Pre Launch New Website SEO Best Practices
-
Hi All,
I am currently mid development of a website (no testing page yet) and want to make sure I am doing my due diligence in regards to SEO. Are there best practices to always complete while a website is being built? If so what are they? I've gotten to the stage where I've read every blog on the planet and now maybe too much info.
I am also focusing my Keyword Analysis around competitor research to write great copy from, but seem to be falling down a rabbit hole of way too many keywords. Is there agencies/services that would just be hired to do Keyword Research for my needs?
Thanks a lot!
-
Thank you so much for all your responses. I think I am on the right track and have culled many down!
I appreciate you time very much!
-
As Andy put it "...Remember, you are aiming to get the right traffic to your page - not just any traffic..."
and what he means is traffic that converts!!!!
-
Hi there, it's good that you're thinking about SEO at this stage. Too often, agencies have to work with what they already have once a website has been built, so you've got the right approach. I agree with the others with regards to Google Keyword Planner - it's a great piece of kit that will help a lot. What you need more than anything is clear and logical information architecture as well. If your navigation and sub navigations are logical and the flow of "link juice" follows that structure then you will have a good start. Consider planning in high quality landing pages for each high priority product as well. If everything is clearly marked in a site map before build, you have a bird's eye view on what is needed. Also, as another poster mentioned, don't neglect your metadata, tags, markup and content.
-
Thanks Andy,
I didn't directly elude to the importance of Quality Traffic vs Traffic. Very nice job bringing that to light.
-
I've read every blog on the planet and now maybe too much info
You would be surprised how easy it is to actually fall into that trap. Because there are so many 'experts', everyone has an opinion on how best to SEO a website. It is actually easier that you might realise if you pull yourself back to basics and follow some best practice guidelines on both SEO and user experience (something often overlooked).
The reason you need to consider user experience (UX) is because what is the point in getting traffic to your site if all it does it bounce back off again? There are often reasons for this that include:
- Lack of descriptive page title
- Lack of descriptive Meta Description
- Primary information buried away in too much content
- Call to action not clear
- Uninteresting pages filled with 'waffle'
- Content not broken up into usable paragraphs on pertinent information
- Badly written content
The list goes on...
Remember, you are aiming to get the right traffic to your page - not just any traffic...
For the keyword research, that is a very important aspect because it allows you to not only focus on primary keywords, but also look at alternative related words and phrases that will support the page. For this, Google's keyword planner is pretty basic.
Remember that with content, you are competing amongst billions of other pages for a decent rank, so you have to make sure your content is as good as it can be. Look at what is winning for your desired phrases and see if you can spot why Google is giving this more prominence and then aim to make yours even better - but remember not to copy. Plagiarism will be dealt with by a slap from Google.
I hope this helps a little.
-Andy
-
Hi Krackle,
I have found after numerous site launches and re-works it is always a good idea to have the targeted keywords in mind. As well as have a firm understanding of SEO basics. (see itpseo #3).
When I first start a page analysis I look at the products or services I have to offer, the competitors sites and the best keywords. Thinking logically I decide if I was looking for X how would I do it? Then I ask others how would you find X; what would you type into the search engine? Then compare what I think and what I was told with what Google shows as the highest volume keywords. In some cases you'll find that Google's "best" keywords are not applicable to your industry. This is usually broad stroke keywords that can potentially have many meanings.
For example my company makes customer rubber caps. Broad stroke caps is not going to lead you to our site or any of our competitors site because caps has many meanings and Google has since figured out when somebody types caps they are likely looking for sports team hats.
At this point I would refine my keyword to be a little more industry specific, rubber caps. Still pretty good search volume and now I am seeing rubber companies coming up in the search results. Now I ask my self do I want to be listed among these companies, do they do what we do? The answer here would be no. These companies offer standard lines of rubber caps in many sizes shapes and colors, we do not. We only make custom parts and don't have any standard lines of rubber caps.
Once again I refine my search to be precise with what I am trying to achieve page 1 ranking (hopefully #1) . My keyword now becomes custom rubber caps. When I search I find some of our competitors offering our types of services. This is exactly where we want to be!
Now I have my main keyword. I will then research longer-tail keywords and variations to find the most applicable again following my process laid out as before. Once I have my best 3 keywords I start work on the design.
Incorporate best keywords in Title, H1,H2, H3 tags. Use (
So in short:
*** Find Best Match Keywords
- Refine Best Match Keywords
- Make a Top 3 list
- Follow basic SEO rules
- Create compelling, informative content
I hope this helps you,
Don**
-
Hi Kracle,
You can use Google Keyword Planner and MOZ tools to analyse the most suitable keywords for your website.
List of Tools:
1. Google Keyword Planner
2. Keyword Difficulty tool (MOZ).
3. Read the pdf guides for begineers by MOZ.( http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo)
Just download the pdf and go through it, then after another guide is also available there.
4. You can checkout the Matt Cutts (Google) -Video on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=matt+cutts+seo+tips).
Follow them regularly and be updated with the latest blogs and tutorials.
Regards!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Many SEO tools donot allow me to check my site with https?
Hello All, Many seo tools I am using in that few tools do not allow me to test my site with https but it force me to check with http and then give report. So my query is do these tools give accurate report with http same like https? Thanks!
Competitive Research | | wright3350 -
How can I track relevant websites my visitors are viewing?
I'm wanting to build a in-depth profile for my company's typical site visitor and I was wondering if there is anyway to view other websites that visitors are searching for online to get an idea of their hobbies/interests and how they spend their free time. I'm not sure if I'm asking the right questions in Google because the results are very broad and are more about reading analytics for your own company. Can anyone point me to a website or software that allows for this sort of thing?
Competitive Research | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
Traffic estimates for any website?
Google's Display Network Ad Planner used to be the best for this (although was often still way out), but the data for the sites I used to check has disappeared. Does anyone know any other sites that provide half-decent estimates of traffic? trafficestimate.com, Compete and Alexa are way off. I'd be interested in paid services too. Thanks. 🙂
Competitive Research | | Alex-Harford0 -
Ecommerce seo - competitors are using spammy links to rank HELP
After setting up SEO Moz and whilst waiting for it to crawl my site i have checked out my competitors who are ranking for the keywords i am going after. It appears from what i can see in OSE that they are ranking with back links from spammy looking sites and lots of exact match anchor text. I have tried to match a few links with what they have currently without getting myself into anything too spammy but i really don't want to follow how they have done it exactly. The niche i am in is pretty boring but the rewards are great but i am finding creating content and distributing it correctly difficult which is why i need some help. My site is roughly 9 months old and the product descriptions are hand written trying to give as much info as possible with a hint of personality so no cookie cutter back of the box descriptions. i have matched a few of the links from competitors which weren't too spammy and as relevant as i could get to my niche, i have also created articles for some article directories - all of which isn't really getting me very far and i am running out of ideas on how to create new content & the types of new content to help me get back links naturally. If any of you friendly guys could offer me some assistance in setting up a basic seo campaign which would help me target my keywords i would be very much in your debt
Competitive Research | | GarethEJones0 -
Would sharing the same IP address with competitors in the same market hurt SEO?
I work for the Chevy dealership in New York who is trying to rank against other Chevy dealerships in the same area. All the dealerships, including my client, are using the same Chevy endorsed CMS (Cobalt). I just noticed that all of these competitors, including my client, are using the SAME IP address. Would it be beneficial to SEO if we were to ditch the Cobalt platform and choose another one that gave us a unique IP address? Have any of you run into this before? Any help would be appreciated.
Competitive Research | | tjkirgin0 -
How to track competitor who uses another website on the url?
Hi everyone, The thing is pretty simple: I have a competitor who uses a different format of url, very similar to this: www.example.com - but he started to use a thing like this: example.mtv.com The problem is that every analysis that I make tell me something about mtv.com instead of the site I want. The url is redirected. Sorry about my english, but I think it is very clear. I want to know how to track something like this, because even in competitor analysis I'm getting info about the big site, and not the one I need. Thank you very much.
Competitive Research | | bluehelmet0 -
Best Traffic Estimation Tool
Hello, What is the best system/tool to estimate traffic to a site, something more accurate than Alexa rank. This is of course assuming that one does not have access to the site's Google Analytics data, Thanks, Carl
Competitive Research | | CarlLarson0 -
SEO Strategy Questions on an International Domain
I'm going to try not to get too wordy with my question. Any help that could be provided would be much appreciated! We recently purchased a Germany-based company. They were using two domains (possibly more) for their website. Domain1 and Domain2. I'm sure for duplicate content reasons, only Domain1 ranked well. We in the US wanted to use Domain2, as it contains the brand name and would add legitimacy to our website in the US. Problem is that they also wanted to use it in Germany. So we split it using GeoDNS. Any international traffic goes to their server. Any US/Canada traffic goes to ours. From what I've read, we in the US should have the advantage here in terms of getting our pages indexed on Google, because Google will crawl from the US. So to Google, it should be as if we've changed all of our URLs. The problem is that Google has not recognized these changes for our homepage and it has been about a month since I submitted a sitemap and changed our geo-targeting to the US in Webmaster tools. They've picked up other pages of ours, but the Title and Meta descriptions for the homepage are in German still. We also rank about 23rd for our own brand name. Bing and Yahoo have picked up the changes without issue and we rank 2nd for our brand name. My other issue is that the old distributor in the US (whom we have replaced) is ranking first for our brand name. I'm working on increasing our inbound links, but is there anything else I could be doing to jump ahead of them in the rankings? Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks!
Competitive Research | | KathleenLTG0