Building a new website is always exciting. But whether you’re building a new site for a personal blog or new business, it needs to be easy to find on the web— and organic search engines are still king when it comes to searchers finding websites. Here are 5 crucial SEO strategies to implement when building a new website.
URL Structure: Simple, Clean and Logical
Placing keywords in your domain name gets you off to a great start in the URL structure, but it has to be done right. When you map out the different pages of your new website, keep it simple, clean and logical. Use hyphens instead of underscores and keep the URLs exact. Use keywords and create a logical hierarchy of sections on the site. Here’s an example of what to do and what not to do.
- Do: www.ficticioustravelsite.com/family-vacations/short-term-rentals
- Don’t Do: www.ficticioustravelsite.com/vacas_in_tampa/fam/rentals/short
Keywords
While the debate rages on about the importance of keywords, here’s what you need to know. Don’t compromise the quality of the content just to squeeze in those keywords. Use keywords naturally where it makes sense. Switch it up and use variations of your keywords. Don’t worry. Google is highly intelligent today and will figure out what you mean. Avoid stuffing your pages with redundant keywords and just write for the audience. Again, Google will figure it out, and everything will fall right into place.
Bing and Google Webmaster Tools
Be sure to get your new site verified in Bing and Google Webmaster Tools. It gives you deep insight to understand how the search engines are crawling and indexing your new site. And if there are any problems, you’ll get an alert for a quick fix and get back on track fast.
Analytics
Analytics tools and tracking codes should be working properly and in place before your site is launched. Take the extra time required to set it all up and avoid having to play catch-up. The data will start tracking once you go live, and you’ll have a good baseline for tracking performance.
Metadata: Optimize
The title tag and the meta description tag should be optimized before launch. Why is this important? Because search is the number one driver of traffic to sites. It beats out social media by more than 300 percent. This metadata helps search engines understand the content for a match up to users’ search queries.
Here’s a list of best practices as guidelines to follow to optimize meta data:
- All titles should be less than 60 characters, including spaces
- Meta description tag should be less than 140 characters, including spaces
- Use a keyword up front
- Each page should have unique titles and descriptions
- Make it enticing and beneficial to the viewer
With these top 5 SEO factors, you’ll be setting yourself up for greater visibility and success with your new website. Plus, SEO leads have a 14.6 percent close rate when compared to the 1.7 close rate of outbound leads.
If you need some help with your virtual presence, give the digital strategists at Marketing Essentials a call at 419.629.0080 today.
