SEO and new websites – A quick cheat sheet

Many new and excited business owners quickly post a website and ignore a beneficial search engine optimization plan. Many have never heard of SEO and what it can do for their websites. Many too just assume that their website will show up on the first page of Google immediately with no effort. We all know that this just isn’t the case. The truth is, all website owners both new and old should make efforts to improve the search engine friendliness of their websites right from the start.

When you keep SEO in mind right from the start with building a new website, you can really save yourself a lot of time and money. Needless to say too, you save yourself hours of time in reconstructing your website to be more search engine friendly after time goes by. Instead, it makes more sense to incorporate a good SEO plan right from the forefront of having your website.

Keep in mind some of the following when you initially create your website with SEO on the mind:

1. Choose a keyword enriched domain name.

The process of using beneficial SEO for your website should start when you purchase your domain name for the first time. Remember, just about any text that comes with your website, even in the form of your actual domain name, should be keyword focused. Ideally, if you can have your main keyword phrase in the domain name of your website, you are taking big steps with regards to SEO. Search engines place a lot of weight on keywords in the domain name. I believe that search engines give even more weight to the text in your domain name than they do the HTML title of your website!

2. Make the use of Flash secondary. Don’t make your entire site in flash

The use of Flash can make a website look “flashy,” but keep in mind that search engines have a tough time sifting through that code. Search engines cannot read entirely through the coding that Flash uses, thus making it hard for them to extrapolate meaningful textual code to index a particular website.

3. Make sure to create a sitemap.

I have seen first hand how many websites can greatly benefit from a sitemap. A sitemap is a useful page for your customers and for search engine bots and should always be a consideration of both old and new websites. Search engine bots actually seek out sitemaps on websites. Having a sitemap can make the job of finding all of your main links on your website a much easier job. They simply visit your sitemap page and index links accordingly. Remember, always keyword enrich the anchor text for all of your main links, especially on your sitemap. This is crucial and many times the sole reason that webmasters setup the sitemap. Many use a sitemap just to have a chance to get some great links to their website.

Another reason that a sitemap is a great tool is because search engines will sometimes view your sitemap as a separate authority site to your domain. I know, sounds strange that a page on your own domain becomes an “off page” authority figure for your website. It is indeed true though, so this alone should be enough to convince you to create and post a sitemap!

I will be going over more SEO and new website implementation in the coming days. For now though, if you are creating a new website, this should keep you busy until the new posts are published.