SEO Checklist for your new website

Depending upon your personal or business need you are all set to launch your new website and had already asked your web design company to send a quote for the same. Normally people get the website designed/developed first and then look for search engine marketing and SEO services for the website. However better and quick SEO results can be achieved if little care is given during design and development phase. Lots of companies claim to be providing SEO friendly design and development services and here is the checklist that you can perform for the same:

1. Website URL: Website URL plays an important role in branding of your business and is the key factor for repeat and direct visitors to your site. It’s suggested your website should contain keywords in the url but never go for a long website name that is hard to remember. Such URL can never help in your online branding and hence less repeat visitors. It’s always recommended that your website name should be short, simple and easy to remember.

2. Simple design: Design should be unique with limited use of flash and images. Humans are attracted to images and flash but search engine love the content so keep a balance between the two.

3. Resolve canonical issue: Its better if you take care of the canonical issue right fro the beginning. For search engines http://sitename.com, http://www.sitename.com http://sitename.com/index.html, http://www.sitename.com/index.html are different pages and it may cause duplicate content issues. This can be taken care by using 301 redirect to only one of the above mentioned urls for a website.

4. Unique content; Use only unique content written by professional content writer. Content should be free from any grammatical and spelling mistakes.

5. URL structure: Avoid using dynamic urls or if you cms or shopping cart causes to have dynamic urls generated you can use url rewriting for the same.

6. Sitemap: Create html, XML and text sitemap for your website and submit it to major search engines. Read our article “Using sitemap for big three G-Y-M” for more information on sitemaps.