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• CodeAspire
• Jan 12, 2021

7 SEO Mistakes to Avoid When Launching Your Website

Creating a new website or a new project you already have can be a very big project. It contains hundreds of creative, technical and strategic decisions that will affect the user experience and ultimately your ultimate success or failure. In addition to what visitors think about your site, it is also important to understand what the search engine is thin. How your website appears in the major search engines (mostly, Google) will affect its ranking. This is why every website should be designed with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind as the primary goal. While SEO methods continue to evolve, staying on top of this is essential to ensure the flow of traffic to your site and the conversion rates you are searching for. Some SEO practices are seeing more success in the long run than others. Knowing this, here are seven SEO mistakes you should avoid when launching a new site.

1. No Keyword Strategy

Since the whole point of SEO is for your website to be found through organic search by your target audience, it would be a mistake to build a site that does not have a well thought out keyword strategy. There are lots of tools to help you choose the right keywords for your industry. There are several examples:

1. Google Adwords Keyword Planner

2. Ahrefs etc

2. Lack of Clear Meta Titles

If the meta title for the home page of your website is "home page", then you have a problem. Your meta descriptions give your search engines and visitors an opportunity to tell them what they are going to find on your page. (This is also something you should do with total tags on images). Caption: Having a clear meta title will help increase click-through rates. Suppose you are a real estate broker for the residents of New Delhi. When your website appears on Google, it says the "home page" tells searchers who you are, and they are unlikely to give you a click. A better meta title, for example, "Top I.T Company in India | CodeAspire." You should also include keywords in the meta title to help search engines understand more about your page. For best performance in search engine result page try to keep meta title within 55 characters. You can use the tool word counter to calculate your characters along with space.

3. Slow Loading Pages

Generally, people lack patience, especially when they are looking for something on the Internet. If they have to wait more than a few seconds for the page to load, they will probably try to give it to someone else. Beyond affecting the quality of the user experience, one thing that many people fail to realize is that page load speed is now a ranking factor used by Google. In other words, if your page is slow to load, your ranking is going to suffer. Fast response and reliable web hosting are fundamental to your website. Your goal should be to keep your server response time (TFFB) below 200ms. Tools like WebPageTest, GTmetrix or Bitcatcha can give you an overview of your server response time.

4. Duplicate Content

A common SEO mistake is to inadvertently publish duplicate content on your site. Search engines have been known to punish sites that have duplicate content, and even those who swear they don't do so are violating the rules without realizing it. First of all, do not take content from other sites or publish spin content. It is lazy, and it does not work. In addition, many sites have duplicate URLs that are causing problems. For example, you might be showing your content in many places like this

https://www.codeaspire.in/service(main page) https://www.codeaspire.in/products/service

There are too many pages to serve the exact same thing, and this can confuse search engines. You can remove pages by removing it, redirecting duplicate versions with 301 redirects, or add a canonical tag to tell the search engine which is the preferred page.

If you wish to add a canonical tag, you should add a rel = canonical link from the canonical page to the canonical page. So, if we have chosen https://www.codeaspire.in/service as the canonical page, then we should see

Should add all other pages. If you are unsure whether to use 301 redirect or set a canonical, the answer is simple. You should always go for 301 redirects.

5. Redirects and Error Management

If you are redesigning a website or building a large site, you are finally going to run into issues with redirects and error codes. Whenever you make a change in a website, it is important that you tell the search engines where they can find new content redirects. If you do not do this, you will face errors, and your site ranking will suffer. Similarly, status or error codes are returned by your site to search engines and the codes that are used can affect your ranking. When you use a redirect, it must be 301, or a permanent redirect, which transfers all the "weight" of the prior page to the new one. A temporary, or 302 redirection, will not complete it. For WordPress users, you can always take the help of plugins. For others, you can also do it with .htaccess - this is the cleanest and search engine friendly way to redirect URLs.

6. Poor Linking Strategy

To get the best from your SEO, you must have a strong linking strategy from the beginning. This means that your site will have both internal and external links. Going overboard with this is likely to backfire, so link relevance is more important than volume. For both internal and external links, see sources that are as relevant as possible to the content you are posting. Use effective anchor text to tell search engines what links are used to keep them natural and varied each time.

7. Not Submitting a Sitemap

Each website should submit a sitemap to major search engines that provide a list of valid URLs and outline the site's structure. Some common mistakes are submitting an incorrect or incomplete sitemap to a search engine which can harm your ranking. Examples are those that have an older structure, do not have new redirects, or they do not use the correct protocol (HTTP vs. HTTPS).