SEO Points to Consider Before Building Your Website

Business owners have been faced with the challenge of the modern way of advertising, and that’s digital marketing and SEO. One of the main features of this process is making a website. The marketing industry focuses on SEO and keywords, but also a well-built and stable website. If you’re faced with this challenge, you’re in the right place. This article will introduce you to the main SEO points to consider before building your website, including technical, strategic, and design points. Here’s everything you need to know about making your website SEO friendly and having a successful start online.

Know your strategy

Before building your website, one of the main things you need to determine is your strategy. This is a pretty wide point, but it can be narrowed to a couple of specific and important questions. Be sure to answer them before the website building, to be able to set your goals and reach them with a website that meets your business’ requirements.

Determine your target audience

In order to set your goals, you need to know your target audience. Do some research and find out everything about your target market. Many of your future decision will depend on the size of the market, and the profile of a potential customer. Explore their demographic, needs, offline and online behavior. Once you write all this information down, you will be ready to build an online presentation that will attract potential customers.

Know your competition

Having competition is a healthy challenge. There’s a lot you can learn from their good points and their mistakes, but also find answers about the target market. Websites you’ll be competing for a higher rank will give you answers to what you need to do better to have that place.

Decide the basics building your website

To make a stable base for your website and have an easy start, you need to make a couple of important decisions as the first key steps. That’s why one of the main points to consider before making your website are:

• using HTTP or HTTPS – most of the trustworthy businesses will use HTTPS for their website, as it is a safer option that’s loved by Google, and it proved to be a better choice for online payments.
• unique URL – discuss with your developer the unique URL that will be used to access every page on the website. More URLs compete with each other for the same ranking on Google, which is an unnecessary spill of ‘points’.
• language – after you decide the target audience, you’ll be able to decide the language of your website. Consider if you need a multi-lingual website, in case you’re going global.
• location – for a global market, you might need a multi-regional website, too. However, that’s not necessary if you’re focusing on local customers.
• number of pages – it’s important to know what are the pages that you need on your website. The easiest way to do this – look at your competitors and check the most common pages they included on their sites.

Create a unique brand

It is important that your customers recognize your brand easily. That’s why creating obvious branding is an important step in website building. Avoid general terms and generic phrases that will increase competition – be unique and recognizable.

Use a flat site structure

Compared to deep design, using flat site designs will make your website simple and easy to use. Visitors will be able to easily reach any page with just a couple of clicks, which improves customer experience. Also, flat-design is more SEO-friendly, as search engines will not have a hard time accessing your website.

Add an XML

XML protocols help crawlers get more contextual meaning about your website. Simply put, XML sitemaps are lists of all the URLs on a website, and serve as a roadmap to search engine crawlers. They provide more information about available content, which makes your website more accessible.

Forget about Flash

Many websites are indeed built using Adobe Flash, however, that shouldn’t be the case with you. First of all, it’s better to use HTML/CSS wherever it is possible, and not rely solely on Flash. Another, more important reason is that Flash is being discontinued in 2021. Luckily, HTML5 interactive content is replacing it. It’s a new, more efficient feature that has proved to be more efficient and functional for playback on websites.

Define images correctly

Most inexperienced SEO users often underestimate the power of images and the text that goes with them. When building your website, make sure you use images correctly from the start. This includes naming each image correctly – using a key phrase or another relevant term in the name. Furthermore, don’t forget about the alt tag – it should be short, descriptive, and relevant to your content. These steps give your content extra weight and improve the SEO of your website.

Invest in a blog

Whatever is the purpose of your website, adding a blog will ensure additional benefits and higher ranks. That’s why including a blog on the website is one of the main points to consider before making your website. By providing high-quality, relevant content, you increase the chances of link building, keep visitors longer on the website, and have the chance to target long-tail keywords. Invest time into creating regular, fresh content and keep your website ‘alive’.

Conclusion

There’s a lot to think about and consider before making your website.  You should know that building a website is a process, and constant maintenance is necessary to be successful and noticed by customers and Google. However, the key steps are in the beginning. This is when you create a solid base for future improvements and ensure and successful start.