Semalt: Building A Website Worthy Of 1st Page On Search Engines


Table of Contents

  1. What is SEO?
  2. What are the expectations of Search Engines?
  3. How to Build a Site Worthy of 1st Page on Search Engines?
  4. Final Words
Thanks to technological advancement, it was never so easy to build a website. Whether a person has technical skills or not, anyone can build a website.

However, building a website and going live is not enough to succeed in this digital world. It should also appear higher in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

You might be knowing which websites rank on the first page of search results. Yes, sites optimized according to search engines can top the search results and open the doors to success for its owner.

When it is about building a website worthy of 1st page on search engines, you need to be aware of the best practices of SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is the process of modifying a website so that it ranks higher in search results. It helps website owners achieve success in the online world.

SEO brings results but not in just one or two days. It requires effort and time to master the art of SEO. Some people new to SEO spend months or years learning the basics to optimize a site precisely.

Many online tools also help in optimizing a site, but experts suggest taking the help of well-qualified and experienced webmasters if you are expecting quick results.

If you are building a website aiming to rank it on top of the search results, this post is going to help you succeed in that. There are basic guidelines, tips, and tricks of SEO you can follow.

But before starting, let's find out what search engines want:

What are the expectations of Search Engines?

All search engines direct users to content and sites containing answers to their search queries. 

But how search engines determine that the site or webpage contains content relevant to their searches? Different elements of a website help them with it.

Some major things search engines expect for determining the relevancy are:
  • Content: The site or webpage should contain the relevant content. The natural placement of keywords in content helps.
  • Authority: The content should link to other authoritative sites. It can be in the form of references, citing the information, getting high-quality backlinks, and similar ways.
  • Performance: The page or site should load quickly and perform well on the desktop as well as mobile devices.
  • User Experience: User experience includes everything that helps users get answers to their queries easily. It consists of the design, behavior, user's safety, easy navigation, and others.

How to Build a Site Worthy of 1st Page on Search Engines?

Below are some of the important SEO steps you can follow to ensure your website appears on the first page of search results:

Step 1: Be Careful While Selecting Your Domain Name

The very first thing search engines consider to rank a website is the domain name. While selecting your site's domain name, make sure it is easy-to-remember, relevant, and contains one of your most important keywords.

There are many types of domain suffix like .com, .org, .biz, .net, and others. Depending upon the objective of your website, finalize the suffix. FYI, the domains with a .com suffix are considered as top-level domains.

If you run a business, It's better to go through informative guides about choosing a domain name before finalizing anything.

Step 2: Choose Only Reputable Hosting Provider

After finalizing the domain name, you need to find a reputable hosting provider that doesn't let you down. When your hosting provider is right, everyone associated with your site gets satisfactory results.

Many visitors show impatient behavior and leave a site if it doesn't load in the first three seconds. Google also gives priority to sites that load quickly.

A simple solution to please visitors and achieve a higher rank on Google search results is to choose a trustworthy hosting provider that lets your site load within seconds.

Step 3: Plan your Website's Architecture

If you build a simple website, users may not find it important. They'll visit and leave, raising the bounce rate. To avoid this, webmasters should first plan the site's architecture.

A well-structured site not only keeps everything organized. Such websites keep users engaged and lowers the bounce rate.

Most websites follow the pyramid structure where the homepage remains at the top, and other important pages (the main menu items) are below it. Underneath them are the subcategories, individual pages, and others.  

This practice of planning the site's structure keeps the site organized and prioritize the pages according to the easiness provided to visitors.

Step 4: Do Keyword Research

Before preparing content for your new website, you should do keyword research and find out the words used by your audience while initiating a search on Google regarding your products and services.

While doing keyword research, make sure you know about your webpage its primary objective.

There are several keyword research tools to give you suggestions about the latest words and phrases searched by people. Yes, they are relevant to your products or services.

Some keyword research tools you may like are:
The usage of the latest and most relevant keywords gives your website an edge above competitors.

Step 5: Craft High-Quality Content

The content on a website includes Text Written on Webpages, eBooks, Blog Posts, White Papers, Reports, Tips Sheets, FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), Videos, Images, Sales Pages, Infographics, and others.

When this content is of high-quality, it attracts, educates, and delights visitors to your site. As a result, customer engagement and ranking of your website in search results increases significantly.

Make sure to craft every content on your site by keeping in mind the people visiting your website. Search engines and your interest should come after that.

Some digital marketing experts vote for longer content because they belive it contains valuable information. They are somewhat right, but comprehensive and focused content ranks better.

If the content is not enticing and fresh, most visitors to your site won't turn into customers. To help you create valuable content, you can go through the quality guidelines provided by Google.

Step 6: Optimize the Code

Creating high-quality content is essential, but you also need to ensure that it reaches maximum people.

For that, you need to optimize the code of your site so that search engines not only find it easily but also rank it higher in search results.

Optimizing the code involves improving a lot of things, such as creating an SEO-friendly URL structure, canonical tags, XML sitemaps, title tags, meta description, headings, subheadings, alt tags, internal links, etc.

To precisely optimize the code of your site, you must understand at least the basics of On-Page SEO. In case you don't, there are many experts to help you with it. Find the one suitable for your needs.

Step 7: Technical Setup

No matter how valuable content you create or take On-Page optimization steps, your website can't rule the search engines without technical setup. 

The technical setup helps you as well as web crawlers/ spiders. Web crawlers learn about the pages to show and avoid in search results. 

You learn about the performance of your site or pages. Based on the evaluation of your site's performance, you can make modifications to your content.

Technical setup covers the following:
  • Setting up and verifying Google Analytics
  • Setting up Google Search Console
  • Setting up Bing Webmaster tools
  • Creating Robots.txt file
  • Installing an effective SEO plugin
These are not all. Depending upon your requirements, the technical setup for your site may involve a lot more.

Step 8: Earn Backlinks

If you would've asked digital marketers about the importance of backlinks, the views were different because backlinks were not that important a few years back.

Today, backlinks are crucial for gaining a higher rank in search results. They are also essential to determine the relevancy and importance of content.

Experts say that instead of the number of backlinks, quality matters the most. When a backlink comes from authority and quality source, your website gains the trust of visitors and recognition from search engines.

The simplest way to earn high-quality backlinks is to create purposeful, useful, and engaging content. Then you should promote that content through different online channels (including social media platforms).
Another way to get backlinks is by getting in touch with influencers and persuading them to share your valuable content.

Step 9: Post-Launch Check

After launching your website, you should perform certain checks and make sure that it is worthy of the 1st page on search engines. The post-launch check should include:
  • Whether the user experience provided by your site keeps visitors happy.
  • Whether the site launches quickly or not. To be sure, check its load speed through Google's PageSpeed insights tool.
  • Whether your site loads flawlessly on mobile devices or not.

Final Words

While searching the internet, you may come across many steps for building a high-ranking website. But according to Semalt experts, these are the nine essential steps to follow while making a website worthy of 1st page on search engines.

Whether your website offers products, services, or information, make sure the site and its content is relevant to the search criteria of users.

If you face any difficulty while creating a great website, do not hesitate to take the help of professionals. They help you get a high-ranking website.

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