SEO Tips for Your New Website
Oftentimes, we hear about new businesses starting a new company, followed by a new website. Most business owners tend to want to beat their competitors immediately, but usually look over some of the basics with their website in regards to search engine optimization (SEO).
Here are some basic elements when starting a new website to keep in mind to help out with your SEO.
SEO and Flash Can Clash
While flash can be very impressive and appealing to your human visitor eyes, it can hurt search engines quite a bit. Some flash will be acceptable for SEO, but too much of it will make it hard for search engines to crawl your website. Important text or alt tags within images that you are wanting to rank for must also be left outside of any flash as well since search engines have a very hard time crawling and indexing flash at all. Understandably, if you need flash for you website, possibly because you are a photographer or need a site to show off a portfolio, keep it a minimum and double check what the search engines see when they crawl it by checking out Google’s new instant preview feature.
SEO and Your Actual URL
If you use WordPress for your website, you are probably aware of the many advantages of using it as your platform. You have probably also seen the permalink structure of www.yourdomain.com/?page_id=01. I would recommend not using ID numbers in your URL, but rather what the page is about so that your human and search engines know exactly what you are talking about. Changing your permalink URL structure will help out with your SEO ranking quite a bit. I recommend keeping the URLs as short as possible. Another very important, but often overlooked is to set up a permanent forwarding so that your site goes to the www version of your site and the non-www version. Another SEO tip is to hyphenate multiple words just like this page you are on, rather than combine it together. This will give search engines a much quicker road-map for your page.
Proper SEO Structure
Using this page as reference, try to use heading tags with your keyword in them. Try to have at least one H1, H2 and an H3 tag without making it unappealing to your human visitors. As important as SEO is, remember that your human visitors are more important!
SEO for Individual Pages
Once you have completed your overall design and SEO strategy, a few key things to try to implement on each individual page are:
- Rambling and SEO don’t mix. In other words, keep one topic per page. Make sure to link to other pages within each pages of your site.
- Don’t keyword stuff: This is a big no-no for search engines. Keyword stuffing is attempting to put your keyword that you are trying to rank for in your page multiple times solely for SEO rankings. This could get your website sand-boxed, or put in the penalty box very quickly, especially with the latest Google Panda update.
- Meta Info: Keep the meta info relevant to each page. Try and keep your title relevant to your page content. Your meta description should be under 140 characters for the entire description to show up on search results. Also, your meta information should not be duplicated from any other website, or any other page on your website.
- Page and website speed: Don’t forget to keep an eye on the speed of your page and website as a whole. Many changes that you do in attempts to help out with your SEO can ultimately slow down your website such as adding more content and/or images.
While there are many SEO tips, these are the basics that really should never be overlooked when setting up a new website. Do you have any other SEO tips?
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