The first step in search engine optimisation is to build your website properly. The basics start with coding. Whether you hire a developer to do the work or do it yourself, there are a few basic rules to keep in mind. We will try to summarise the most important ones in this article, in no particular order of importance or chronological order. If we are less familiar with the field and the concepts of sitemap or UX sound unfamiliar, we should leave the work to a competent person. However, they need instructions on what to look out for when building our site. These are presented here.
If the site is indexable, then the robots can start crawling the content on the site, so it is unnecessary to optimise the content while the site is not good from a search engine optimisation point of view.
Speed
We probably don’t need to explain how important it is to have a fast-loading page when a visitor clicks on our website. If nothing happens in a few seconds, they will go back to the search engine and most likely choose a competitor’s website. That’s why Google doesn’t like slow pages. So don’t make ours slow!
Optimised for mobile
In today’s world, a significant proportion of visitors come from a smartphone or tablet, so it makes a difference what kind of site they are on. Not only they, but Google is not happy if a website is not mobile-friendly, so it ranks them lower in the search results.
SSL
Browsers mark sites without SSL as insecure and Google prefers sites using the https protocol. If you allow credit card payments or personal information on your website, you should definitely use encryption, but with the above in mind, it should be used for all sites. In most cases it is available free of charge from web hosting providers, you just need to install it.
URL structure
Right from the start, plan the navigation within your site and be clear about what the url’s of your subpages should be! It is good if they contain the important keywords. If you change the URLs later, make sure to 301 them!
Redirects
301 redirects are necessary if, for example, you have permanently changed your URLs and want to let the search bots know about it. A 302 redirect also plays a similar role, but in this case, the SEO content of the previous page is not transferred, as it is only a temporary redirect, e.g. for a seasonal promotional landing page.
Page 404
Many people make the mistake of not setting up 404 pages, which appear when the page they are looking for cannot be found because it has been deleted or the wrong URL has been typed. We should set this, and it doesn’t hurt to redirect visitors from here, for example, with a link to the main page. In addition, we can customise it to fit in with the overall design of the site or be creative.
Sitemap
Creating a sitemap of the main URLs of your site will greatly help search engines to crawl your subpages as quickly as possible.
Canonical tag
To avoid duplications, you need to tell Google which link should be the primary link in case you have the same content on two or more pages. This can happen, among other things, if there is a filtering option on our site and the resulting results are in fact duplicate content, just on a different url. The inclusion of the canonical tag can help with this.
Robots.txt
Using robots.txt is very important for pages that you do not want to be indexed. This could include subpages that are still under development, or admin interfaces that you do not want Google to index.
It’s best to pay attention to these aspects while the site is being developed, rather than starting the SEO audit after development is complete and then spending extra time and money to correct the errors that could have been caught at the beginning.
Once this is done, we can then start to focus on the content and the other two areas, onsite SEO and offsite SEO. After all, it’s no use having a website that is well optimised for content if it’s slow or poorly displayed on mobile, and Google ranks it lower in search.