Position your website SEO

Is your website ready? And now what? We summarize the basic steps you should follow to ensure your website is optimized for search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.)

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process in which your website is configured in such a way that search engines can easily find and understand it. To achieve this, it is very important to consider the following points:

The first step is to index your website in search engines. The idea is basically to notify Google and other search engines that your website is online and contains important information for users searching for related topics. For this, you must create a property in Google Search Console (in Bing Webmaster Tools for Bing) and upload your sitemap. The sitemap is a file that will indicate the structure of your website to search engines. Generally, the sitemap is located at an address on your website similar to this: www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Once you have completed the registration of your website and uploaded the respective sitemap, it is very important to also create a property in Google Analytics. To get the best performance from your website, you must constantly measure: the number of visits, the events performed on your website, the navigation flow, the audience, and all the data that will allow you to optimize your website’s performance. If you don’t measure, you’re blind, you don’t really know if your website fulfills the purpose for which it was created.

Now it’s time to check your website’s configuration. Create friendly links, that is, links that contain keywords related to their content. For example, if you have a company that sells steel products and one of its categories is steel tubes, an optimized link for that category could be: www.yourdomain.com/steel-tubes.

Many CMS platforms offer templates and when creating new pages or categories generate links like this: www.yourdomain.com/category-123. This is a clear example of a link that does not work correctly for search engines.

Note: Do not overuse keywords, putting too many keywords in the website’s links is counterproductive.

Working on the structure and content of the website is one of the key points to achieve good optimization. It should be noted that both Google and Bing and other search engines use Bots to analyze any website. That is why the website structure must be clear and hierarchical so that the Bots understand the content and classify it according to its relevance.

Website structures are defined with HTML tags. These tags determine the order and hierarchy of the content within the website.

<h1> Titles, main texts

<h2> Subtitles, secondary texts

<h3> Supports for texts, product or service titles

<p> Descriptions, explanatory content

<a> Call to actions, links

Therefore, they are not only useful for search engines to categorize our website, but also to facilitate reading for users.

A very common mistake is using multiple h1 tags on the same page.

Metadata is all the information that is not visible to the user on the website interface and yet is part of its structure. It is designed to provide relevant information to search engines. You can edit the following parameters.

Meta Titles: Page Titles, these are the titles that will be displayed in search results:

Meta Descriptions: General description of the page or tab. It is very important that it represents the content of each described page.

Keywords: Words or short phrases separated by commas that represent the most relevant content of your page. It should be noted that search engines no longer consider them as relevant for ranking in search results

Finally, it is necessary to verify that the website is adaptable to all types of devices (Responsive). Search engines like Google give a good rating to websites designed for all types of devices. Nowadays, not having a responsive website is the same as having nothing since more and more users are inclined to browse from mobile devices.

In addition, Google also considers loading speed to establish its Rankings. It is very important to work on the weight of the images (suggested format jpg quality 60%)

To measure the speed and performance of your website, you can use Google’s tool: Page Speed Insights. It will provide you with an analysis with all the errors and suggestions so you can optimize your website’s speed.