8 Most Important SEO Factors for a New Website
If you are starting up SEO for a new website, either by yourself for your website or for a client, you must consider 8 Most Important SEO Factors for a New Website.
SEO differs from industry to industry, and is a complicated thing. It consists of the analysis of site structure, its content, visual design, and analysis of keywords, etc.
Improper search engine optimization (SEO) can lead to that search engine blocking the site, and will not display it. Mostly it will be seen as pages crawled but not indexed.
With SEO Experience over the years, I, Salman Qadeer (SEO Consultant & SEO Expert) have prepared some tips to help you quickly understand the topic.
As I am running a Digital Marketing Company in Lahore and provide SEO Services, including Facebook Marketing Services and here I’ll explain the process I take in consideration before starting SEO, especially for a new website.
1. Page loading speed matters (Core Web Vitals)
Many believe that low page loading speed annoys users only. However, the consequences of slow loading are much more serious. Download speed has long been a factor in the ranking of sites.
Moreover, Google declares speed of loading on the mobile version of the site as among the major factor in the issuance of mobile search results.
And of course, your audience will also appreciate the reduced download time of the site.
If you want to improve the performance of the mobile site, Google has developed a tool named light house. It is 100% free and checks the speed of website. Moreover, it checks the time it takes to load its first byte as FCP, and the time it takes to load the largest visible object on first view of your website known as LCP.
It will check the download time of the page of a site on the 3G mobile Internet, evaluate the usability of the mobile version, and much more.
Make sure your website meets the following criteria:
2. Robots.txt files are case sensitive and should be placed in the main directory of the site (SEO Factor for Initial Promotion of the Website)
The robots.txt file is located in the root directory of the site and contains instructions for indexing it for search engine robots. Using robots.txt you can:
The file must have a name consisting entirely of lowercase characters (robots.txt) in order to be recognized. Search robots search robots.txt files in only one place: the main directory of the site. If search robots do not find these files in the main directory, they simply continue to scan further, assuming that there are no such files.
3. Google ignores the structure of the site map
A Sitemap (sitemap) is added to the root directory of the site and gives search engines information about which pages of the site should be indexed, which of them comes first of all, how often they are updated.
If the sitemap is in XML format, you can structure it as you like – the breakdown into categories and sections in the structure of the site does not affect how Google scans your site.
4. Google usually crawls first homepage
This is not mentioned directly, but observations show that Google finds the home page first. The exceptions are the pages to which a large number of links from other pages of your site lead.
TIP: Always link your important pages with anchor text on your Home Page.
5. Google evaluates internal and external links differently
Internal links include links on your site: in the menu and links to your articles on the pages of the site and everything that directs the visitor to the internal pages. External links are links that lead the visitor outside the site. A link to your content or a website from an external site has a different weight than a link from your website.
6. You can check your Crawl Budget in the Google Search Console
Your Crawl Budget is the number of pages that the search engine scans per unit of time. You can get an idea of what this indicator is for your site in the Search Console (Google search console) and try to increase it if necessary.
7. You can check how the Google mobile search robot “sees” the pages of a site.
Since Google began to prefer the mobile versions of the site when indexing. Optimizing the site for mobile has become an important task for webmasters. To check whether a specific page of your site is recognized as mobile friendly, you can use the Mobile Check Tool in Google Webmaster. And with the help of another tool – “Site Diagnostics” – you can check the entire site for mobile optimization.
Use the Google Chrome Dev Tools for Lighthouse Reports of Mobile to find specific pages on your site that have usability problems on mobile devices. You can also take a test on the convenience of the mobile version of the site.
8. You can add additional canonical URLs to the main domain
This will allow you to keep the weight of the old domain while you are using the new domain name in marketing materials and other sources. The Google Help detailed instructions on how to use the canonical URL, or to improve the rating of the same content as hosted on different pages.
Bonus TIP: Add Schema Mark Up
Google, Bing, Yandex, and all other search engines use an algorithm, and work on it accordingly. Schema Mark Up is a code which you can use to tell Google what the contents of your website are, and what it is about in a much more efficient way. Secondly, you will have extra free allotted space on Search results if it’s relevant, as that extra information shown results in better click through rate (CTR).