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 have created multiple locations, this is a great checklist to go over while developing 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 researched your keywords. Keyword analysis can make a huge impact when it comes to your rankings. Use the google keyword planner to ensure 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 increasingly important in search engine ranking algorithms and needs to be considered to abide by the best SEO practices. Do things like compressing images, HTML, CSS, JS, and your database. Using WordPress, research your theme to ensure it’s adequately coded, considering speed. If needed, purchase a CDN solution.

Scalability

If you plan on growing your site in the future, consider scalability. Forex. 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 case, if you used a scalable social media plug-in solution, you could manage all 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 build your social media outlets 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 standard 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. Other metrics to consider include the 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 your stock photos are compressed and your thumbnail images are. Using WordPress, ensure all of your theme’s images are compressed. An excellent plug-in to do this for you is Ewww image optimizer for WordPress or use tiny png’s website to upload photos, squeeze them, then download them manually.

Alt Tags

Image alt tags again go to content. Google needs content to know what your site is about, and a great way they find this out is by using alt tags in images. Although this can be a bit extra work, it is essential 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 you have a properly functioning site map and submit it to all the search engines. Some standard 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 paramount. Always make sure to research the proper security techniques for the way you are building your site. If you are handling credit cards or e-commerce, you should obtain an SSL certificate for your site and research the types of security your host provides.

*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 title. As for your H2 and H3 tags, these need to be used as central points in a hierarchical order.