Top 9 SEO Things to Consider When Creating a New Website

SEOs are usually brought in to work on a website after it has already been built. Sometimes they are asked to help long after it was created, and depending on the status of the website, which is more difficult. Therefore, when creating a new website, the best idea would be to get SEO help from the beginning. However, if that is not possible, here are 9 important SEO things you must consider when building a new website.

1) Simple Code
There are endless ways to get any results with HTML and CSS. Therefore, you must have a great coded site that will keep the layout simple without any unnecessary code. It is important to keep the code simple because:

• Simple code is more effective in different browsers.
• Code bloat means slower loading times from bigger files.
• More code means more of a chance for errors which leads to more of a chance of crawling issues.
• Simple code is easier to edit when you want to update your site.

However, it can be hard to tell if your code is bloated or not, so it is recommended that you talk to your developer.

2) Blogging
Blogging has become a huge part to the success of many businesses. It is pretty crucial to have one so if you are creating a new website, you should consider using a CMS that includes an integrated blog.
Having your blog incorporated into your website is better for the reader and your company. Having it integrated means:

• Being on the same domain
• Uses the same voice and personality
• The same look and feel

3) Consistency
A common problem with websites is that all the content is style individually which often creates extra bloated bits of code that were thrown in by the editor. It not only adds code bloat, but it has a negative influence on the website. Therefore, the content you add should have little style coded in and all style should then be coded into the main style sheet.
If you make sure your content does not have too much styles:

• It will make changing the style in the future easier
• All of your content will be style consistently
• There will be less chances of things looking bad or breaking

4) Content
A huge importance of SEO is the content so it is important that it is relevant and helpful. Therefore, having a blog is important but you can put your content in:

• Product description pages.
• Your home page
• Landing pages.
• Category pages.
• Information pages.

In order to have a well organized website, you must plan ahead and consider how you are going to use your content. For example, you should give every product a short description, main description, and key points if you have an e-commerce page.

5) Site Speed
Speed is a key component of user experience, which leads to the success or failure of a website. That being said, speed is very important. The faster the site, the better. You can make your website fast when building it by:

• Choosing a host in the relevant country.
• Avoiding code bloat & keeping it simple.
• Minimizing HTML, CSS, & JS files.
• Avoiding images and, where possible, using CSS3 to get the same effect.
• Using database caching to make the server response times faster.
• Also, use Google’s page speed tool to find other helpful tips

6) Responsive Design
Mobile is becoming increasingly popular so it is very important to have a responsive mobile design for your site. Actually, Google often favors the sites that have responsive designs for searches on the mobile devices. The best way to make a simple responsive site is to use a framework like Bootstrap. Frameworks will help give you the tools to build simple responsive HTML layouts. After the layout is created, convert the HTML into a theme for your CMS.

7) Navigation
Navigation also plays a major role in the experience of the users and success rate of your site. Overall, make sure that you design your site & mobile layouts as simple and as easy to use as possible. When building your site make sure you consider these navigation tips:

• List all of the pages/categories you need.
• Highlighting which pages/areas are most important.
• Decide which pages need to be available & from where.
• Design your main navigation accordingly.
• Design the sub-navigation for the categories & etc.

8)  Simple SEO Controls
There are a lot of very simple SEO tasks you must do everyday. The hardest part, however, is remembering to set aside time to do it all. Some of the simplest things most people forget to do is:

• Writing a carefully crafted page title for new blog posts.
• Writing descriptive meta descriptions.
• Forgetting to add an alt tag to images.
• Including relevant links within content

These may not really be related to building a website, however, adding these small bits of SEO is a really good idea.

9) Plan Your Marketing Now
One major mistake that most business owners are making is failing to create a well-organized marketing plan before their site is even built. It is important to plan ahead of time how you will market your site to the public and draw them to your page. Start your plan by asking:

• If you plan to do SEO, all of the points above will help.
• If you want to use PPC, consider what landing pages you will need.
• What sites exist where you can find potential customers?
• What content are these customers looking for?
• How can you make your site more attractive to the owners of those sites?

Even though your plans will change over time, as do everyone’s, it is still important to have a starting point by planning ahead.