When creating a site, whether it be on Webflow, Shopify, or a custom-coded Web3 one like what we do at CrossChain, you still have to keep SEO in mind. One of the main reasons for writing blogs and connecting them to the main domain is because it increases the likelihood that someone will click on a blog and make their way back to your product/service.
This is great in theory, but what do we actually have to do?
When you create titles, divs, headers, etc, you are building information for Google's crawlers to parse and index. The direct text you put on your site is translatable into SEO search results for a consumer. When someone searches for a specific topic, assuming that it is relevant to what your website/product/service has to offer, you want to have as similar/accurate of information as possible to their search query. This means that you have a better chance of ranking when they search for that specific topic.
In the context of engineering, this means that you need to accurate. When researching a cabinet, you can include color, size, and make. However, for engineering, the more accurate and long-tailed the search, the better. Just think about it like searching for a StackOverflow answer- the more accurate the Google search, the faster you'll find the answer. Like including computer, OS, package version, language used, functions, etc.
To check this, think about your product or service, then use SemRush to view top SEO searches related to your product/service. Ideally, you have a bunch of phrases that you would search if you were your target consumer.
As an aside, marketing is SUPER important and overlooked by almost every engineer I have met. The way that you message your product/service translates into more sales than you can imagine. Just because you have a superior product/service does not mean people will come. You need to expect that they want, and work backwards to figure out how they would.
So you've coded/no-coded your website, you've selected the phrasing that will rank well with your customer's searches. Now, when you connect your server to the domain, you need to add SSL, set up an email, and any other security procedures to protect against XSS attacks and SQL injections. But, we already knew that as web developers.
What we need to do now is think about marketing. How are we going to track user engagement, if the customers are converting, and where are they going on the site? We'll need a suite of tools to measure this, like Google Analytics (discussed below).
Before that, we need to verify our domain through the Google Search Console. Follow this video do so. This gives your email/Google account admin access to the domain- meaning you can track information, make modifications, and track analytics- which we'll discuss next.
When creating a site, you need data. For any endeavor, the most important feedback is truth, which is easier than ever to retrieve given the amount of tracking and tools available for it. Here is a simple video for it. On here, you'll want to track users that bounce from your page and other statistics related to stickiness. A great resource for this is connecting your site to Ahrefs and analyzing your user traffic and the actual performance/health of your website. If you are product or service focused, you can use Heap for tracking conversions (people landing on your site and eventually purchasing).
And that's it! Those are the very basics of getting your site set up for SEO :)
