Before you purchase a url for your new business, there are several factors that you need to consider first. Picking a url at random and throwing up content is not the best way to generate web traffic when you want to create a new website. That method will not generate long-term organic traffic and in the long run won’t generate more sales for your business.
The Basics
So, what are the basics elements that every new business needs within their website?
Keyword Targeted URL
In a previously mentioned post, we talked about Keyword Siloing and why it is important to determine the topic of your website and how you are going to organize your content first. Once you have this established, along with a solid website architecture, you can use your targeted keywords to purchase a url as close to your targeted keyword as possible.
Measure, Measure, Measure!
As you might be guessing, there is a lot more to creating a great website for your business than just the content, as great as it may be. However, if you are not putting analytics tools to use, you are going to be missing out on how to optimize your site from day one. Many SEO veterans know that site optimization doesn’t end after a week or a month but is typically a constant process of monitoring and refining how users find and navigate through your site.
Having said that, you might be wondering what you can do from the start to get a jump on how to have a great site. This is going to be important for your website and business.
Monitor – Google Analytics
Before you even launch your site, the most basic thing you need to do is prepare to monitor your traffic. You can do this by incorporating Google Analytics into every page of your website. Remember, you need to know how people are finding your site and how they are navigating through it. This will allow you to identify popular content as well as content that is not appealing to your visitors.Ultimately, this information is going to help you to continue to upgrade your content through marketing or simply through rewriting posts and retain visitors and make sales.
Google Webmaster Tools
The next thing you want to do is setup webmaster tools. These programs give you data about your site from a search engine’s perspective and overtime will be invaluable as you optimize your site over time. You can never have too much information about site performance.
Check for Problems
Many new site owners often over look this, especially if they have someone create a professional website for them. You want to make sure that you check your website before you launch it. If everything isn’t working well, or if you had a bum developer, your site might be turning visitors away because of broken links and extremely slow page load times. To see how your site is doing, you can run a crawl simulation on your website, which is similar to what bots do when they are indexing your site.
There are free tools online that can do this for you. Some SEO savvy people recommend Xenu or Custom Crawl. You can find both free and paid tools out there. Overall, crawl tests are a must.
These are the most fundamental topics when creating a new website. Remember to monitor your users and check for problems. If you do this, you should be able to keep improving your visitor’s experience as you go.
