You wanted to set up your business, so you registered your domain name, installed WordPress and got a reliable WordPress hosting provider. You might have even looked into reseller hosting so you could make some extra income on your website. The next step is to make sure that your site is properly set up for marketing, particularly SEO. So how do you go about making sure that your new site is set up to succeed with SEO? The first steps you take can save you hours of work and help you reach your goals faster. Here are the top SEO tips to apply to a new website.
Tip #1: Research Your Keywords and Structure Pages Based on Them
In order to build out your site, you have to know what pages you’re going to need. This involves you using the Google Keyword Planner tool (available with an Adwords account) to come up with keywords that you want to target. Once you figure out your keywords, you’ll need to structure pages based on them.
For example, if you’re selling women’s bags, you’ll want to create categories like daytime, evening, leather, stitched, etc. You’ll then want to put very targeted pages from the keywords you’ve researched under those categories. Pages for chic tote bags, cross body, day clutch can go in the daytime bags category and weekend bags, straw bags can go in the casual category in this example.
Tip #2: Optimize Each Page Properly
Each page will need to be properly optimized for a target keyword if you want it to rank in the search engines. Start with the title tag. You want to use a title that features your keyword prominently, is short, gets to the point and is impactful. The meta description is what describes what the page is about. You can use this to expand on your title and provide engaging information to the user.
Then there is the header tags with the H1 tag being the most important. Finally, there’s the alt tags which you use to describe your images and anchor text links to help describe in-content links to the search engines. If you’ve installed WordPress and have set up WordPress hosting, you’ll want to set up Yoast SEO which will analyze your content and make sure that everything is optimized properly. It’ll also provide preview snippets and page analysis information so that you can make the right changes.
Tip #3: Focus On Creating High-Quality Content
It’s almost impossible to succeed in SEO without quality content these days. Google has many ranking factors that judge the quality of your content, so you really have to put in the time and effort to creating something that adds value to users. Figure out what your target audience wants to read about by looking for popular blog posts, trending topics on social media and busy forum conversations. You can also run surveys to collect information directly from your users. That will ensure that you don’t waste time creating content that you assume your audience will want to read.
You need to make sure that your content not only has the information that your audience wants, you need to use engaging language. You need to use great formatting, readable typography, embed graphical cues, attractive titles (and subtitles), high-quality images and multimedia (when appropriate). Having all these elements in place for your content will make all the other parts of SEO much easier.
Tip #4: Create a Link Building Campaign
The search engines rank websites based on a voting system and that system is based on the links pointing to your pages. There are two parts to generating links to your site. The first part is to set up your marketing to help you promote your content. To do this, you’ll want a blog to post your content on and relevant social media accounts to help get your content spread. You want to use your blog to share your content and embed social share buttons to get your content shared in social media. You also want to build followers on social media through your website, email newsletter and blog so that you can leverage your followers to promote your content.
The second part is creating an outreach campaign. Come up with a list of related websites you can partner up with or submit a guest blog post on. Reach out to them to see if they’d be interested in featuring your content in return for theirs. You can also promote each other’s via social media. If you’re looking to submit a guest blog post, make sure that you really understand the blog’s target audience. Create blog content according to the blog’s style and in a way that caters to their readers. That’s what will help you get accepted over competing writers.
Tip #5: Use a Bottom Up Strategy
The biggest mistake that you can make when starting to build a SEO campaign is to start going after the most competitive keywords. SEO is a long process and it can take many months for you to start seeing results. That’s why you want to start out by targeting low competition keywords. This will help you get some rankings that will result in traffic, social media followers, blog readers and email subscribers. You can leverage that into furthering your campaign to rank for very competitive keywords.
Going with this bottom up strategy also helps you generate revenue from your SEO campaign quicker. This revenue can be used to support your campaign to rank for more competitive keywords. It can be reinvested into hiring content creators, purchasing advanced research SEO software, web designers, buying advertising and outsourcing other parts of SEO to help you be more efficient. You’ll also have built up some authority for your site in the eyes of Google which will help you rank for the more competitive keywords.
Those are the top SEO tips that you should apply to your new website. There’s no shortcut for SEO success. If you want to succeed with SEO, you need to focus on executing the fundamentals and setting up a process based and systematic formula for growing your campaign.
