From the course: Advanced SEO: Developing an SEO-Friendly Website

What is an SEO-friendly website?

From the course: Advanced SEO: Developing an SEO-Friendly Website

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What is an SEO-friendly website?

- [Instructor] The modern search engine rules the web. And we all know that ranking well can have a serious impact on our bottom line, so it's no surprise that we're all competing to climb in the search results and working effortlessly to keep the competition from forging ahead of us. But all too often I see an over-investment in website content, whether it's blogs, white papers, ebooks, or videos. It's a game that everyone plays. And at this stage I think most marketers understand it pretty well. Find a topic that people are searching for and produce content that's better or has a fresher perspective. But all of that content, that's just the bait on the end of your fishing line. You can have the best bait, but if you're fishing with a shoestring and a stick, you're in for a bad day. If you want to compete, you want the best fishing rod, reel, line, and the knowledge on where and when to fish. An SEO-friendly website is in some ways like a fishing rod. It's the technical foundation for everything you're going to do in your SEO efforts. When you develop a highly optimized website, you make it easy for search engines to access your content and understand it. An optimized website adheres to both the written and unwritten rules, everything from the user experience to the organization of the content to the page speed plays a significant role in where you rank. Build a highly optimized website, and you'll gain a real competitive advantage. This optimization, however, is a serious departure from content development. We're going to need to get a real look at what's going on under the hood. This contains, among other things, looking at indexability, root domains, redirects, canonical URLs, page tag structure data, and even critical rendering paths. The goal is to find the right balance, because, truthfully, a website that's really good for users is really good for SEO. So together we'll look at the components that make up a highly search optimized website and know that they'll go hand in hand with also improving user experience. Keep in mind, though, there's no silver bullet here. You'll need to embrace as many of these elements as possible. At the very least, improve them beyond what your competition is doing. Nobody maintains top positions forever, though, so stay vigilant.

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