SEO friendly means that a website is set up in a way -from its code to its design, text, and images- that it makes easier for search engine crawlers to index the content, determine what the site is about, and show it in search results pages.

Being SEO friendly can help a website appear in the first pages of search results and with more than 2 billion websites, and more than 3.5 billion daily searches, you want your site to rank as high as possible.

But what exactly makes a site SEO friendly?

Your website’s title pages are unique, and you should tell Google by using title tags. Titles should be concise but descriptive. Use meta tags to describe what each page is about accurately; meta tags should include the most relevant keywords so that you let search engine crawlers know precisely what your site is about. Use an effective meta description or description meta tag. Meta information is what Google displays when your site appears as a search result. It should include relevant keywords and be brief yet persuasive to entice users to click on it. Again, each page should have a unique description.

Use easy-to-understand URLs. This helps you keep your content organized while allowing search engines to categorize each page on your site accurately. Ideally, you should use the words that best describe what the page is about.

Make your site easily browsable. This helps visitors quickly find what they are looking for. To accomplish this, create an intuitive hierarchy and use text for navigation. Include an HTML sitemap for users to turn to and an XML sitemap so search engines can find the pages on your site.

Publish relevant, compelling content on your site. This alone will go a long way in the eyes of search engines. What’s more, users know and like to share good content, and this will also bring organic traffic to your website. The first rule about SEO is that you should always put users first. They are the ones who will ultimately read and share your site or recommend your products or services. Even Google itself is in the business of making users happy, so that should be your main

Use appropriate anchor text. Anchor text is the text you use to link to other pages. It should tell the user and the search engine what the page you are linking to is about.

Optimize your site’s images. You can provide information about the image using the “alt” text attribute. Doing this lets you provide information about the image if it cannot be displayed for any reason. The images’ file names should also be descriptive of their content.

Use heading tags to organize your content for both the user and the crawlers. These are used to give content a visual structure that allows users to know what the most important information is. There are six heading tags from h1 to h6, which denote the degree of importance of any given text. Avoid using heading tags excessively or using them only for styling text. Text within a heading tag must be meaningful to the reader and to search engines.

The ultimate goal of making a website SEO-friendly should be to present users with the best content possible in the best way possible. Great user experience is any search engine’s number one priority when deciding what rank a website will be granted.