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SEO Mistakes For a New Site

Article Overview

Before your website goes live, it is important that you follow some really important SEO rules, otherwise, your rankings will either go down OR you won’t rank at all. Following are some SEO mistakes people and businesses make when they build a new website.

Are you going to get a new website built for your business then the following are some fundamental SEO mistakes you should avoid at all costs.

1. You Need Time For An SEO review and Audit.

Depending on the size of the website, you need around 1 to 2 days to go over the whole website and prepare it for launch if there is an SEO perspective. You can’t expect to make a site live and have it SEO ready that day. It’s like having a painter, paint your shop on the day it opens – it’s just not going to happen. Time and necessary preparation is needed if the website is going to be Google compliant and adhere to all the strict SEO requirements. Rushing through your SEO checklist is a sure way to miss out on things, which will affect your rankings once your new website has been indexed.

Ideally, you should be working with your web developer from the outset to make sure that they are following SEO best practices. Work carried out in hindsight is a lot harder to do than at the start of your project.

2. Check The Web Developers CMS

I find that many web development companies like to put websites on their own CMS or content management systems platform – they do this so they can basically charge a monthly fee for this service – which is a total rip off and something that is not needed when there are so many open source free CMS platforms on the market like WordPress.

The SEO issue here is that many CMS platforms may work well on the surface, but underneath in the back end, they are an SEO nightmare. I have seen this so many times before, where people come to me wanting to rank their website and we have to ditch their CMS and start from the beginning.

These custom-built CMS platforms don’t allow for basic SEO essentials like H1 headers, titles, descriptions, meta tags etc – the list goes on and on. Yes, they may work well for basic brochure style websites, whose owners are not concerned about SEO, but if you want a page 1 or even page 2 ranking, you can forget about it. Also with the explosion of DIY websites, you have to be careful of their SEO impacts as many of these sites like WIX and Squarespace have lots of SEO limitations.

3. Thinking About the Price Too Much

People call me all the time and say how much for SEO and getting their website ranked. As soon as I hear this I turn off and steer them to a cheaper SEO supplier. In this game, there is only 1 way to do things and that is through a well-strategised SEO campaign by a company that knows its stuff. Too many businesses will go with the cheapest option on the market and therein lies a massive problem; they won’t get their website ranked – cheap n nasty companies offer their search engine services because they cut corners and in most cases will take your money and do no work for you.

Also read: Mistakes Most Businesses Make When Choosing an SEO agency

Basically, if you want to get the business via Google, then you have to pay for this service. Depending on the keywords you are after this can cost a lot, but after all it’s your business and you want to do the right thing for it. Shopping around and tyre kicking for the lowest price will result in three things:

  1. you won’t get your new website ranked
  2. you may end up getting your website penalised through dodgy SEO practices.
  3. you might end up in a lengthy 12-month contract that you can’t escape

Conclusion

For a new website to rank on Google you do have to take into account many of Google’s algorithmic factors. The above are just some minor points to look out for when launching a new site. Getting to page 1 of Google for competitive keywords is highly challenging and one that needs mapping and planning from the outset, which is why you need the expertise of a web design agency like us at Hopping Mad Designs. Get your SEO right from the beginning will yield huge dividends once the site gets indexed by Google where you’ll start to see decent ranking for long-tail keywords in a couple of months.

 

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