Looking to make sure your site gets fair treatment from Google? While Google’s algorithms have long been considered a bit of voodoo, here are some common sense tips for building SEO friendly websites to help your search rankings and keep your brand in the forefront.

Make it Fast
Page load speed is major factor in how Google ranks your site. So make sure your site is loading as fast as possible. Use a Content Delivery Network or CDN (such as the one raved about in these Sitelock reviews) to ensure your content is getting delivered to your visitors as fast as possible. Also, make sure your images are compressed to the absolute most, and you script and style files are minimized to ensure they load fast on any device. Google and other search engines offer ways to test your page load times, which can be very helpful in seeing where you problem areas are. This is one of the few non-secret tools Google has that can tell you how your site is doing relating to SEO, so take advantage of it.

Keep Your Site Hacker Free

One of the worst things that can happen to your site is getting blacklisted for being an illegitimate site. This can happen even to the most honest of sites if those sites are compromised. You want to make sure all your web software is up to date and free of any backdoors to prevent hackers form accessing your data, manipulating your site (usually for advertising purposes or phishing scams) to ensure that you don’t run afoul of Google. You can use third party security services to help make sure you site is protected form attacks that can get you banned from Google. Getting blacklisted from Google can take months or even years to overcome so it should be avoided at all costs and keeping your site hacker free is a crucial tip in building SEO friendly websites.

Don’t Cheat!
Don’t flatter yourself; you are not smarter than Google. Long gone are the days of using some tricky and misleading keywords to get your site to the top of the rankings list. Today’s search algorithms are highly sophisticated and if you try to the buck the system you are much more likely to get on the dreaded blacklist than get any advantages. Write quality content that is related to your subject, use image alt tags and other attributes that reflect the content on the site, and encourage actual readers to like and share your content, as social has become a big part of Google rankings. So there is no shortcut, just use common sense and don’t cheat if you want to up your search result rankings.

If you want to build an SEO friendly site use our common sense tips, keep your site clean and secure, don’t try to game the system, write quality and relevant content, and make sure your site loads fast on all devices. This tips will ensure you site gets fair treatment form the search giants.