Must Have SEO Basics for a New Website

Basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not just fundamental; it's absolutely essential for any new website. Mastering the must-have SEO basics for a new website will strategically position your site to be discovered precisely when people are searching for your products or services. This article provides critical SEO basics for a new website that will benefit web designers and developers aiming to please Google, Bing, and other search engines, ultimately driving valuable visitors to your site.

Before you even begin adding content, conducting thorough keyword research is a must-have SEO basic for a new website. This process helps you identify the exact words and phrases your target audience uses when searching for what you offer. For instance, if you offer digital marketing services, researching keywords like "best SEO strategies" or "local business online advertising" will guide your content creation, ensuring your pages are built around what potential clients are actually searching for.

Domain Canonicalization

A crucial SEO basic for a new website is addressing domain canonicalization. Try entering both the non-www and www versions of your site into your URL bar (e.g., http://yourweb.com and http://www.yourweb.com). If both versions load independently, you have a canonicalization issue. The solution is simple: implement a 301 redirect from the version with fewer backlinks to the one with more. This tells search engines which is the preferred version of your site, consolidating its authority and preventing duplicate content issues.

Title and Meta Description Optimization

Fixing duplicate titles and meta descriptions is another must-have SEO basic for a new website. You can achieve this using programming techniques to dynamically pull titles and descriptions from your content, or you can update them manually for precision. Remember these key guidelines:

• Maximum length for Title: 66 characters.
• Maximum length for Description: Ideally 120 characters, with a maximum of 160 characters.

For example, a well-optimized title for a marketing blog might look like this:

SEO Blog | SEO Tips | Internet Marketing Blog and Tips | Your Web

Another common issue to address, especially if your site uses pagination, is to ensure consistent and SEO-friendly naming conventions. For instance, when dealing with paginated pages, use a dash (-) instead of a pipe line (|) before the page number in the title. The pipe symbol should generally be reserved for separating distinct keywords or sections within the main title.

Incorrect:

SEO Blog | SEO Tips | Internet Marketing Blog and Tips | Your Web | Page 10

Correct:

SEO Blog | SEO Tips | Internet Marketing Blog and Tips | Your Web - Page 10

Googlebot and Robots Control

Understanding Googlebot and how to control it is a fundamental SEO basic for a new website. Google uses a web crawler called Googlebot to gather information about your website. For your site to appear in search engine results, Googlebot (and other crawlers) must be able to "crawl" it effectively. While many webmasters use robots.txt files for controlling crawling, an alternative is to use the index, follow meta tag. This directive tells Googlebot to both index the page and follow all links on it, ensuring your site's files and content are detected.

Optimizing Images with File Names and Alt Text

An often-overlooked but vital SEO basic for a new website involves optimizing your images. Make sure you use descriptive file names and alt tags when you upload images. Alt tags (alternative text) provide a textual description of an image, which search engines can crawl and understand. By doing this, each image you upload contributes valuable SEO benefit, helping your site rank for relevant image searches and improving accessibility. For example, instead of naming a file chart_1.png, a better name for an SEO-related image would be seo-keyword-research-chart.png. Likewise, its alt tag should be descriptive, such as alt="Chart illustrating effective keyword research process for SEO."

Implementing these must-have SEO basics for a new website requires a little effort and a shift in how you approach your site's content, but the payoff in terms of visibility and traffic is well worth it. What other aspects of SEO are you curious about for your new website?