5 SEO Musts When You Launch a New Website
When launching a new website for your business, there are a lot of things to consider. One of the main things is making sure that your new website is properly optimized for search engines so that your new site can be found by potential clients and customers.
1. 301 Redirects
If this isn’t your first website, you need to implement 301 redirects for any pages that existed on your old site that either don’t have a corresponding page on the new site, or changed URLs. These 301 redirects are the way to make sure that any old URLs that might be floating around still go to the correct place and you don’t lose potential traffic. 301 redirects repoint the page and let Google know that hey, this page used to be on this URL, but now you should look for the same (or very similar) content here on this new URL!
2. Add Title Tags & Meta Tags
Title tags are the content that shows up at the top of a tab when you are on the page, and the title that displays in search results (usually). This will most likely default to the page title, then the site URL. You want to make sure to get this updated to something that includes keywords and describes the content on the page and your business. For example, an optimized title tag for Crush Marketing would be “Digital Marketing Company in Northern Virginia” instead of “About Crush Marketing”. It’s also a good idea to include your location if you are a local business.
3. Optimize Your H1’s
When looking at the content on your page, make sure you have headlines that include keywords and direct answers to questions that potential clients or customers may have about your business. Using H1’s is a great way to let Google know what the most important content on your page is. It’s a good rule of thumb to make sure you have an H1 on every page.
4. Add Schema
Schema markup is a way to tell Google exactly what the content on your website means. Instead of just indexing the words on the page, you are telling Google (and other search engines) what those words mean by adding additional tags to the HTML of your web pages. These standardized tags tell the search engines “this text describes this specific place, person, video, event etc.” This helps search engines to more accurately understand your content and display it to users in a more optimized way.
5. Optimize for mobile
When you launch your website be sure to check and see what all of your pages look like in a mobile browser. Often words can get cut off, buttons are too small to click, or images can become distorted if your site isn’t optimized for mobile. You can also run a free mobile friendly test and see if Google detects any issues. At Crush Marketing, we build all of our websites with a mobile-first approach since about 50% of website traffic comes from mobile.
These are just five of many different tactics to get your new website optimized. If you need help optimizing your website, contact Crush Marketing today.