You’re building a new website—that’s exciting! Whether you’re building a site for your new business or your personal blog, it needs to be easy to find. Organic search engine listings are still the number one way that users find websites. With that in mind, here are five SEO (search engine optimization) considerations to remember when building a new website.
- URL Structure
Using keywords in your domain is a great start to the URL structure. When you sit down to map out the various pages of your new website, keep the naming convention simple and clean, and use hyphens instead of underscores to separate words. Keep the URLs precise, use a keyword if it makes sense to do so, and create a logical hierarchy of site sections. For example:
Good: www.travelsiteflorida.com/family-vacations/short-term-rentals
Bad: www.travelsiteflorida.com/Vacas_In_Tampa/Fam/Rentals_short
- Keywords
Speaking of keywords, there is some confusion surrounding the importance of keywords, exact match vs broad match, meta keywords, semantic search … here’s what you need to know.
- Use keywords when it makes sense – never compromise the quality of writing to use a keyword.
- Switch it up, use natural language and variations of keywords – Google’s pretty smart, it’ll figure out what you mean
- Do NOT stuff your pages full of repeated, redundant, repetition. Don’t focus on “keyword density,” just write your pages for your audience. The rest will fall into place.
- Google & Bing Webmaster Tools
Get your new website verified in Webmaster Tools. There are a few easy options to make it happen, and you’ll be glad you did when you launch. Webmaster Tools give you great insight into how the search engines are crawling and indexing your site. If there are any issues, you’ll get quick notification so you can fix them and get back on track quickly.
- Analytics
You want to be sure your analytics tools and tracking codes are all properly in place and working before you launch the site. Playing catch-up afterwards can be a real pain in the butt. Take the extra time, set it all up, and then rest knowing the data will start tracking as soon as you go live. This gives you a great baseline to track future successes.
- Meta Data
Two pieces of meta data must be optimized before you launch – the Title tag and the meta description tag. Not only do these help search engines understand what your pages are all about (so they can them properly against the user’s search query), but these two tags also appear in the SERPs (search engine results pages) as the clickable hyperlink and snippet of information underneath.
Here are a few best-practice guidelines to follow:
- Title should be less than 60 characters, including spaces
- Use a keyword up front and save branding for the end
- Description should be under 140 characters, including spaces
- It is a great opportunity to encourage the click from SERP, so make it benefit-rich and enticing
- Make sure each page has unique titles and descriptions
And there you have it – our top 5 SEO factors to consider when building a new website. There are definitely more things to keep in mind, lots of other SEO bits and pieces, and we can talk about those some more in another post. But if you do nothing else, be sure to implement these five items to set yourself up for greater visibility, and greater success.
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About Digital Lion
Digital Lion is a design and marketing agency specializing in online marketing, custom website development, video animation, graphic design, branding/logo design, and print marketing design. Headquartered in Calgary, and with secondary locations in Edmonton and Ottawa, they work with clients across Canada, as well as worldwide, and are focused on being environmentally friendly and giving back to charities that they are passionate about. The company mission is to “Design a Better World®.”
