Tips
What makes a website SEO friendly
An SEO friendly site is one a crawler can read, a phone can load, and a reader can use. Most of the work is structural and happens before a single word is written.
Correction, 23 September 2026: duplicate pages can correctly name a different preferred canonical URL. The earlier self-canonical rule was too broad.
An SEO friendly website is one a crawler can read completely, a phone can load quickly, and a reader can use without friction. That is the entire definition, and the work splits into those three parts.
Almost all of it is structural, and almost all of it is decided before anyone writes a word.
Can a crawler read it
Serve the content in the HTML. Google documents a rendering stage for JavaScript. A client that does not execute scripts cannot read content created only by those scripts. If search visibility matters, render on the server or at build time.
Give every page a unique URL that describes it in words. Pick one host, one protocol and one trailing-slash convention, and apply it everywhere including your internal links.
Make sure robots.txt does not block the things you want found. A robots rule controls crawling. It does not guarantee removal from the index.
Can a phone load it
Three measurements matter. How long the main content takes to appear. How quickly the page responds to a tap. Whether the layout jumps while loading.
Images are usually the cause of the first. Set width and height, serve modern formats, and size them for the container they display in.
Third-party scripts are usually the cause of the second. Every tag manager, chat widget and analytics script competes for the same main thread the page needs to respond. Load what you can after the page is interactive, and remove what nobody reads the data from.
Injected content is usually the cause of the third. Cookie banners, ad slots and late-loading fonts all move text that a reader had already started reading.
Can a reader use it
Navigation that says where things are, in the words a customer uses. Headings that describe the section under them. Text that has enough contrast against its background to be read outdoors on a phone. Touch targets big enough to hit.
These are accessibility requirements first. They also happen to be what a search engine is trying to approximate when it measures page experience.
The structure underneath
Group pages so that anything important is two clicks from the homepage. Link between related pages in the body copy, with anchor text that describes the destination.
Decide the URL structure once. Changing it later means a redirect map, and a redirect map is a project.
Give each page one job. A page that tries to rank for four different questions usually ranks for none of them, because it answers each one partially.
What to put in the HTML head
One title, written for the page. One meta description, written for the click. Check that each canonical names the intended preferred URL. Duplicates can correctly name another page. Structured data that describes what the page actually is, validated before it ships.
Anything auto-generated here should be checked on ten pages before you trust it on four hundred.
A test you can run today
Disable JavaScript in your browser and load your most important page. If the content is gone, a crawler that does not execute scripts sees the same thing.
Then load it on a phone over a mobile connection, not over office wifi. Then read it outdoors. Most of the problems worth fixing will find you in those three minutes.
We build sites this way by default. If yours needs rebuilding instead of patching, that is web development.
The performance measures above follow Core Web Vitals. Test accessibility against the relevant WCAG criteria.