8 Good SEO practices to follow while building new website
11 lipca 2017
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It means optimizing your website for search engines what improves visibility of you’re the website in search results. SEO is an activity aimed at positioning websites. The higher the position of your site in search results, the more people you reach. The result is an increase in the number of visits and it improves the likelihood of new users turning into customers of the company or brand. SEO is an element of internet marketing. It refers to a number of strategies developed through content marketing and social media marketing. In this text we would like to describe you few bases that can easily and quickly improve the positioning of your website.
1) Proper tittle
The title and the description of the page marked in the code are one of the most important elements influencing how Google perceives our site. That is why it is highly important to have a possibility to manually modify the titles for each page within your website. Avoid constant elements of titles like your company’ name or the city in front of the title. The length of the title should not exceed 75 characters. Only between 50 and 65 characters are visible to Google users and it makes it the perfect length. The title should always include the most important keywords for a particular page. For the product page of the online store it will be only the name of the product but in the case of a service page this should be the name of the service most often with e.g. the city where it is provided. Always consider what you will type in Google, if you look for the product or service yourself.
2) Links’ structure
Not only the title must be clear and reasonably chosen. You should always consider proper names for the links of particular pages. Properly constructed link is one that:
Applying these rules in practice means that the link should look like this:
- [Yourwebsite].com/our-offer
- [Yourwebsite].com/clothes/shirts
- [Yourwebsite].com/contact
Not like this:
- [Yourwebsite].com/page3?=6.php
- [Yourwebsite].com/category?=6/search=p?123-12sef.php
3) Internal linking
Internal linking is the basis of a well-optimized website. It is also the foundation for proper activities within and outside of it. Thanks to correct structure of the subpages and the appropriate linking of each one, it is possible to achieve greater visibility on Google and increase traffic to the site. What are the main advantages of proper internal linking?
4) Image optimization
Building a good SEO website you must also take care of aspects related to the proper optimization of graphics on the pages. I does not mean the choice of images but the technical issues. For images, you must always keep in mind:
5) Domain name
Two the most essential issues here are the age and the name of your domain. The age may have a positive effect on its ranking. Older, longer existing domains may be better viewed by search engine algorithms. When choosing the name from the SEO standpoint, bear in your mind that a domain named hugo-boss-shirts.com can be perceived better than a domain called buy-my-shirts.com which also sells Hugo Boss shirts.
6) Site map
Site map is a very important element in the positioning of pages. That is an alternative, hierarchical representation of the website’s structure which provides the possibility of optimal navigation of the website - switching to a site with a single click.
Site map has a positive impact on the value of a website. Such maps provide a large dose of text links leading to the key sites of the website in one place. It is also known that text links are more important to search engines than graphic links. Each properly created sitemap provides a good number of links and anchor text leading to content on the page.
Google, in addition to the regular site map available to website’s visitors, recommends creating a special sitemap (Google Sitemap) for indexing robots. This is a specially created XML document that contains links to the pages of the website. By creating and submitting a Sitemap, we are confident that Google has information about all the pages on that website, including URLs that could not be detected in the normal indexing process of your site.
7) Keywords
It is important to realize that content created for SEO must include proper number of keywords. The optimum keyword density is around 0.5%. In the past the determinant was over 2% but now such keyword stuffing is unfavorable from the SEO optimization point. You can use Google AdWords Keywords Planner which is an incredibly helpful tool in building your texts. Google has created this tool for the benefit of AdWords users to help them choose the right keywords for their campaigns but you should definitely use the keyword planner for your content marketing strategy.
8) Gradation of headers
It is important to remember about the proper structure and hierarchy of headers - h1, h2, h3 etc. tags. It is not complicated at all and you just have to follow 3 simple rules:
Remember that these 8 points are just the basis and SEO optimization is a very complex and multi-surfaced issue. Properly designed service should focus on a large number of various tasks and each of them may ruin your website’s positioning. It means that before preparing your brand, new website you have got two potential choices: make a really good research and learn a lot or leave it to high-skilled professionals.
1) Proper tittle
The title and the description of the page marked in the code are one of the most important elements influencing how Google perceives our site. That is why it is highly important to have a possibility to manually modify the titles for each page within your website. Avoid constant elements of titles like your company’ name or the city in front of the title. The length of the title should not exceed 75 characters. Only between 50 and 65 characters are visible to Google users and it makes it the perfect length. The title should always include the most important keywords for a particular page. For the product page of the online store it will be only the name of the product but in the case of a service page this should be the name of the service most often with e.g. the city where it is provided. Always consider what you will type in Google, if you look for the product or service yourself.
2) Links’ structure
Not only the title must be clear and reasonably chosen. You should always consider proper names for the links of particular pages. Properly constructed link is one that:
- Does not contain any special characters,
- Does not contain digits,
- Is short,
- Informs the user what is on the page.
Applying these rules in practice means that the link should look like this:
- [Yourwebsite].com/our-offer
- [Yourwebsite].com/clothes/shirts
- [Yourwebsite].com/contact
Not like this:
- [Yourwebsite].com/page3?=6.php
- [Yourwebsite].com/category?=6/search=p?123-12sef.php
3) Internal linking
Internal linking is the basis of a well-optimized website. It is also the foundation for proper activities within and outside of it. Thanks to correct structure of the subpages and the appropriate linking of each one, it is possible to achieve greater visibility on Google and increase traffic to the site. What are the main advantages of proper internal linking?
- It greatly facilitates the navigation for users.
- It ensures that search engine robots properly scan and index your page.
- It strictly determines the hierarchy of information for pages/subpages while building links between them and phrases.
- It helps to spread the juice link within the page.
4) Image optimization
Building a good SEO website you must also take care of aspects related to the proper optimization of graphics on the pages. I does not mean the choice of images but the technical issues. For images, you must always keep in mind:
- ALT alternate text – displayed on the page when the image cannot be loaded. This is also the text which will be used by Google search engine to find graphics in the image search engine.
- File naming – always use the key words in files’ names e.g. red-men-shirt instead of DCIM9373_23536.png.
- Size optimization - the size of the image does not affect the search rankings but it is worth to think about it in terms of overall page load speed. There are plenty of online image converters that will help you to convert the files without significant loss of quality.
5) Domain name
Two the most essential issues here are the age and the name of your domain. The age may have a positive effect on its ranking. Older, longer existing domains may be better viewed by search engine algorithms. When choosing the name from the SEO standpoint, bear in your mind that a domain named hugo-boss-shirts.com can be perceived better than a domain called buy-my-shirts.com which also sells Hugo Boss shirts.
6) Site map
Site map is a very important element in the positioning of pages. That is an alternative, hierarchical representation of the website’s structure which provides the possibility of optimal navigation of the website - switching to a site with a single click.
Site map has a positive impact on the value of a website. Such maps provide a large dose of text links leading to the key sites of the website in one place. It is also known that text links are more important to search engines than graphic links. Each properly created sitemap provides a good number of links and anchor text leading to content on the page.
Google, in addition to the regular site map available to website’s visitors, recommends creating a special sitemap (Google Sitemap) for indexing robots. This is a specially created XML document that contains links to the pages of the website. By creating and submitting a Sitemap, we are confident that Google has information about all the pages on that website, including URLs that could not be detected in the normal indexing process of your site.
7) Keywords
It is important to realize that content created for SEO must include proper number of keywords. The optimum keyword density is around 0.5%. In the past the determinant was over 2% but now such keyword stuffing is unfavorable from the SEO optimization point. You can use Google AdWords Keywords Planner which is an incredibly helpful tool in building your texts. Google has created this tool for the benefit of AdWords users to help them choose the right keywords for their campaigns but you should definitely use the keyword planner for your content marketing strategy.
8) Gradation of headers
It is important to remember about the proper structure and hierarchy of headers - h1, h2, h3 etc. tags. It is not complicated at all and you just have to follow 3 simple rules:
- Each page has only one header "H1" and it is the title of the page.
- The number of individual header types should follow the rule: h1> h2> h3> h4> h5 etc.
- Always follow the order of the header types: if there are two types of headers on the page then they should be h1 and h2 rather than h1 and h4.
Remember that these 8 points are just the basis and SEO optimization is a very complex and multi-surfaced issue. Properly designed service should focus on a large number of various tasks and each of them may ruin your website’s positioning. It means that before preparing your brand, new website you have got two potential choices: make a really good research and learn a lot or leave it to high-skilled professionals.