7 tips for a search engine friendly Website

Every website needs visitors (traffic). Without enough visitors, without enough traffic, your own homepage is actually rather useless, because who do you want to show something to? Sure, there may be users who create their own homepage just for themselves, for example, yes, no idea why you should do that.

To get visitors or traffic to your own website, there are several possibilities. One possibility would be to reach your visitors through the search results pages of Google or other search engines and to guide them to your site through interesting content. This is called search engine optimization or in short SEO.

In order to achieve good results in the search results with your own homepage, you should read through the following 7 tips for a search engine friendly homepage and check whether you have already implemented these tips with your own page or whether you should still do a little SEO here.

The appropriate domain name is an aspect that should not be neglected and can make a decisive difference in the success of your site. For example, if you run a site about pets, specifically about dogs, then a domain name like "my-homepage.com.tl" won't really bring you to the front of the search results when someone enters "dogs" in the Google search. In this example a domain name like "my-dog-homepage.com.tl" or "my-homepage-about-dogs.com.tl" would be much more promising, because here Google already has a starting point in the URL, which contents are to be expected on this homepgae.

An internal linking is not done alone with the menu on your own homepage. Internal linking is when a link is set to another (sub)page within the various (sub)pages of your website. If possible, words should also be linked here that should appear as a search term in the Google search, or with which your page should be found in Google and Co.

So that search engines can really find all (sub)pages of your homepage (if there is no proper linking), a sitemap should necessarily be present. You don't have to worry about this with the Homepage-Baukasten, because we take over this work and automatically create a sitemap of all pages, even for a free website and as soon as a change is made by you or a new page is created, we send a "signal" to the search engines that something has changed here and the "GoogleBot" comes by and reads the update of your page.

It is extremely difficult for search engine bots to read the content of your page if it is located in so-called iFrames. iFrames are embedded content that is usually located on another page. Thus, the search engine can hardly or not at all determine to which (sub)page this content belongs and in case of doubt simply does not evaluate this content at all. Therefore, try to display content directly, otherwise the content may not be evaluated at all.

If you embed or display images and files on your page, it is important to remember that a search engine cannot view the images. Search engines can only correctly classify images and files based on the file names and the alt tags used.

A picture with the name DSC000136.JPG says quite little about what is represented on this picture. For example, if it shows the dachshund dog Max, then rename the image to "dackelruede-max.jpg" and it will be more obvious what to expect on this image. If you now include the image on your website, then be sure to also give the image an alt tag with "dachshund male Max" so that the search engine can "look" at the image properly. The alt tag tells the search engine, so to speak, what is to be seen on this picture. Of course, there are Internet users who take advantage of this and write something else in the alt tag than what is really on the picture. This may bring short-term success, but in the long term it brings nothing but trouble, at the latest when Google introduces a new search engine update and the images are then exposed as spam.

Since search engine bots can only view and read the bare HTML code of your own homepage, you should definitely make sure that you use much more text than images on your page and if you do display images on your website, that they are at least properly named and described with alt tags.

A qualitatively demanding (sub)page should not fall below a minimum number of 300 words, whereby the maximum word count is about 1500 words. Anything more than that is usually not read or noticed anyway, unless the topic is extremely exciting and demanding. However, the minimum number of words should not be undercut. About 500 words have been established as a good average.

Also, make sure that you do not include too many outbound links (links that lead to external pages) on your individual (sub)pages, as these are used as a ranking factor by Google, and be sure to check the pages that you link to within your own homepage. Because there are also enough "bad" pages that you certainly do not want to link and Google recognizes the links to this "bad neighborhood" (Bad Neighbourhood) and punishes pages, either with worse positions in the search results up to the complete ban from the search results hits, so the complete deletion from the search engine index.