Setting up an effective website for your business has grown from an optional gimmick to almost a complete necessity over the course of the past decade. Besides needing to look at the long term, you also have to look at the short term. Ask yourself this question: Is your website prepared to be the best it can be in terms of SEO, at launch?

Almost every single entrepreneur, business owner, or hobbyist will answer no if they’re being truthful. The world of SEO changes on a nearly daily basis and there are dozens of different things you have to investigate and ensure fits into the standards that keep you on the good boy list with Google and other search engines.

Luckily, there are a few things – okay, maybe more than a few ...

Websites have different goals. Ecommerce websites need their visitors to view and buy products. For offline businesses, the website could be a way of making the company profile known and displaying the portfolio of services. Websites could also be a means to generate leads by making users take a specific action such as making a call, filling out an online form, or signing up for a newsletter. Sometimes, brand building and publicity are the objectives of a website. Websites can also have short term goals like publicizing an event or popularizing a product. In both those cases, the focus would be on community building and the desired action would be getting more followers on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Whatever the ultimate objective, the common goal for all these websites is to get more traffic. Ranking high on search engines is one way to get that. This is where Search Engine Optimization ...