SEO at the stage of developing a new site: optimization and promotion from scratch

Let’s imagine that you plan to create a site. You clearly understand for what purpose it will be developed and what results should be expected. But the last question remains: how to ensure the promotion of the site from scratch? Let’s figure it out.

SEO at the site development stage: why is it important

Competent SEO in the initial stages will allow you to quickly occupy high positions after the launch of the site. When a site meets the requirements of search engines from the beginning, it receives the following benefits:

• positions and targeted search traffic will grow more quickly;
• saving time, because the need to spend resources on basic optimization will disappear;
• accelerated payback due to the rapid growth of positions.

Stages of work

Site optimization at the development stage is an individual task that may differ from project to project. But there are a number of basic steps needed to optimize a new site in any case.Competitor and niche SEO analysis for a new site begins with studying key topic queries and mapping them to the topics/services that will be featured on the site. When studying competitors and the niche, you should pay attention to:

1. Efficacy of search promotion in the chosen topic.
2. SEO coverage as a customer acquisition channel.
3. The level of technical optimization and its quality.
4. The specifics of the content and the mass of competing resources.
5. Audience activity in different seasons.
6. Key mistakes of competitors.

Collecting the semantic core

The semantic core collection is the process of collecting semantics and forming a list of search queries that users use most often. As a result of the formation of the semantic core, the SEO specialist receives a list of keywords that will be used for the following purposes:

• to optimize the site and form the structure of the site;
• new page creation;
• to evaluate the resource’s popularity and generate new ideas.

The promotion of a new site is also not complete without clustering of the semantic core — the division of keywords into groups. It will help choose the priority directions for further development of the site.

Formation of the structure of the site

The structure of the site is a set of all the landing pages of the site, placed in a certain order. The correct development of the site structure will help users navigate more easily and find the necessary information faster.In addition, a properly composed structure is one of the keys to successful search promotion, as it will help avoid the appearance of many navigation problems.

Development of page prototypes

Prototypes of site pages look like a sketch of the scheme of the future web resource. Site design will help the owner and developers of the resource:

• correctly arrange blocks and elements;
• visualize the concept;
• properly organize navigation;
• think through the points of user interaction with the resource.

Having prototypes will save time on site creation and reduce the number of future revisions.

Recommendations for internal optimization and content writing

Internal optimization is a whole set of tasks, which includes checking:

• the robot.txt file, designation of pages that should and should not be indexed;
• site maps (sitemap.xml);
• 404 errors or the presence of ghost pages;
• the existence of duplicate content;
• layout and its compliance with standards;
• server errors when working with user requests; adaptability of layout for different devices.

The internal optimization of the resource additionally includes other stages necessary for the successful development of the site, such as checking for broken links, installing analytics, etc.Optimizing textual content is no less important than internal optimization. After all, the content affects both the position of the site and behavioral factors. When creating technical tasks for writing texts, it is necessary to take into account:

1. Purpose, because each text must perform a certain task: inform, sell, etc.
2. The presence of keywords, since the text must correspond to the group of queries for which the page is optimized.
3. Technical requirements or so-called text verification criteria: uniqueness, wateriness, nausea, etc.

Text optimization is important for SEO promotion at the stage of site development, as it allows you to significantly save time and effort for further processing of content after launch.

Checking the correctness of work

The final stage is to check the correctness of the website and all its elements. An SEO audit will help here, which is easy to perform with the help of special tools for comprehensive analysis.

Conclusion

The cost of SEO promotion of a new site and its optimization from scratch will cost less than post-optimization of a similar scale. In addition, early execution of work will help squeeze all the potential out of the resource and get higher positions at the beginning of the launch.