How To Kick Start A SEO Optimized Site. Launching a website is not an easy task. It requires months of planning, checking the design, development, testing, and content curation. It’s a lot of hard work for the team. Then you get to launch the new website. Though launching a website is cause for a celebration, some organizations fail to realize that launching a website is not the end of the project. It’s just the beginning of a new digital product. Digital teams should remain hands-on as it requires continuous monitoring and improving the new site after it goes live to meet user and business needs. 

This process of making regular improvements to the site refers to optimization. These tactics may be by a feature backlog or planned initiatives, or may be ad hoc or inspired by analytics, audits, and testing tools. Ultimately, optimization is a continuous endeavor using the given tool, its technology, and the teams that support it.

Here are a few tips that will help you draw a post-launch optimization strategy. 

How to Build a Website for Search Engine Optimization(SEO)

1. Page Layout And Formatting

The design and formatting of your page are crucial. The layout can be anywhere from text size to where you put links, content, images, and videos.

• A site that has too big or too little font will not make the users happy. It is essential to use a user-friendly font size and think about the color of both the text and the background.
• Using a font and background color that is hard to read will also frustrate users from interacting with your content. This means they could miss vital information or might exit the website altogether.
• Consider that putting content in some of the most looked at spots can ensure visitors get the most crucial information that might convince them to take action. Tools can help you decide what parts of your site are most clicked on and paid attention to by a user.
• Your URL should be an SEO-friendly structure; for Example, www.Example.com, instead of www.Example.com/?page_id=46.
• Direct your website to either www or the non-version, not both.
• Don’t put text in images because search engines cannot read it.
• Limit or abandon the use of flash moderation and iFrames.
• Pay attention to website loading speed. Having big images, too many CSS files, and HTTP requests can slow things down. 

2. Do Your Keyword Research

Do extensive research on keywords that you plan to use on the site. Keywords are the important factor used to determine SEO for a website. By understanding which keywords are best to use for your content, you will even give your site planning a direction.

Keyword research is beneficial to SEO and can also help with the planning process. Finding the correct keywords for your website is the most crucial task. You need to find out how people use search engines for you. 

Keywords help a search engine to decide what message a site is trying to tell and why it is essential and valuable to users. It is also helpful to do your keyword research to evaluate what people are already looking for and what the competition is like.

It is common that SEO wishes a keyword to be used about once per 100 words. This means if a page has about 200 words on it, you should use your keyword twice in unique ways. It is vital not to overuse keywords as search engines usually consider this for SEO rankings.

3. Take Time To Think And Plan Site Structure

The Planning of your site design or layout is just as important as the keywords, title tags, and content. Before any coding is finished, it is vital that the key features of the website are laid out. You can either do this by designing it out on paper or using an online software built for this purpose. 

By taking the time to plan out every link, button, and content that will go on each web page, you can ensure there are rarer errors when it comes to creating the site. It is identical to having a blueprint for constructing a house. Without a proper plan, you can’t just jump in and start the building process. By taking the time from the start to plan everything out, you are already on your way to gaining a higher SEO ranking.

4. Work On Your Meta Tags

Meta Tags are found in the HTML source code of a web page. They give information about the website/page and are scanned by search engine spiders. The fundamental meta tags are:

Title meta tag-  A title meta tag is an HTML code that defines the title of a web page. A web page’s title tag is displayed as part of the search snippet in a search engine results page.

Description meta tag- This tag provides a brief summary of a web page, not the whole website. A page’s meta description gives the user an idea of the content that exists within the page.  

Add metadata to images- You can do this with the < alt > tag and include keywords. 

5. Leverage Data & Experiment Regularly 

Optimization is not a digital fad anymore, it’s the best practice. The central idea behind optimization is testing, experimentation, and gradual improvement. Data is an organization’s greatest friend. There are free data collection tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, etc. They provide organizations with greater insight into how users are engaging with a website or digital product. These tools help you understand what content users are engaging with and visualize how the content is getting engagement. Tools like Optimizely give permission to teams to personalized content. A/B tests different variations of content or designs and promotes the best experience for the right audience at the right time. 

If teams know where and why site visitors fall off, then they can tailor the efforts to improve those specific experiences. This data can inform test scenarios and experiments to improve conversions or business outcomes. In a few cases, it can be as simple as moving the call to action (CTA) to a different place precisely higher up on a page.

Don’t forget to capture the current metrics to serve as a benchmark for any test or experiment. You’ll want a pre/post comparison to understand if any tweaks or tests have achieved the desired results. 

6. Test and Update Existing Content

Teams can spend hours crafting a perfect piece of content, publishing it, and then crickets. Whether it’s creating new or repurposing old, there are multiple ways to add great value to on-site content. They are:

• Check with a new title while marinating the keywords
• Break information into multiple sub-headings so that they are easy-to-read
• Add relevant keywords to the page that you’re trying to rank
• Give relevant, accurate information
• Add relevant images and videos 
• Add backlinks to credible sources
• Inject inbound links to relevant posts or pages
• Change the publish date for the updated content to a current date
• For transparency, add an editor’s note. 

Don’t change and update the URL for republishing. Search engines can penalize sites that post duplicate content and create a redirect that could lose some of the value in the original URL.

7. Optimize Site Content for Search Engines

‍Many confuse optimization with SEO. Though SEO plays an important role in deciding a website’s visibility and effectiveness at attracting users, at the end of the day it’s just one element of optimization. SEO is the collective effort to rank pages in the search engine results and also improve the quality and quantity of web traffic that is given to a page or site. Users use search to navigate the web, it’s critical to include SEO best practices and techniques in websites and new digital products and to monitor their performances.

Search engines both use and regularly update algorithms to determine what pages to show to a user based on their search. However, there are multiple core components that evaluate a page’s experience and rank position.

• Keywords/Content – Search engines analyze the content of a page against keywords that are relevant to a query. Though a site should have keywords, but be careful. The algorithm penalizes content saturated with keywords in an attempt to surface them higher in search results. Google is lenient to SEO gamesmanship. Try to incorporate keywords in the first paragraph. 
• Business Listings – Use Business Listings for search engine discoverability. These best practices are applicable across major search engines that include Google, Yelp, Facebook, Yellow Pages, Bing, etc. This helps to position business information in front of users who are searching for specific products or services.
• Links – Pages containing backlinks to other sites with quality content can better the position of your site’s content. It not only helps SEO, but adds credibility to your own content. 
• Page Structure – HTML acts as a blueprint for site content and can make a huge impact on the way search engines evaluate its relevance. Ensure the page’s HTML should have relevant keywords in the titles, proper header tags, Meta descriptions, alt tags, etc. 
• Mobile Experience – Almost half of the web traffic comes from mobile. Search engines try to surface relevant content that also has a positive mobile experience. Recently, Google Search switched to a mobile-first indexing approach for all new websites. 
• Page Speed – Users want answers to what they are searching for and want them fast. So if a page is slow to load, the search engine receives a signal not to serve that page to the users in the future.

Google Search Console is just one tool that can help teams to understand search traffic and performance; it improves search results based on Google’s recommendations and analyzes search queries for clicks, impressions, and overall position of the site content. 

8. Increase Page Load Speed

The average site visitor waits 1 second for a page to load before bouncing back to search results for another result, and it will never return again. When a site offers a poor experience with slow load times, users leave those sites. Search engines understand that a slow page leads to a bad experience for the users. 

Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool provides a free, quick analysis of a site’s mobile and desktop performance.

They rank the site based on their performance score.

PageSpeed Insights lists the opportunities to better page load times with detailed explanations and estimated saving after making the changes. 

9. Improve Mobile Usability

‍It’s a standard now that websites and digital products should be responsive to mobile devices. Mobile usability improvements can be made to enhance the mobile experience for users. In the last few years, search engines have tweaked algorithms to consider mobile experience for a page’s search result ranking. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tool to test the website’s mobile experience. It is like PageSpeed Insights. Google will provide further explanations on how to make adjustments when needed. Even if a site offers a positive result, there may be room for improvement.

10. Reduce Bounce Rates 

‍Bounce rate is the percentage of website traffic that leaves a website after viewing only one page. While it may sound like a bad thing, it is not always a bad thing. It can indicate many other things, in fact:

• The visitor was searching for a particular answer and found what they were searching for
• Analytics data is affected by spam or bot traffic
• The content is not possessing the answer the visitor was searching for
• The page gives a poor user experience.  

Analyze analytics tools to understand particular pages that may be receiving high bounce rates. You need to review live pages and assess content with the following examples in mind:

• Relevancy- Make sure language in ads and inbound marketing efforts align with the content you’re pointing them to.
• Usability – Ensure content is formatted correctly. It is legible and works as expected. 
• Engagement – Insert related content to the bottom of blog posts, link to other pages, and offer product recommendations so that users continue browsing.