Investing in SEO is the best thing you can do to make your website rank high in search listings. This will help you drive more organic traffic on your website which basically means that a great percent of your visitors will soon become your clients. The statistics says that the first five results on the SERP page account for 67.60% of all the clicks. That is why it’s so important to use all the possible tools to make sure that your website is in the top five.
However, SEO optimization is a complex process. You can face many troubles (for instance, combining SEO with React) while trying to improve your website traffic. In the present article, we will give you 10 useful tips that will help you accomplish your goals.
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Make Interface Responsive
A responsive, convenient-to-use interface is crucial for attracting a larger audience to the website. If the design of your website is not attractive enough, your visitors will just leave the page, and go to your competitor’s site.
The design should also be optimized to all the devices (PC, tablet, smartphone) because people usually stay on websites that are adapted for the device they are using more often than the others. To be more precise, your website must be adapted to fit different screen sizes. The visitors should be able to see all the pictures, graphs, and read the text effortlessly.
All these will make the visitors stay on your website for a longer time. Thanks to that, Google will consider your service relevant to the user’s request and rank it higher in the search results. Therefore, you should use the best possible framework to create the most responsive interface. Nowadays, React is considered to be the best, and the most sought-after framework to build web app frontend.
Making Responsive Design with React. How to make a React App SEO Friendly
React and SEO interaction is one of the most difficult topics. React is a JavaScript library that allows creating top-quality user interfaces for websites. According to Statista, it’s currently the most popular open-source JavaScript library among the frontenders worldwide. As the survey has shown, in 2021, 40.14% of all software developers preferred React js to all the other frameworks. That is why you don’t have to neglect using React if you wish to develop the best possible interface for your web service.
Many startupers who want to build their website are afraid of using this framework because they aren’t sure that it is possible to build an SEO-friendly website with React. In fact, if you ask Google team “why is React SEO friendly?”, they will tell you that the search-related JavaScript problems have been solved back in 2015. Does this mean that there is nothing to talk about anymore? Not really.
Most often, React is used to create static, dynamic, and single-page apps. Dynamic and static apps don’t cause problems when it comes to SEO-friendliness. Only single-page apps (SPAs) are problematic in this aspect. Nevertheless, they provide very convenient user experience, load quickly, and have all the content on a single page. The content changes without the page refresh, which means different content can be available under the same link.
SPAs are rendered on the client side. This makes the initial loading time longer which causes a negative effect on search engine optimization: the crawler may just fail to spot the content on the page and, therefore, will have nothing to scan.
When you are building a single-page app, one of the best ways to solve the problem with its SEO-friendliness is to use a SEO friendly JavaScript framework. We recommend using Next.js. This JS framework will enable the server side rendering which, in its turn, will fix the issue with the website’s visibility in search engine results.
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Create Content To Target Optimal Keywords
Content is one of the most important factors that bring traffic to your website and drive interest to it. Prior to selecting the keywords, you need to choose the topic.
It’s recommended to focus on long-tail keywords. They are those that contain more than two words. Such keywords help drive more quality traffic to your page.
Moreover, you also can think about integrating the keywords into the pages. This will improve the precision of results and, this way, will bring even more organic traffic to your website.
It should be noted that the keywords stuffing can theoretically influence the ranking in a negative way. Some make sure not to overuse them.
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Optimize Heading Tags
Heading tags improve not only SEO, but also the readability of your website. They mark the beginning of a section. There can be any number of sections, but they all start with a title.
The headings must include the most important keywords (especially the title). This will help the search engine crawlers to understand the context of the page. Use the less important keywords for smaller headings (H2 and others).
For readers, the headings allow to quickly scan the page and see whether the information they were searching for is present in the article or not. Large blocks of information are not easy to read and perceive. Headings also keep your article structure well-organized.
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Apply Internal Linking
It doesn’t matter how cool the pages of your website are designed, and how informative the content is, the search engine may still fail to detect it. Internal linking is used to make sure that all the pages (or at least most of them) will be discovered by search engines.
Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean that you can just randomly paste links to the other articles on your site: they should look like a harmonious part of the text. To succeed with an internal linking, use pertinent anchor text. It will give a reader a preview of the article your link to. For instance, the phrase “business strategy” links to the article about the best business strategies. In this case, the phrase and the link are well-connected and won’t cause questions.
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Improve Website Clicks With The Help of Meta Description
The meta description is a brief text, located below the title of the page in search engine results. It gives a quick preview of the page’s content. The meta description should be accurate (i.e. completely match the content of the page), and contain the most important information. Thanks to that, a user will see if there is any information on the page he/she was looking for. You have around 150 characters to fill the meta description space.
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Make Your Website As Readable And Interesting As Possible
Creating an SEO-friendly website, you focus more on the technical aspects of the process. However, in order to keep your visitors on your website for a longer time, you must constantly create interesting content. It’s also a greater part of the search engine optimization: Google promotes only those pages that constantly stay relevant to the user’s needs. This way, if you stop making quality content, Google will consider your website as the one that is not up to date anymore and therefore not interesting for the users, and will lower it in the search results.
You can use different means to make your content informative and interesting: videos, infographics, e-books, etc. The main rule is to make it easy to read and easy to understand: your visitors won’t be wasting their time trying to catch on to the information and will go to the other website. For this reason, you should keep the content readable. Consider such points:
- size of the text (it shouldn’t be smaller that 16pt);
- color of the page background and the text (depending on the theme of your site, you can use light colors for the background of the pages, but don’t use bright colors, such as yellow, red, pink, or purple for the text);
- the font (it’s highly recommended to use classic fonts that are familiar to the eyes of the visitors);
- format of the content (break long articles into blocks, use headings and bulleted lists; paragraphs that are composed of more than 10 sentences are not convenient to read).
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Make Sure That Your Page Loads Quickly
Obviously, the users won’t be waiting for a long time for your website to load — they will just go to the next website. There are many ways to improve the site’s load time. For example, compress large image sizes. Thanks to that, your website won’t have slow load time because of having to load large images.
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Ensure That Your URLs are User-Friendly
The URL structure is not the most important aspect of a website, but it still can ease the job of crawlers when ranking your page. Make sure that each page has a unique URL.
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Avoid Non-Unique Content
Of course, this is not a key for building a SEO-friendly website, but search engine crawlers won’t prioritize your website unless it contains unique content. That is why you should always check the uniqueness of your content.
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Determine The Most Valuable Pages
Let the search engine bots know which pages contain the most important information by creating an XML sitemap. This will help you pass more data to them. Understanding your website’s structure, the search engines will give the most important pages better priority.
Conclusion
The search engine friendly website involves a lot of work and you have to think about many aspects. The design, optimal keywords, headings, internal linking, meta description, interesting and well-readable content, website structure, etc. So, in final, you have be sure that:
- Both search engines and your visitors understand what your website is about/what it sells.
- The structure and the design of your website are intuitive, and your visitors can quickly find what they are searching for.
