10 Best SEO Practices When Creating a Web Site

There are many SEO practices to follow when creating a site.  I have documented the top 10 best SEO practices that I see many beginner clients not doing.  Whether this is your first site or you create multiple sites this is a great checklist to go over while creating your site and for review before launch.No need to worry if you have already published your site and did not follow some things on this list.  Just make sure to do them now.  You will have many more steps to follow to bring your site to the top but this is a great start to some of the best SEO practices.

Keywords

Before adding content to your website make sure you have done research on your keywords.  Keyword analysis can make a huge impact when it comes to your rankings.  Use google keyword planner to make sure you are using impressionable keywords and keywords that are not too competitive for your geographical marketing interest.  Maybe focus on a niche to start with.

Speed

Speed is getting more and more important in search engine ranking algorithms and needs to be considered to abide by the best SEO practices.  Do things such as compressing images, HTML, CSS, JS and your database.  If using wordpress do research on your theme to make sure its properly coded taking speed into consideration.  If needed purchase a CDN solution.

Scalability

If you plan on growing your site in the future make sure you take scalability into consideration.  For ex. if you post a facebook icon on every page then change or delete your facebook site, all of your facebook links will be broken.  In this particular case if you used a scalable social media plug-in solution you could manage all of your social media links in one location. With a scalable solution you would only have to change the link url in one place and it would automatically update the links on all of your pages.

Social Media

Make sure to start to build your social media outlets either before you build your site or while you are building your site.  With social media quickly becoming a ranking factor method, make sure not to leave this multi million dollar market behind.  Some common social media outlets are facebook, twitter, pinterest, youtube and google plus.

Analytics

You will want to be able to follow your analytics right when you launch your site for proper tracking.  If you plan on using google analytics for your metric then make sure you have set this all up.  Some other metrics to think about including are google search console (google webmaster tools) and bing webmaster tools.

Optimization

The best SEO practices will always include compressed and optimized images, audio and videos.  Make sure that not only are your normal images compressed but also your thumbnail images.  If using wordpress than make sure all of your themes images are compressed.  A good plug-in to do this for you for free is ewww image optimizer for wordpress or use tiny png’s website to manually upload photos, compress them then download them.

Alt Tags

Image alt tags again goes to content.  Google needs content to know what your site is about and a great way that they find this out is by using alt tags in images.  Although this can be a little bit of extra work it is very important and will help tremendously in the long run with your search rankings.

Site Map

As soon as you are ready to publish your site make sure that you have a proper functioning site map and that you submit it to all the search engines.  Some common search engine submissions for site maps include google and bing.

Robots File

A robot file is placed to help search engines read your site.  The search engine sends a robot to your site and that robot reads the robot file and can get easy to read instructions on if it should follow your site or not and other things that search engines like to crawl and index your site.

Security

Security is very important.  Always make sure to do the research on the proper security techniques for the way you are building your site.  If you are handling credit cards or any sort of e-commerce its highly advised you obtain an ssl certificate for your site and do research on the types of security your host provides for you.

*Bonus* H1 Titles

Well what kind of Best SEO Practices article would this be without mentioning the use of proper titles.  Make sure to use H1, H2 and H3 titles properly.  Every page needs one header H1 tag at the top of the page and only one H1 tag. Your keyword for your page should be included in your H1 tag.  As for your H2 and H3 tags these need to be used as main points in a hierarchical order.

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