Ready to show the world your new online home?
With literally trillions of web pages, hundreds of thousands of new domain registrations daily and competition that is well established in the market, what should your web company be doing to ensure your brand new site doesn’t just get lost in the mire?
Even before you engage in a SEO (search engine optimisation) program there are key onsite considerations that should be made to give your new site the best start in a very crowded market place.
1. Make sure that all of your pages are accessible. There should never be ‘page cannot be found’ errors or other results of missing pages that can harm your SEO. Ensure that all 404 pages or 500 pages are re-routed using redirections.
2. Ensure you have no duplicate content on your website, either duplicated from another page on your website, another website you own, or heaven forbid someone else’s website. The search engines will penalise you for this and will hold back your pages progress as a result.
3. Try to have a good ratio of keywords to content, though don’t repeat your target terms so much that they exceed 4% of the content on the page. We recommend having good levels of content on each page, particularly if you will benefit from that page ranking, the search engines need something to read and rank you for, it’s not just about the meta data.
4. Prepare your Meta data. If your web company has not discussed this with you, discuss it with them. Having original, keyword rich and alternating page titles is important, as are your page descriptions. Google doesn’t take into account Meta keywords anymore, but the other search engines do so we recommend using them. Ensure your H1 tags are used well; these should be keyword rich text areas, not images or contact details.
5. Ensure your website has been submitted to Google’s Webmaster Tools and has a sitemap. Telling Google that you are there and making it easy for them to spider your website is just common courtesy these days.
6. Make sure you have your Google Analytics set up. Installing Google analytics is free, flexible and very powerful. it allows you to track how many people are using your website and what they do once they're there. You can track sales, what content your users are interested in the most and how your audience finds you.
All of these things should be planned and prepared during the early stages of your web design and build.
What next?
The trouble is, SEO isn't as simple as turning on a few plugins and it isn't a one-time job. The good knews however, is that despite most people being aware of SEO, few actually engage in it. So putting in a little dedication could put you ahead of a lot of the competition. To make matters better, the above tips don't require any coding knowledge to implement. There's even things you can do to increase your search engine visibility on a local level.
Need help getting your new website off the ground? Get in touch with Ascensor today and find out how we can get your website out there for the world to see!