SEO Tips to Consider While Launching a New Website
It’s always exciting to launch a new website, but on the other hand, it can prove a hair-pulling, nail-biting endeavor. It’s a common practice by businesses to redo their website for various reasons including making them more visually appealing and enlarging the site.
At times though, the process of building and launching a new site can impact Google rankings and hinder user experience. Most businesses that market their products or services online are likely to be optimizing their website for SEO.
Optimizing a site for SEO plays a crucial role in the performance of your online marketing campaign, which makes it very important. This post aims to point out a few SEO tips that you need to factor in while creating and launching a new website.
Getting the Site Structure Right
- If you fail to get your website structure right, your page authority and rank will drop, subsequently contributing to lower sales
- As much as we are preoccupied with the site’s visual appeal, ensure it is functioning properly first and foremost
- Don’t wait until later to make SEO considerations: do it from the designing phase of the project
- If possible, consult the services of an SEO expert or company from the very beginning to ensure the structure itself is SEO optimized
Maintaining Site Rank during the Rebuilding Process
- If your website is ranked, make use of redirects to ensure you don’t lose the existing ranking as you carry out the rebuilding process
- Create redirects that will route your old address to the new one(s)
- Prior to launching the site, come up with a list of old page addresses. Then match them to the most relevant pages in the new site and have your designer integrate the required redirects
- After you launch the website, have your SEO agency check and audit it to check if the redirects have any issues
Developing Website Content that is SEO-optimized
- Prior to the launch of the website, you need to make sure the content on it is ‘optimized’
- SEO optimization will prove more effective if the directory structure, navigation options, and content have all been optimized with the business in mind
- After Google has indexed the website, the keywords can then follow. However, this will take much longer and can get complicated if the optimization has been done following the launch, and not beforehand.
Avoiding Duplicate Content
By now you know no search engine likes duplicate content. Here is how you can avoid that thorny issue:
- Implement canonical tags to tell Google which content to use in case you have unavoidable duplicate content on your site
- Deploy the no-index meta attribute to inform Google to avoid specific pages in its search results
- Use robots.txt to identify pages or directories the search engines should steer clear of
Creating HTML and XML Sitemaps
- As you go about creating a new website, you will need to inform search engines of the changes to the structure and content of your site
- Create an HTML sitemap to help visitors understand and identify the new site structure
- Create an XML sitemap that will aid search engines in crawling your site more effectively
- Submit your XML sitemap to the search engines within 24 hours of your site going live.
