Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an integral part of the digital marketing world. It is used by businesses and just about anyone with a website to rank higher on SERPs and increase traffic. SEO becomes an important part of your website marketing strategy even before your site is live. A pre-launch SEO checklist helps you start things off the right way.
By integrating an effective SEO strategy into your website launch plan, you won’t just be making your life easier down the road. But doing so will also help you convert customers and bring in revenue faster. Also check SEO Geek.
For your ease, we have listed down a few important SEO aspects a business should consider when launching a website. If you launch a website without considering the SEO aspect of it, it can become a lot harder to make changes. Once the website is built and is live, it can be difficult to make changes to things like site structure, UI, mobile design, and URL structure.
If you are updating an old site, launching a business, or in the process of building your business online, below mentioned are a few SEO aspects that you should consider when launching or revamping your website.
Page Titles
You need to have good page titles for all the web pages on your website. The search engines show up to the first 60 characters of your title on the search engine results page (SERP). It is also shown when you bookmark a site or in your visitor’s browser. Ensure that the title is a concise, clear, and transparent description of the content of a page. It should also contain the primary keyword of that page.
Sitemap
A sitemap is the map of all the pages that are on your website in an XML format. It allows businesses to speed up the indexing process on Google. Sign up to Google Search Console. Once you have created a sitemap for your website, download the map on Google Search. This ensures that the search engine can get a complete picture of what your website will look like and what pages it should index.
You can create your own sitemaps on a content management system like WordPress or xml-sitemaps.com. But these are both online tools, so make sure you have access to a reliable internet connection like Windstream Internet to use these tools. The high-speed internet connection and the reasonable Windstream Internet Prices make it a suitable connection for businesses.
Meta Tags
The SEO experts are divided on whether meta tags contribute to the ranking of a website. Most of the meta tags don’t hold that much significance anymore, but the meta description is extremely important. The meta description is a precise summary of what the content on a webpage is all about. As per Google, it should not exceed more than 160 characters, and each page of the website must have a meta description.
Page speed
As per multiple surveys, slow page speed is a major factor in increased bounce rates. The bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit a website but then leave it due to different factors. Over time, page speed has become an important SEO factor. Even Google has announced that it is now one of the most important ranking factors, which means a fast website will help you rank higher on SERPs.
Final Note
Most businesses and marketers only consider website design when launching or revamping a website. And while that is an important factor, it has little to no significance when it comes to driving traffic and generating leads.
To capture organic traffic, a business should have an effective SEO strategy in place before the website even goes live. The above-mentioned are just a few SEO aspects that you should take into account when integrating SEO into your website launch plan.
