Making Responsive Websites SEO Friendly

A couple of years ago, the demand for responsive websites suddenly increased and many companies began transforming their websites into responsive ones. However, while that was being focused on, companies did not realise that although their websites are now responsive, they are not very SEO friendly. There are some common errors that responsive websites face when it comes to search engine ranking. Here’s how you can make sure your website is not only responsive but also SEO optimised or SEO friendly.

Firstly, conduct a simple site:domain.com search to ensure that your website is indexed. A website that is not indexed will not be visible in a search engine’s index when users search for it. This problem is more common with mobile URL’s because these are most often designed in a way that prevents mobile pages to compete with “canonical” pages in terms of link equity. Some websites could be responsive and innovative but cannot be found on search results when users search for it. Hence the effort of innovation is lost.

In order to index any website, be it responsive or not, search engines should be able to crawl it. This means that they should be able to follow a link that takes them to every unique piece of content on the site and then save that URL. Several website crawlers are available to check if your website is crawl-able.

Furthermore, there are also certain tools available for developers to identify certain crawl errors with their website. If you are the owner of the site, it is essential to verify it with the search engines. Another important aspect is to have accurate sitemaps which is the traditional way of finding content on a website.

With sitemaps, owners are able to directly communicate with search engines, hence making the information as accurate as possible.

Make the website text based and information rich

Moving on, the key to making a responsive website SEO friendly is to make it text-based and information-rich. Use words that search engine users would actually type in during their search. Although you might create a fancy website with all sorts of images, videos and animations, search engines only read text when producing search results.

Therefore, it is crucial to use text for displaying important content in your website. Another important factor that makes most websites SEO friendly is its ability to be linked and shared. Search engines consider sharing and linking to be very critical in their ranking process.

Use simple URLs

Therefore, URLs should be very simple, straightforward and easily remembered. Website developers should also go one step further and add social bookmarks to make their websites share-able within social networks.

Search engines are now giving less importance to slow-loading pages in their ranking algorithms.

Fortunately, there are many resources available for developers to make use of and make their websites load faster. Following the instructions given by these tools can increase loading speed of your site by one second and even this minor speed increase can impress search engines looking for optimum mobile performance.

In general, responsive websites can be made much faster than they actually are; one advice they could use is to make their websites PDF.