As search engines evolve to become the most trusted sources of information in the modern world, businesses and entrepreneurs trying to attract customers must learn to optimize their digital presence to stand out in these portals. In fact, search engine optimization or SEO has become one of the most powerful and effective business development practices in existence today.
Still, for a lot of website owners, even for those that are well-aware of the incredible power of SEO, optimizing their websites for search engines is often a secondary task, that happens much after they have implemented their major functionalities and after the website has been operational for a while. This is not advised, especially for a business looking to grow digitally.
The difference between building a search engine optimized website from scratch and SEO-optimizing an existing website is the same as an architect designing your ideal living spaces from the ground up, and making changes to your home after it has been built.
Of the numerous advantages to building a search engine optimized website from scratch, we explore a few below:
Lay a Better Foundation
Whether you’re building a house or a website, laying a strong foundation is of the utmost importance.
In website development, this means ensuring that you have a clearly defined website architecture, sitemap, optimized internal links and content, with appropriate header tags etc.
This ensures user-friendly interfaces and a better user experience, which results in better user behaviour, more time on page, repeated visits and bookmarking.
Reduced Sandboxing Period
Google puts all new websites under a filter known as Google Sandbox. This is a measure to prevent spam sites, especially those that incorporate competitive search phrases, from rising in search page rankings. Google will use this time to analyse your website’s content, its category, what it’s talking about, which pages are important etc. In some cases, this period can extend up to 6 months. But if a website is search engine optimized with a clearly defined structure, architecture, linking etc., Google can index the website easier, and therefore doesn’t need such a long time to analyse its effectiveness. In such cases, the sandboxing times can come down to two months.
Better Crawl Budget
Google allocates a certain crawl budget for every website.
The term “crawl budget” refers to the number of pages Google will crawl and index on your site on a single day.
This number can range from 5 to 5,000 or more. It depends on the number of requests per second that the Googlebot makes to your site and how optimized your website is for the bot.
This means that even if your new website has 1,000 pages, Google can index the whole thing in a day. But if it is marred by a lack of proper infrastructure and optimization, server errors, and other issues, the whole process can drag on for months.
Avoid the Need to Spam
For a lot of new websites, a major chunk of their search engine optimization strategy revolves around packing their content with every relevant keyword possible. But, a lot of times, this takes away from the quality of your content and might lead your audience to rate it as spam, which further brings down your rankings.
Enabling your website with SEO-friendly tools and infrastructure reduces the need to resort to such practices to build your audience during the initial phases of your business. It allows you to deliver quality content even while optimizing your website for search engines.
till, if you are a website owner and haven’t optimized your website yet, you need to worry about having missed your chance. While there are obvious advantages to optimizing your website for SEO as you’re building it, it is entirely possible to derive similar results even if you are trying to make changes after it’s been operational for some time, though the results might take a bit longer to achieve.
Whether you are looking to build a new website or trying to optimise an existing one, our extraordinary teams of digital super-specialists will be able to help you empower your business and its digital presence with the tools and capabilities needed to succeed in the 21st century. Reach out to us today.
GMI’s Research Team is a panel of knowledgeable experts from various fields such as digital marketing, social media, and web development, all united by a common goal—to educate. We enjoy exploring everything from the latest industry trends and emerging technologies to people and demographics, both in the UAE and beyond. Through our blog posts, we share valuable insights that help businesses and marketers stay informed and prepared for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
