SEO Foundations for a New Website

Search engine optimisation has a reputation for being mysterious. It is not. Most of the long-term results come from getting a short list of fundamentals right, and most of those are decided when the site is built.

Start with technical foundations. Search engines need to crawl and understand your site: a working robots.txt and sitemap, clean URLs, one clear H1 per page, descriptive titles and meta descriptions, and structured data (schema) that tells Google what each page is. These are invisible to visitors but decisive for ranking.

Next, speed and mobile. Google indexes the mobile version of your site first, and ranks faster sites higher. A site that is slow on a phone is a site that ranks below its competitors, regardless of content quality.

Then content that answers real questions. Ranking follows relevance: pages that genuinely answer what people search for, written in the language of your market. For a local business that means targeting local terms — "website laten maken in 's-Hertogenbosch" rather than just "web design".

If you serve more than one language, hreflang tags tell Google which version to show to whom, so your Dutch and English pages do not compete with each other. This is easy to get wrong and quietly damaging when it is.

Finally, a warning: avoid anyone selling "guaranteed number one rankings" or buying links. Search engines penalise manipulation. Honest, well-built sites win slowly and keep winning. We build the technical foundation into every project so your content has the best possible chance to rank.