10 SEO Items to Check-off for Your New Website

You’re about to wrap up work on your new website, and it feels great… for the most part. Sure, the design looks great, the calls-to-action are bold and beautiful, and the copy is incredibly engaging. So, what could be missing?

When you get to the end (or near the end) of your web design project, it’s important to assess the SEO situation.

While it’s easy to believe that a single SEO plugin is enough to get you started, that would be a mistake. There’s a lot more you could do – even before your site goes live – if you want your website truly optimized for search. It’s better to do the work now than find six months down the road that no one’s visiting your site because the right work wasn’t done upfront.

In order to truly maximize SEO, your website needs to be ready to meet the search engine’s high expectations straight out the gate with:

If you can take care of as much of that as possible before launch, your website will be well prepared to take on the challenge of beating the competition in search, starting on day one.

Now, let’s explore how you can optimize your new site for search.

Maximizing SEO When Setting Up a New Site

Don’t be intimidated by the steps here. Many of these we are already doing for you if you selected for us to set up your site; we simply wanted to include them here for good measure seeing as they’re an essential part of the SEO maximization process.

Step 1: Domain Check

If your site is quickly approaching launch, then you’ve most likely purchased a domain already. Make sure your domain is Mapped Correctly to your new website and ready to go live.

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Step 2: HTTPS Security

In Google’s eyes, the “insecure” website label no longer just belongs to hacked websites or ones with mixed content. Any website running on HTTP that accepts sensitive customer information is now insecure and will not rank well in search. When you ‘Map’ your domain to your bizProWeb site, an SSL Certificate will automatically be generated for your domain within a matter of hours and you’ll be all set.

Step 3: SEO Friendly Template

Performance is also a Key Factor in the new Google search algorithm. The leaner and faster a website is, the better it appears in the eyes of search bots. No worries here, each template created by bizProWeb is a performance machine.

Step 4: Keyword Research

Ideally, all keyword research for your site’s content and metadata was completed before any copy was written. Even if it wasn’t, there’s no time like the present to get this done. You can use tools like kwfinder and Answer the Public to identify which keywords work best for your site. Keywords/Key-Phrases should be relevant, memorable, and less competitive if you want to improve your chances of getting found for them.

Step 5: Page Optimization

Once you have your keywords selected, you’ll want to optimize all of your content around them. In other words, use the keywords enough where it’s easy for visitors and search engines to determine what each page is about. Typically, you’ll want to use one focus keyword per page. While it’s okay to infuse a few secondary keywords within there as well.

bizProWeb provides the SEO Tools you’ll need to optimize each page of your website.

Step 6: Image Assignment

Each page of your website should have at least one image on it. Once you’ve selected and uploaded your image, use the metadata fields to add ALT text (if you want the image to be found in search as well).

If you can tie your page’s focus keyword into the ALT tag, that’s even better. Then set a featured image for each page so that, when your content is shared on social media (a search ranking factor), it has an engaging image attached to it.

*Metadata such as 'ALT', 'Title' and 'Description' tags are available in the Media Manager section of your bizProWeb site dashboard.

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Step 7: Content Check

When your content’s loaded into each page and all the above optimization efforts are complete, do one more check of your content. The reason I say this is because marketing and SEO experts like Neil Patel believe that longer, more detailed page content leads to higher conversions and, consequently, an improved search rank.

Step 8: Link Internally

One of the best ways to demonstrate to search engines that your site has relevant and read-worthy content is by giving visitors a reason to visit multiple pages during their time on site. You can do this by creating a system of internal links that tie each page’s relevant subject matter to one another, or by driving visitors logically from their starting point, all the way to the end of the conversion funnel.

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Step 9: Link Externally

Another way to improve your reputation with search engines is by linking to high-authority websites from your content. While this won’t have an earth-shattering effect on your ranking, outgoing links to relevant and high-authority sources have shown to have somewhat of a positive effect.

Step 10: Image Optimization

As websites become more reliant on high-resolution and full-screen imagery, which are great for the user experience, you’ll need a way to get a handle on what they do to your loading speeds.

Re-sizing your images and properly naming them are the first step, the rest you can leave to bizProWeb’s robust Image Compression software that will super-optimize your images for speed and vibrancy.

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Wrapping-Up

Building a new website is both exhilarating and nerve-wracking. You’re excited to launch that baby and get marketing online, but you need to be sure you haven’t forgotten anything. Considering how important organic search traffic is to getting new visitors to your site, you shouldn’t save SEO for after launch. Make the necessary efforts to maximize SEO now.

SEO: 10 Items to Check-off for Your New Website

You’re about to wrap up work on your new website, and it feels great… for the most part. Sure, the design looks great, the calls-to-action are bold and beautiful, and the copy is incredibly engaging. So, what could be missing?