15 SEO Elements to Include While Developing a New Website

If you intend to use SEO on your new website, congrats! You’re already one step ahead! There are various SEO factors that should be considered while developing your website. Here are 15 SEO elements you should keep in mind, to help you catch up with your online competition.

1.  Get a Non-Competitive Domain Name

When brainstorming domain names for your new website, check out the competitiveness of those names. This is very similar to the competitiveness of keywords, except you’re stuck with your website’s domain name forever. You can use a free tool like Google’s Keyword Planner and make sure the name does not have a lot of competition. For example, a website with the domain name, “healthyfoods” would be very competitive and would have a harder time ranking than it would with a more unique name. Choose a creative and memorable domain name that won’t force you to compete with blog posts or large websites.

2. Be Strategic with URL’s

This is similar to the first point, but the difference is the part of the link after the top-level domain (.com, .org, etc.). Google seems to prefer clean and relatively short URL’s when ranking websites in search results. Make sure your webpages do not have overly complicated URL’s and you will be good to go!

3. Make Sure Your Website is High-Speed

Google takes the speed of websites and webpages into account when ranking search results. There are many different ways you can ensure your website will be fast when you are developing your website. Before becoming public with your website, you should double check your page speed by using Google’s free PageSpeed Insights Tool.

4. Have a Clean Website Design

Have you ever landed on a webpage that was just too cluttered and it made you click off immediately? Make sure that your website is not one of those when you are developing it. A clean and organized website is an indicator of quality to Google.

5. Include Pictures

The inclusion of pictures on a website is yet another indicator of quality to Google. They nicely break up the text on a page, and they also just simply look good. In addition to including pictures on your website, you should also optimize the alt text of the image. If you are using strategic keywords in your content, make sure you use those keywords in the alt text of your image. This will help to boost your website’s search result rankings, as it’s a bonus keyword entry.

6. Build Links on Your Website

If you have the chance to add a backlink to a high-quality website and especially to your own website, you should! This is an off-site SEO tactic and will help to boost your rankings.

7. Use the Pillar Content Tactics

Especially with your first few blog posts, you should be creating content that builds off of itself. We have an entire blog post that discusses pillar content because it can be challenging to grasp with just a few sentences.

8. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Mobile devices took up a whopping 52.2% of website traffic in 2018! This is exactly why you must make your website mobile-friendly when you are developing your website. Google has set an initiative to present search results that are mobile-friendly over those that are not (especially to searches made on mobile devices).

9. Include Social Sharing Buttons

When developing your website, add social sharing buttons, which help to build backlinks to your website. These buttons make it easy on your website visitors that share your website. You can add them anywhere you want on your website, but make sure they’re easy to find.

Are you enjoying this post? If so, be sure to subscribe for occasional email updates from our team!

 

10. Set Up Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that assists in analyzing data for your website. It also gives you some insight on your website visitors, so you should definitely take advantage of it. In addition to setting up your website on Google Analytics, you should also make sure that Google has crawled your website. This means that Google has looked at your website and indexed it, so it will show up in search results.

11. Use Google Search Console

Google seems to have a tool for anything a website owner may ever need. Google Search Console is another free tool which alerts you when there are issues on your website. These alerts will come in handy when you are in the process of developing your website.

12. Consider Starting a Blog

There are many, many reasons website owners should consider including a blog on their website. One important reason is that blogs are incredibly helpful with practicing SEO tactics. Blogs also provide more opportunities to rank in search results, as websites with blogs have 434% more indexed webpages than those that do not.

13. Lengthen Your Content

Without compromising the quality of your content, make sure it is Google’s preferred length. Do not stress out about making your webpages contain over 1,000 words if it doesn’t need to be, just make sure you answer your reader’s questions thoroughly.

14. Increase Website Visitors’ Dwell Time

Website visitor’s dwell time is heavily related to the length of your content. Based on some studies, content that took seven minutes to read kept readers engaged the most. When developing your website, consider what will make your website visitors stay around for a longer amount of time.

15. Use Headings and Subheadings

You should have headings and subheading on almost every single one of your webpages (even your “About” page). They break up the text for readers, and they show Google that your website is high-quality. Headings also contribute to the organized structure of a website, as mentioned in point #4.

Questions About Developing a New Website?

Once you have developed your new website and have the above SEO elements, make sure that you are taking steps to ensure that it is effective. Let us know if you have any question about how to use SEO to boost your performance on Google. You can contact us by filling out the form below, so we can set up a time to talk with you.