Essential SEO Aspects When Launching a New Website
If you have a business idea that needs to be brought to life, registering a domain name and building a website are usually the first steps toward that goal. However, it’s not that simple as it seems – Google and other search engines are important when it comes to being found and seen, and therefore you have to take steps in order to optimize your site for better search engine rankings.
This is where SEO comes to the stage – although it is a long-term process, taking some specific steps after launching your website may be beneficial for your site’s target keywords, leads and sales. It’s always easier to start doing this from the very beginning – ideally even before the site’s launch, because it’s rather complicated to fix a website that wasn’t originally built with SEO in mind. Below are some of the most important aspects of SEO you have to keep in mind for when you decide to launch a website.
Target keywords
Your ability to rank mainly depends on the structure of your website – you have to model it so each page targets its set of closely related and relevant keywords in order to rank high up in organic searches.
What does that mean? If for example, you sell women clothing – there is a variety of different pieces of clothing, from skirts, dresses, trousers, blouses, shirts, et cetera. You want each category to rank for its target keywords and attract searchers looking for a specific type of clothing. So, in order to do that, you have to break your site into different categories, with each one targeted to a specific keyword. So, the main keyword should be “Women’s clothing”, with subpages for each item separate.
This way of structuring a website gives many perks – not only does it create a theme that is clear and targets keyword for each page on the website, it also allows you to closely target each keyword on each page for maximum relevance.
However, try not to optimize one page for too many keywords. It’s better to have several pages, each extremely relevant, than one page covering multiple topics poorly, which can actually make your webpage invisible to the search engines. If you’re not sure how and where to start, there are many SEO Services that can help you build an effective and keyword-rich website.
Quality content
Content is the future of SEO, and there are numerous reasons why. First of all, men aren’t machines, and Google has evolved over the years to think more like customers in order to provide the best user experience. So, if you want to heave a successful SEO campaign, you have to provide your users with high-quality content that’s intriguing and engaging to the community.
Research showed that websites with a bigger word count rank higher up than those who provide little to no text and light content. So, it may take you some more time to create that content, but it will surely have a positive effect on your website.
Another reason for doing this is because long and detailed pages are more likely to get links – by doing so, a good blog post on your website for example can pay for itself in a greater number of inbound links to each page. Generally, people like to find informative and engaging content, which naturally improves your ranking, so this is another important aspect of SEO to take into account.
Optimize title tags
Your title tag is the text that Google displays as your page title for every search result, as well as the text that will display in the user’s browser when they visit your page. It’s important that all of your pages have tags that are optimized for their target SEO keywords. Start your title tag with your target keyword, then describe what users should expect when they click through to your website.
Keep the page titles brief and simple (because Google will crop your tag if it’s longer than 60 characters) and avoid stuffing keywords into our title tag. Use your primary keyword once, then add relevant information about your page.
Accessibility and user experience (UX)
Make sure to check if your website is accessible through search engines by using tools which can scan your site and determine if crawlers can get to all of your pages, see if you have duplicate content, make sure you don’t have thin content pages, broken links… The list goes on. When you’ve finished that and made sure everything is in order, it’s time to optimize your website for all audiences, devices and browsers.
Lastly, use a tool like Google Speed Test to see if all pages load fast from everywhere, and while you’re at it, do some proxy checking. That means you need to make sure to be available from all sorts of regions, especially if I’m doing international targeting or if I know that I’m going to be targeting rural regions that my pages load fast from everywhere.
User experience is the trickiest part, and for that you may need to test it out informally with some customers, friends or family to get proper insight on how to improve your website. You can also find various useful tools to run some formal testing online which can reveal things in your navigation or your content that’s just stopping people from having the experience that you want.
Conclusion
SEO is a long process, and it’s rarely enough to simply launch a website and wait as the leads, sales and revenue start to roll in. If you’d like to rank for competitive keywords, you need to put together a long term SEO strategy with clearly defined goals, milestones and objectives. Make sure to follow all of the aforementioned tips in order to give your site a much needed boost.
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