Many times we have a customer come to us looking to have their website search engine optimized. That’s great, right? Absolutely!
However, it often becomes problematic for our client’s budget when we look into the backend of their website and determine that the web designer they hire did not build the website with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind.
We wanted to take a minute to highlight some of the key things in the website development process that is essential for helping ensure a good foundation for SEO. If you’re looking to hire someone besides Uptick Marketing to design your next website, make sure that these things will be included in your redesign.
Note, the items below refer to the website development standpoint of search engine optimization – aka what should be done while building the website to ensure help with SEO.
5 Things Every Website Should Have for SEO
- Get HTTPS encryption. Google has made it abundantly clear that it prefer HTTPs encryption. Therefore, when investing in a new website design, require that your new site has HTTPS/SSL security.
- Turn on crawling of robots.txt. This may seem like a no brainer as this allows search engine robots to crawl your website (which is pretty much the only way you can rank in search results). However, you will be shocked at how many web development companies somehow leave out this key aspect of website development and launch.
- Redirect old URL. If you are changing the URL names or structure for your website, then it is essential that the old URLs are redirected to the new pages via a 301 redirect. This easy-to-do step goes a long way at helping to keep your previous page rankings intact, helping significantly with search engine optimization efforts.
- Remove duplicate content. Never launch your website with the same content on multiple pages of your website. Similarly, never use content from another website. Every page on your website should be unique with high-quality, relevant content. Launching a website without this criterion is never a good idea and can harm your “trust factor” with search engines.
- Use correct heading tags. Every single page should have an H1 and that H1 should be directly related to the title and keyword on that page. Other content headings on a page should be H2-H4. Remember to only use H5 – H6 for navigational headings.
Again, these are only five of the many things that all developers should keep in mind when building and launching a website as they are the foundation of proper search engine optimization.
Once these tactics are complete, a SEO specialist can take your optimization efforts to a new level with intentional and keyword rich meta titles, meta descriptions, headings, alt tags, and internal linking.
Need Help with Search Engine Optimization?
Is your website not showing up in search results? Do you need help optimizing the backend of your website to help get more traffic to your website? If so, Uptick Marketing can help!
Contact Uptick Marketing in Birmingham, Alabama and Destin, Florida today for a free website analysis and consultation meeting. Let us help you grow your business through the power of online marketing and advertising!
