What Is an SEO-Standard Website? The Battle to Beat Google's SEO Standards

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

99% of users research before they buy, 73% of users only visit the top 10 websites and assume those are the most reputable brands… Those numbers are a resounding statement of how important an SEO-standard website is in today's exploding digital marketing era. Yet many people are still quite hazy and don't truly understand what an SEO-standard website is. The journey to achieving SEO-standard website status is painstaking, demanding many techniques and great persistence from SEO practitioners.

What Is an SEO-Standard Website? Markdao Decodes "SEO Standards"

What is an SEO-standard website? Simply put, it is a website designed with a configuration and features that make it easy for Google to crawl and understand the entire site. You may have an attractive, eye-catching website with beautiful, aesthetic design and quality content — do you think that's enough for a website? In fact, a website that looks great on the outside still may not be enough, especially when you're competing fiercely on the internet against other businesses. Businesses need an SEO-friendly website — in other words, one that "beats" the SEO-standard website bar.

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What are the criteria for evaluating an SEO-standard website?

• Unique titles and descriptions for all pages. Titles should be around 60–65 characters; meta descriptions around 150 characters. Titles and descriptions must accurately describe the page content without keyword stuffing.

• The website's URLs must be clear, formatted in lowercase, and separated by hyphens.

• Fast page load speed creates favorable conditions for ranking high on Google's search results page.

• An SEO-standard website must have unique, useful content. That means the content on your website is one of a kind — it can't be found anywhere else. In particular, the information provided must be high quality, accurate, and easy to understand, and you should use bold, italic, and underline formatting for the main keywords in the article.

• Include SEO-standard images to make the content interesting and engaging for readers. However, images need to be optimized in size, guaranteed in quality, and should use ALT text. Additionally, images must fit the article's topic; you should design or edit your own images before using them.

• The layout of an SEO-standard website must be clear and consistent. Specifically, it must have a Header, Breadcrumb menu, Page Title (only one title per page), text formatted into short paragraphs with subheadings, author information, and a Footer.

• Create an XML Sitemap and use a Robots.txt file.

• The interface must be compatible with every device — from computers and tablets to mobile phones — delivering an enjoyable user experience.

• Have a sitemap.

The reasons businesses must equip themselves with an SEO-standard website

Given the fierce competition in online marketing today, website design is a necessary condition for any business. So what are the reasons you absolutely must build an SEO-standard website?

Markdao has listed the following significant benefits:

• Building credibility and increasing brand recognition.

• Increasing organic traffic to the website from search engines, which in turn makes it possible to rank higher on Google's results pages.

• Maximizing savings on marketing costs on Google as well as on other channels.

• Making the website more user-friendly, easier to use, more professional, and more experiential.

• Optimizing the website for mobile devices and improving traffic to the site.

• More opportunities to reach the top organically thanks to a combination of quality content and images.

• Boosting sales and sales performance through high traffic directed at the right potential customers. This is also regarded as the most important of all the reasons to build an SEO-standard website.

• Additionally, an SEO-standard website helps you understand what customers want — for example, how they access your site, what they click on, how they leave, what content they like, and so on.

The 7 Google standards to reach the gates of an SEO-standard website

It will be very hard to check whether a website is SEO-standard without much experience or knowledge in this field. And the effort to build an SEO-standard website only means something if it goes beyond the standards Google sets. Below are Google's requirements for a truly "SEO-standard" website.

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Optimizing SEO-friendly URLs — the first task when designing an SEO-standard website

• Automatically generate URLs from the Product/Article Title to optimize URL SEO

• Customize URLs to SEO requirements when needed

• Automatically generate SEO Titles and SEO Descriptions for products/articles as you write

• Never use auto-generated URLs with numbers inside them, such as www.example.com/?p=578544

• Use URL rewriting for links, separating each word with a hyphen "-"

• Have a standard robots.txt file so crawlers can read content easily

HTTPS is required to meet SEO-standard website requirements

At the Google Search Console Event 2019 held in Ho Chi Minh City, Google presented data on HTTPS and affirmed it as one of the criteria for SEO evaluation. Imagine: if your website has poor security, Google will find it very hard to trust.

An SEO-standard website must have optimized content hierarchy

Search engines need a separate URL for each piece of content so they can crawl and index it, as well as refer users to it. Different content means different URLs, and there must be a hierarchy between the pieces of content on the page.

What are the titles and meta description tags of an SEO-standard website?

The title, meta description, and URL are the three most basic pieces of information Google displays on Google Search to represent the content a URL contains. Imagine: if a URL has no description, Google won't want to display it.

Google has updated its criteria and recommends the meta description tags of an SEO-standard website as follows:

• SEO Title — around 70 characters

• SEO Description — 160 to 200 characters, depending on the moment, as display length varies

These display sections should be customizable to be more search-engine friendly and to reflect meaning in a way that's easy for searchers to understand.

A 404 page linking to a redirect page

Sometimes users will land on a page that doesn't exist on your website by following a broken link or mistyping a URL — or simply because a small change you made broke the link. Using a custom 404 page to guide users back to a working page on your site can improve the user experience. Your 404 page can include a link back to the homepage and can also offer links to popular or related content on your website.

An SEO-standard website design must be mobile-friendly

Today's world prioritizes mobile devices. Most people search Google using their mobile devices. The desktop version of a website can be hard to view and use on a phone.

Therefore, designing an SEO-standard website for mobile is important for your online presence. In fact, since late 2016, Google has been running experiments primarily using the mobile version of a website's content for ranking, parsing structured data, and generating snippets.

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Setting up H1, H2, and H3 tags on the website

Setting up custom H1, H2, and H3 tags in the interface makes it easy for Google to understand the main content of the article or product.

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