Will my new site be on page 1 of Google?

The short answer is NO. But we start you off on the front foot to achieve SEO success.

Search Engine Optimisation is a specialist service which we don’t offer at Rather Design. Like copywriting, this is a service for which we can connect you with one of our recommended partners. There are also things you can do to improve it yourself over time.
When building your website, we are very mindful of ‘SEO best practices’. There is a brilliant article by Squarespace that gives you the full picture here, and it’s relevant for Wordpress and Shopify sites, too.
In this post we’ll give you the low down.

WHAT WE DO TO OPTIMISE YOUR NEW SITE FOR SEARCH ENGINES.WE FOLLOW THE CHECKLIST BELOW.

✓ We add a site title - Even if you're using a logo you should add a site title, as the text may be Indexed by search engines. We recommend you keep the title under 60 characters and include one or more keywords.

✓ We add your location and business details - Your site has a better chance of appearing in searches for your area if Google and your customers can see your location. If you have a business with a physical location, we recommend you create a Contact page with your address and a map.

✓ We connect your social media - Setting up social sharing to link to your social media profiles.You can choose to push content as you publish it, and encourage people to share your pages.

✓ We add a browser icon - Your site's browser icon or favicon gives visibility to your site's brand. The icon may appear in search results, browser tabs, and elsewhere on the web.

✓ We add a social sharing image to your site - Social sharing images display on social media when you or someone else shares your site. They look great when you share a site with someone on your phone.

✓ The font system in any website has a hierachy that is pretty universal regardless of which platform you are on. It is set by your web designer.
i.e. H1 for headings. H2, H3 and H4 follow this is in style and reduce in style accordingly.
P1 or P is your paragraph style for body copy.
There are styles for hyperlinks, monospace, buttons and navigation.
We assign type styles in consideration of how site crawlers interpret and index your pages. For example, your H1 font should only be used for headlines, so the ‘robots’ know that this is the most important info on the page.

✓ We Create a custom 404 page - No one likes to hit a dead-end! A customised 404 Page with links to some of the popular or important areas of your site encourages visitors who encounter a broken link to stay on your site, rather than immediately going back to search results.

✓ We test your site for broken links before publishing but they may occur in the future if you change the site yourself, such as deleting a page.

✓ We Check URL slugs - It’s best to have URLs that reflect the content of the page not a bunch of ugly numbers and letters bunched together.

✓ We re-name and re-size the images and videos that you’ve given us to build the website with.
This way we reduce the risk of a slow-loading site which will be down-ranked by site crawlers.
We rename images with a conventions such as your-company-name-image-description.jpg, instead of the one your photographer gave it which is usually something like IMAGE-1234567890-EDITED-V2.JPG.

✓ We ensure SSL is enabled - Your SSL panel will be set to the Secure setting. Sites without SSL may be penalized.

✓ We create quality redirects - If we are bringing your old site over from another platform, we re-direct every old link to the new site so that you don’t get any dead links!

WHAT YOU CAN DO POST-LAUNCH AND INTO THE FUTURE

We don’t do this part for you, but we show you how in your training.

• Ensure each page on your site has a unique SEO description. The text should be short and easy to read (50-300 characters), describe the content of the page adn include keywords that are relevant to your business, including your location and the services you provide. You can also add SEO descriptions to individual blog posts, products, and events.

Please note, keywords are not like hashtags. You need to write organic content in full sentences and paragraphs. Listing keywords that are simply separated by commas is not going to impress a site crawler.

• Continue to follow the naming and sizing convention we have set for you when it comes to uploading images and video.

• Use your blog. This works the same way as point one. No one likes a really wordy website - it creates long scrolls. A blog is the best place to publish all the info and expertise you want to convey and search engines love it. So do your visitors. Case in point, this blog of ours is aimed at showcasing our projects in more detail and being a place to refer past and present clients for info on commonly asked questions. If you don’t have the time or passion for writing, use your blog to showcase galleries, projects and services like a showcase instead.

• Backlinks. Having the link to your website mentioned on other websites/blos is a power move in SEO. Offer to be interviewed or even guest-write someone else’s blog - someone with DA (Domain Authority) and watch things change! By pushing your own posts through to Pinterest creates backlinks on their site, too. Including linkd from your own Youtube or Vimeo channel in your posts does the same thing. Backlinks is the heading of a bigger conversation that we will explore in detail in another post.

• Investing in Ad dollars with Google and Facebook improves your ranking.
Work with an SEO expert. These options are expensive but the truth bomb to end this post is, you can pay your way to the top in the SEO game. It takes a bit of time but you can take that number one spot if you really want to.

We hope this has helped you get a better understanding of how SEO works.
For specialist SEO Services, we recommend Luke Thorn at WebRefresh.