How Do You Build a Website with SEO in Mind From the Start?

There are best practices for building a website with SEO in mind from the start. Here are our tips for how to do it.

Video Transcript

David: Okay, so Onawa, you’re building a new site.

Onawa: That’s correct. My company is building a new site. We want to do the SEO part right from the beginning. We have all the usual standard SEO going right now, but having looked at a site I used to manage, and they just replaced it. Well, it’s not indexable. So, I keep watching them like disappear from search results. It’s kind of like, I don’t know, and I know we’re not going to do that, but I want to make sure that I’m thinking about the things we’re going to do.

David: Yes.

Onawa: Because obviously they did not think of all the things, either. So, I know I’m going to do better than them.

David: Yes.

Onawa: Our site will be indexable. We’ll have all of our alt text and meta descriptions and keyword research. We’re good to go on that. Maybe the things that I could forget are what I want to make sure that I remember.

David: Great. I mean, this is the right way to ask it because so many times people think of SEO, they’re like title tags and descriptions, putting words on the page. But if the site is not readable or crawlable or indexable, the best Pulitzer Prize winning SEO keyword optimized content can’t do you a darn bit of good.

Onawa: Oh, and they also forgot to bring over like 10 years of blog posts.

David: Right. So that’s a huge common problem.

Onawa: I know we won’t do that either.

David: Oh, we don’t like those. We’re start over. I’m like, you’re going to lose a lot, even if they’re not all relevant. So, number one, this is where we remember the five parts of any SEO campaign. Right? One, Analytics. It’s no good to launch a website without analytics because you don’t know if it does anything, so have a plan. If you can move to Tag Manager, it’s a good opportunity for that. But have that plan in place. Also, don’t put analytics on the site until it’s launched. You don’t want analytics on your dev site.

Onawa: Yeah, I think we’re encountering some enthusiasm right now.

David: Right, right. That’s literally step one. No, step two, we’ll get to step one in a second. Step two is confirming analytics on the site once it’s launched. Step one we’ll get to in a second. Analytics is always the key start of everything. That’s why we’re really big on that here. Two is technical. Now, everybody’s got their own little thing that’s technical. Sometimes people say, “Oh, technical, that means speed.” Well, that’s a dimension of technical, but it’s really making sure Google can read your site. So, if we use a system like WordPress, we’ve got 95% of the technical stuff taken care of, off the bat. Sometimes we have to fight developers who say, “I want to build it in a Node framework because that’s what I’ve been studying, and it’d be cool.” Well, okay, if you’re going to do Node or Angular or React or any JavaScript framework, there are certain steps you have to take in addition. That’s why sites get de-indexed on launch, right? So, use an established CMS like WordPress. There’s a lot of politics going on with WordPress right now, but it’s still a really good platform to build a site on. Most of your stuff be taken care of. But within the technical, you have to worry about stuff like 404 errors and redirects. So, think about your Search Console page report and the error report where it’s going to show you things like, these are 404 pages, these are 500 errors, these are whatever. Think about those things and how you can mitigate that. So, for instance, having a plan to make sure if any URL changes that the redirects are in place. But it’s not just from this version to the latest version. You want to make sure redirects are in place for the previous version and the version before that and the version before that. You have to have a plan, so the redirects could go in. Now there are plugins that can do this on a WordPress site, but sometimes server-side redirects are a little easier to manage. So, have a plan in place for that, right? However, I will say that I’ve worked really hard in a lot of cases to not change a single URL on a site, so I can avoid a massive number of redirects. So, only under rare circumstances would I… And thankfully with a WordPress site, you’re changing the theme, but you’re not really changing the URLs. So, unless there’s a really good reason to change the URLs, don’t. That includes triple W, or not. Right? Whatever you’re using, if you want to keep what’s going on on your site, make sure all the URLs are exactly the same. Don’t forget that even the final slash at the end of the URL matters. If there’s one character difference, Google will de-index the page before it reindexes it later. And that will see your dip in site traffic until you grow. So, one of the things I say to all my clients is there will be a drop when we launch the new site. There’s going to be a drop. But if we do everything right, in a month or so, it takes a month, maybe two to recover. That’s as Google’s going through the whole site and saying, “Okay, well this page has changed. How does it now rank as opposed to the other millions of websites out there on the same topic?” So, during that time of reindex, you’ll have the old site still in the search results while the new site is there. So, things like redirect plans help mitigate that damage. Right? And expedite the dip. So, it’s a shorter dip, but there’s going to be a dip. Just set everybody’s expectation. But think about Search Console and the errors and figure out how you can mitigate those damages. Then we talk about content, right? That’s having a SEO blueprint, meaning a keyword topic unique to each page that’s not repeating the same keywords. So that way, we know this page is on this topic. This page is on this topic, right? Having a plan and having all our title tags written, and our meta descriptions written, and our content written.

Onawa: I think we’re doing good with that.

David: Good. I’d even have five blog posts queued up to launch on the week after the site launches. This does a couple things. Number one, the next day you launch your first new blog post. That gives Google a reason to come back to your site. The next day after that, you launch another blog post. That gives Google another reason to come back to your site. So, if you do five days or so of blog posts, you’re really giving Google an interest in your site because new stuff is producing, and that again can help mitigate this. Now, blogging is one of those things that we’ve talked a lot about. Then getting into a rhythm of blogging is good but use that opportunity. So, that’s the content part. Then once we do content, we think about link-building. That’s where I would start to do two things. Number one, find an opportunity to build a link to your site that’s new and never been built before. There are all kinds of documentation in Curious Ants about what makes a credible link. Don’t just send a press release out. Those don’t count. Don’t just post it on your Facebook page. I mean post on your Facebook page, right? That’s a great idea. But don’t think that’s a link. It’s not a link that counts for Google. Think about how you can get promoted in your local industry. Think about how you can submit your website to a website design award. Get an interview in the local newspaper or local small business journal, right? Get interviewed. Get a link to your site that’s fresh and new. Along with those links, and this is especially important if your URL changes, go back to your old links and make sure they are linking to the right place. That’s tedious and a real pain in the butt, but if you’ve moved your URLs from www, or vice versa, that’s the time to do it. As many of those you can do, the better. While you’re reviewing those, go through and find new opportunities. Okay, so they wrote about you five years ago. Maybe they’d like an update. You submitted in this business directory, but you can contribute a blog post to that directory, too. Now’s the time to do that. So, get those links into the fresh site and all this mitigates the damage of the reindexing. There is on the Curious Ants site available to everybody, the checklist, the Website Design Best Practices, which is what you give your designer developer to make sure that it’s built right. The last update was three months ago. I really keep that up to date. So, check it out, download it, make sure you read it. Make sure everybody who is involved reads it. There’s a lot of experience and a lot of tears behind that document of websites that went wrong. Every time I give a developer that document, they find some way to work around something I said, and they do it wrong and I have to go back and fix it. But that’s a great place to start. The second thing is the website launch checklist. This is what whenever the site launches, you need all hands on deck, and you need a team of people reviewing the site, because once it’s launched, the clock is ticking, and Google potentially could index an error. We want to catch the errors before Google can index it. It’s not going to index it that quick unless you’re a really high traffic site. So, you typically have some time to catch things and fix it before Google does. Otherwise, that dip just goes on for a long time. I like to make sure everybody has the launch checklist before launch. Everybody knows how we will be evaluating the launch. You’ll see stuff in the checklist that means there’s something you’ve got to do beforehand. There are some other tips in there, like every day set up an alert to tell you about the 404 errors, or if you need to add some more redirects that you missed, things like that. That’s all in the post launch checklist. That’s really huge. Again, a lot of tears behind that because of how many times I’ve launched sites and we screwed up. We were panicking a couple of times. I think the last website I helped launch was in December. And thank goodness it took 15 minutes after launch and we’re like, “Hey, they did it all right.” Everything’s great. Most of the time, that’s not how it works.

Onawa: Yeah, yeah.

David: The post launch checklist is designed to help. Review it before you launch.

Onawa: Yeah.

David: Right? And that brings me to the number one thing. When you launch the website, the first thing you check. Number two is analytics. Number one is that God forsaken checkbox in WordPress that says, do not index this site.

Onawa: No, we’ve been having an issue not with that, but with a similar thing where every time we go to launch, for some reason our robots.txt is set to not index.

David: It might be because of the way you’re copying from the dev server to the live server.

Onawa: It might. It didn’t used to be that way, but now it happens every time.

David: And that brings up a good point. Dev servers are indexable by Google.

Onawa: Yeah.

David: Especially on WordPress sites. Because there are things WordPress is doing to tell Google the site’s here. So, you can create a real duplicate content problem where Google goes, there are two copies of this site. So, remember, there’s one way to guarantee Google won’t index your site. It’s called a password. If you password protect your Website, Google cannot enter a password and index it. You can do it on the server side. I’ll do a server-side password and just enter it in and I can monkey all I want on the site, but Google can’t get to it. Then when you go, check the robots.txt, and make sure you uncheck that box. I’ve made so much money from website audits where they forgot to uncheck that box. I have a buddy who launched a website, and it wasn’t until three months later they realized he forgot to uncheck that box.

Onawa: Oh no. I mean it, it’s bad. It’s the first thing I check because it’s happened before to me intentionally in some cases. So, I do want to ask. We have an enthusiastic intern who is adding Site Kit to the dev sites. I was like, we shouldn’t do that.

David: No.

Onawa: If I say David says we shouldn’t do that, that will make it better.

David: There you go. Use it. So, I think I told Tricia this, and I’ll tell you, I am moving away from recommending Site Kit.

Onawa: Okay. We didn’t use it. I would just add the code.

David: The best case is you can manually… There is a plugin called the Fluent Snippets plugin.

Onawa: Yeah.

David: That is a plugin that allows you to add code without monkeying with the theme.

Onawa: Our theme has spots for the header and body.

David: Right. But remember, there are two places you have to add Tag Manager.

Onawa: Yeah, the head and body.

David: Head and body. Not just the head. So just make sure you’re adding it per the directions in Tag Manager or analytics. I would recommend using Tag Manager. But yes, do what you can. And that’s why the Fluid Snippets plugin is a good solution because then if the theme gets updated, the analytics doesn’t get overwritten, which is a really common problem.

Onawa: Yeah.

David: If you’re not using a daughter theme, for instance. Or let’s say your page builder as it’s a thing, usually that works, too. But double check that and make sure it’s adding it in both places.

Onawa: Yeah.

David: Oh, and also make sure you, an overzealous intern, didn’t add it in all the places, and you’re firing 17 versions of it. It’s a great way to increase your traffic.

Onawa: Sure.

David: So yeah, those are some other little tips and if they aren’t in the guidelines and checklist, then tell me, and I will update them. But go to Curious Ants and use the search bar to search Website Design Guidelines and Website Launch Checklist and you can download those to help you with the launch. It tells you what you’re going to be looking at, what success looks like. Tools that help are Screaming Frog. You know that I’m a huge fan of Screaming Frog. Crawling your site with Screaming Frog is a great way, and a scalable way, to check every page of your site for weirdness. That’s one of the things I think on the post launch checklist. I know not everybody has Screaming Frog. It’s a worthwhile investment. If you’re going to pay for one tool, that’s the one to pay for, especially if you’re a developer. But that should get you in the right direction.

Onawa: Yeah, I know we strive to do best practices for SEO, but there are a lot of people involved. too.

David: That’s the challenge. So, someone has to be ultimately responsible for the launch. Sometimes clients hire me to be that person, but any of you could do this with these checklists, because they are not designed to necessarily be done by a developer, you just have to know what to check. Then you can tell the developer, “Hey, this is broken. I don’t know what to do to fix it, but you better fix it.” Right? Ideally what I do is ask my clients before we launch a website to get access to the dev server a week before launch and do my own little review. Screaming Frog should be able to work on the dev server with the password and then I can catch any problems before launch. Then, literally the minute the launch happens is when everybody’s reviewing the site, checking for broken links, checking for content. Are there any weird things that we’re not expecting any widgets broken, did we forget to add the form right? With analytics on every page of the site, these are the things that everybody should be checking because in a way you want to almost manually check every page. That’s where Screaming Frog can be really helpful because it can crawl the whole site.

Onawa: Yeah, yeah.

David: It’ll tell you if the analytics code is on every site. Great. Those guidelines should help you. But I mean, we all know SEO isn’t one and done. Right? So that means now someone has to watch the Search Console every week.

Onawa: Yeah.

David: Watch Bing Webmaster tools every week, set up the weekly Google Analytics report to make sure there is a troubleshooting report, make sure there are no problems, like those kinds of things. This is your opportunity to start on the right foot, because when it launches, there are going to be errors. The best developers make mistakes. But it’ll be okay, we just have to not panic, and be as prepared as possible. Cool?

Onawa: Yep, great.