What Makes a Website Google-Friendly?

What exactly does it mean to be a “Google-friendly” website? To put it simply, for a website to be considered Google-friendly, it needs to be optimized to meet search engine preferences!

For this to happen, a website needs to meet specific characteristics favored and preferred by search engines such as Google. By meeting these criteria, the website will be viewed favorably by search engines, and as a result, will be ranked ahead of other websites within the search engine’s result pages. This way, when a search engine user inputs a search query into Google, Yahoo, or Bing, for example, a search engine optimized website will always be displayed ahead of websites that do not meet these preferences. Of course, the ultimate goal of Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO), is to ensure that your website is ranked within the first page of search engine results pages. Naturally, this is something that can only be achieved if the website is Google-friendly!

Making a Website Google-Friendly: Elements of SEO

As most internet users will be aware, Google currently holds a global monopoly in terms of being the most used search engine site in the world. It logically follows then that for a website to be considered search engine optimized, it must meet Google’s preference criteria specifically.

As such, the process of making a website “Google-friendly” is commonly referred to as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.

In the realm of SEO processes, there are two main types of SEO techniques. These are on-page SEO - which refers to optimizing a website’s internal content and its on-site technical specifications, and off-page SEO - which includes the creation of external ‘backlinks’ to the website - which is also known as link building. Admittedly, quality link-building is a difficult process to master. As such, it is recommended to engage the services of an SEO expert who can assist with building backlinks for you.

It must be said that Search Engine Optimisation is essential when attempting to make a website as Google-friendly as possible. And, crucially, both on-page and off-page SEO should be employed for the best results.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO involves the process of ensuring that the content, technical specifications, and user experience (or UX) of a website meet the criteria specified as being favored by Google and other search engines.

To clarify, Google prefers websites that display technical characteristics such as fast page loading speed, ease of interactivity, and good internal navigability. As such, optimizing these elements is essential to achieve effective on-page SEO. Further, the content displayed on a website must also be optimized to be indexed, crawled and ranked favorably by Google. This includes creating website copy that is in line with keyword research. Keyword research and optimisation is an essential part of on-page SEO which dictates the direction and tone in which website copy should be written. It is important for website copy to be ‘picked up’ by Google when search engine users input queries into a search engine. This can only be achieved if the website copy is keyword-optimized to be tailored to specific search queries.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO differs to on-page SEO in that it involves SEO methods that occur externally. That is to say, techniques that are applied outside of the website in question. One important element of off-page SEO is a process known as link building, which involves the creation of backlinks. But what exactly are backlinks? Essentially, backlinks are links pointing to a specific website, placed within the copy of external blogs. The purpose of backlinks is to entice blog readers to click through to the linked website, therefore directing organic traffic to the site.

Of course, backlinks could not exist without the creation of outreach articles. Outreach articles - also referred to as guest posting - are blog posts created by copywriters with the specific purpose of having backlinks embedded within them. Of course, it is important for the copy that is written to be of high quality. Drivel or gibberish simply won’t be favored by Google, and it won’t be displayed preferentially in SERPs (search engine results pages). As such, outreach articles should always be written by human copywriters, preferably in their native tongue. It is equally important to avoid the temptation of using AI technology such as ChatGPT to write these articles for you.

Why Having a “Google-Friendly” Website is Important

Photo by Ling App

It Can Help Your Website Stand Out From Your Online Competition

In a saturated online marketplace, it can be difficult for a website to stand out from its competitors! As mentioned, the goal of SEO is to have your website ranked on the first page of Google. However, this can be difficult to achieve. Often, websites offering the same products and services will be targeting similar keywords within their on-page content. This leads to some keywords being more difficult to rank for than others. Also known as ‘keyword difficulty’, how competitive a keyword search term is can make it harder to be displayed when users search for that specific term. That is why it is important to employ a combination of SEO techniques.

It Can Encourage a Positive User Experience For Visitors to Your Website

As well as increasing brand awareness and audience engagement with your website, making your website Google-friendly can also increase the likelihood of website visitors having a positive user experience when visiting your site. User experience, or UX, is an important aspect of any website. By ensuring your page loads quickly, is easily navigable, and is enjoyable for your site visitors to interact with, you can ensure that your page is not only preferred by search engines, but the UX it offers is also positive, memorable, and appealing to your website audience.

For a website to be considered ‘Google-friendly’, it must be search engine optimized. Fortunately, by following tried and tested Search Engine Optimisation methods, the on-page, off-page, and technical elements of a website can be fine-tuned to meet Google’s preferences. It follows that by meeting these criteria, a website will be ranked preferentially in Google’s search results pages. And of course, as the ultimate goal is to be ranked as favorably as possible, making your website “Google-friendly” is an essential part of good SEO.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes