to the page’s content.

https://domain/categoy/product is better than https://domain/23213/31321.html