Use SEO to Get Your New Site Off to a Good Start
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To judge from forum posts and other sources, getting indexed in Google – let alone on the first few pages – presents a major challenge for a new web site. I even know of at least one SEO who won’t touch new web sites. If you have a new web site, chin up; this article will offer you some tips to get you noticed in a good way by the major search engines.

If you’re building a brand-new business web site, SEO should not be an afterthought; you need to think about it right from the beginning, along with your site’s content. It starts with keyword research. You know what you want to offer, but do you know how your target audience thinks about it? Say you’re in the morbid business of selling coffins, and your market is all within a small tri-state area. Do your customers refer to them as “coffins” or “caskets”? Or do they use some other term? You get the idea.

Once you’ve done your keyword research, you’re ready to build your content around it. Keywords really should fall naturally, but they definitely need to be in the body of your content to be noticed by the search engines. That’s not the only place they need to be, of course, but I’ll get to the other areas in just a minute.

You’re probably thinking of two related aspects of your web site: content and structure. You don’t have to get particularly fancy about your site’s structure; there are a number of places online where you can get free templates. If you’re going to use a free template, however, you will need to make a few changes.

A template will make sure that your web site’s design looks the same on every page; unfortunately, one of the side effects of this is that it uses exactly the same title, description and meta tags on every page. This is not good for SEO purposes. Make sure you go into the HTML of your web pages and change those tags to reflect each page’s actual content. Try to limit your title tags to no longer than 68 characters (counting spaces as characters), and put your most important keywords first in the title tags.

Next: Going Live is Not a Rehearsal >>
 

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Comments On: Use SEO to Get Your New Site Off to a Good Start

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