SEO Checklist: Optimize Your Website Before it Goes Viral
Today Search Engine Optimization has become an important part of the website design and development process. Whether you are creating a business website or a personal website or may be a news website, but you must take care of the various SEO elements before your website goes live on the internet. Earlier, people use to do the SEO of the website once it is already launched, but nowadays as things are turning fast it become important for the website owners to get on the Google search from the very first day and in order to do this it is important to take care of various SEO elements even before website is launched.
Here, we are bringing you the top things required for the website before it goes live on the internet:
HTML Codes and Java Scripts:
HTML codes and Java scripts are two of the most important part of the website. These days many website use java scripts because it provides users a great experience on the website and also makes website easy to navigate. The use of Java script, and HTML codes should be done in a proportion that it should not affect the loading time of the website.
As a general rule, any website that takes more than 5 seconds to load on the browser is said to be the slow website and by the time website gets loaded on the browse, user probably switched to another website. This increases the bounce rate of the website and from SEO prospective bounce rate is a vital factor. Therefore, make sure that you have optimized all the HTML codes and Java scripts. Meta Tags: Meta Tags are the tags that are essential for the search engines to read and known about every page of the website. The entire search engine read these tags and shows them in the search results. If your website doesn’t have the Meta tags on may be Meta tags are not optimized then more likely your website should not be showing up in the top of the search results. There are two types of Meta tags 1) Meta Title Tag: This is the main heading tag which exits on the header of the website. The title tag of the website and its pages contains the website page title or heading. You may include some keywords in your title tag in order to make it more visible in the Search Results. Some people also include the brand name of their business or company in their title tags to promote their brand. 2) Meta Description Tag: like page title, page descriptions are also important for the search engines. The Metadescription tags are the tags that provide information about the page in a short description. The Metadescription should be short, simple and crisp. Please note that not only search engine but users also read page description there fore while writing the page descriptions keep this in mind and try to keep it simple. The ideal length of the page descriptions is the 160 characters. XML Sitemap: The XML Sitemap is another most important part of every website. There are two sitemaps, one is the HTML sitemap and other one is the XML Sitemap. The XML sitemap is specially created for the search engines. When a search engine crawler or a bot visits the website, it first crawl the XML sitemap and from there it goes to other pages of the website. The XML site map of the website contains the URL’s of the pages of the website in the form of coding. There are now various plugins and tools available through which XML sitemap could be easily created. An XML sitemap could contain up to 50,000 URL’s and up to 10MB of file size. Robots.txt file: This is another important external file on the website that must be checked before making website go live on the web. As the name suggest, Robots is basically a text file which is uploaded on the root folder of the website and it reads like this www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt . The objective of creating a Robots.txt file is to prohibit the search engine crawlers to crawl some specific pages, folders or files on the website. Sometimes, website owners don’t want search engine to crawl the encrypted pages or privacy pages of the website like account information pages, member’s login, or check out pages. The robots.txt file is also used to block search engine from crawling the 404 pages or duplicate pages on the website that could affect website’s visibility. The example codes which are used in the “robots.txt” file to block particular folders, files or pages are show below: User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /*?* Google Analytic Code: It is important for the website owners to track the visitors on the website since the very first day, therefore it is important to integrate the Google Analytic code on the website. This tracking code is generated through Google analytics and placed on every page of the website in order to track the users. Google Webmaster Verification Code: Google Webmaster or Google Search Console is a free of cost website optimization tool provided by Google, so that website owners or webmasters could improve crawl ability of their website in Google search. The Google Webmaster provides details of various major or minor technical issues on the website that could be affective website’s crawl ability. Some major issues could be find through Google webmaster are: • Crawl errors • Server errors • Duplicate title and descriptions • Mark up data
• Security and Privacy issues • Content related issues
• Search analytics • WWW and Non WWW issues • Sitemap issues So, considering the above factors while web designing & development of your website; will be beneficial to get an SEO optimized, Search engine friendly, branding & promotional website.