A business website is absolutely critical for a business to brand build, generate sales leads and as a popping to communicate with its customers. Not only must the website be aesthetically pleasing, but it must also be ranked high in the search engines for exposure. If a website is ranked well in the search engines, it would get a large number of sales leads that could potentially be converted to business transactions. But in order to achieve good rankings on the search engines, a website must first be designed and developed in a SEO friendly manner. These SEO friendly elements if traits would contribute greatly to the subsequent Search Engione Optimization. (SEO) efforts. At home, businesses in Malaysian websites compete for local business traffic as well as having to slug it it out for exposure in the regional and global market. That in itself is already quite a challenge. And thus all the more, it is imperative that Malaysian websites go into battle, as a manner of speaking, armed with SEO friendly websites.
Guidelines for a SEO friendly website
User friendliness
A business website must be attractive, designed with a flow that would make for convenient and intuitive browsing. That would motivate a visitor to stay in your website longer and it is a factor that search engines like Google take into consideration as part of their algorithm. If visitors are exiting your website as fast as they come in, Google would deem your website’s relevance as questionable and thus your ranking would be affected adversely. Other factors that are considered not user friendly are slow page loading times, poor internet connectivity and confusing navigation that irritates.
Optimise your design
Crawl friendly
Search engines like Google and the smaller ones deploy robots or crawlers for visiting the various pages found in a website, and adding them to their search index. Though some programming language such asJavaScript may be used to code the website, businesses should be aware that these are not crawled by the search engines, and may affect the indexing of the website. The search engines are mainly checking the HTML content of the webpage which should be relevant to the products/services offered by the business. It is also important to have URLs which are search engine friendly. Often businesses are using databases for storing and retrieving data for the webpages. However, when the databases are used, the website developer should ensure that the URLs contain keywords or alphabets, if there are characters like ?+,= in the URL, it could affect website ranking.
