If
you are starting up a website then it may serve you better to buy an
old domain as oppose to coming up with your own. This is because older
domains that were registered with Google at some point are better for
ranking up the search engine results pages. A brand new domain is going
to struggle a little to rank up because it is new and Google prefers
older domains that have been well maintained.
1 - Plan your website from the very beginning
This
is vitally important as it will help you avoid various screw ups in the
future. Plan it so that you know what pages are going to be on it, you
know what audience each page is going to target, and how you are going
to weight your pages so that one page is not significantly heaver than
the others. Planning is also vitally important because of navigation.
You need to get your navigation right, and ideally you are going to have
at least three internal links pointing at each page. As you can
imagine, planning this carefully is important.
You
can also plan your keywords well in advance, as well as all the content
and Meta content you are going to have to add. It also means planning
your titles, H tags and your URL names. Planning how you are going to
layer your pages, funnel your customers and put your navigation into a
hierarchy is also important.
2 - Navigation and the correct anchor text is important
As
stated above, the navigation on your website is important, which is why
planning is so important. But, the navigation is so important that it
needs special attention. The links you create that point out of your
website may affect your SEO, and the internal link structure will
definitely affect your SEO.
Your
anchor text is important too. The anchor text for your internal links
needs to be informative and descriptive. It should ideally hold a
keyword that is relevant to the page it links to. Your anchor text tells
Google what the linked page is all about. If your anchor text is
misleading then Google is going to get it wrong about your internal
pages.
3 - Your on-page SEO should be fully complete before uploading a page
This
is true as there are few excuses for not. You can complete your entire
website before uploading it to the host server. It does your website no
good to have blank pages or unfinished pages. You should be able to load
your website onto the server in one go and go online with a perfect
website. Doing this is far better than any alternative.
4 - Tight code, clean code and severely bug tested before going online
Bug
testing before you go online is very important, and remember that cross
browser compatibility is a big deal. Also remember that screen sizes
may need to be compensated for. Bug testing will avoid any big SEO
disasters in the near future. A tight website code will ensure that
loading and render times are not inoffensive, and Google will index you
and rank you higher if your code is clean HTML. Any other varieties of
programming code can be stored as an external resource. Google only
indexes HTML coded pages, and if there are other snippets of code within
the HTML then the indexing bots are likely to stop reading and move on.
5 - Take an SEO audit you do yourself and run a WC3 validator check
Now
that you have your website all ready to go, you may want to run a few
checks. If you wish you may publish your website and wait a few days
before running the tests. Run an SEO audit to see if you have missed any
on-page SEO that you should not have. Your off-page SEO is going to be
terrible, but that is not a problem since you have not started any of
that yet. You are looking for mistakes and omissions within your on-page
SEO.
You
then need to run a W3C validator check. Keeping up with W3C standards
is not an SEO issue, but it does make it easier to avoid mistakes that
may be search engine unfriendly by simply keeping up with their
standards. You can run a validator check for free with quite a few
online resources. Try a few and see if they point out anything that may
need fixing within your website. Fix any problems and you should be fine
for the moment.
Author bio:Sonia J. is an author of this post. She's also in a team of http://writing-service-assistant.com/ that helps students to find the most reliable and professional writing service.
