Best practices
SEO
Make sure your web site is discoverable by search engines.
Content
The most important part is your content. The text on your page should include what you would expect your users to search for.
Prioritize search friendly words and sentences in your page title, main (h1) header and text content.
But remember, a site that has interesting content often get links or references. Focus on writing information that has value for your visitors.
Technical
Writing semantic HTML also helps search engines understand your page.
Use heading tags correctly (<h1>
-<h6>
), add <title>
tag to header with search friendly content and add <meta name="description" content="...">
with a description (this is the text that shows up on the search result screen).
Also make sure that your site links between all pages so that a search engine can crawl all pages of your site.
Make sure it gets indexed
An important note, you can make a site non indexed (i.e search engined will ignore the site) by setting meta tag or adding a robots.txt file.
This might be important during development, but don't forget to make it indexable when set live.
Sitemap
To make sure Google can index your site more effective, you can add a sitemap.xml
file.
This file usually resides in the root of your site (https://www.itiden.se/sitemap.xml) but the important part is that it is referenced from your robots.txt (https://www.itiden.se/robots.txt) or linked to from Google Search Console.
Example robots.txt:
Sitemap: https://www.itiden.se/sitemap.xml
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a great tool to follow up on search terms being used to find your site. Make sure your register your site and that people that should follow up search results has access.
To do
The content of the page includes content you expect your users to search for.
The pages uses semantic HTML.
The pages can be indexed when put live.
The site has a sitemap that has been added to Google Search Console.
Access to Google Search Console has been provided to persons that should have access.