Search engine optimization for a new website can be intimidating due to the amount of information out there. You need an experienced in-house SEO or consultant who will help you with the SEO. This piece will help you to start your website SEO if you can’t hire a professional.
- On-Site SEO Basics
Your website is the place where some of the important elements of search engine optimization occur. You may have heard a lot about link building, but link-building without a good on-site SEO isn’t effective. You should put bare minimum on-site optimization elements on your website’s main page, including the homepage.
The Golden Rule of On-Site Optimization
Before divulging it further, you must not overdo some SEO elements. You may want to shove a lot of keywords onto your pages, but this shouldn’t be the goal. In fact, Google charges a penalty to the pages that are stuffed with keywords. So keep things simple when it’s come to keyword optimization. Choose up to five keywords or keywords for each page on your website and optimize them.
- Why You Need Content
Content is great for both your website and search engines. The more content you have on your website, the more likely the visitors will stick to your website. The more content you have, the more likely search engines like Google will put your website’s pages in the search index. The key to pleasing both search engines and visitors is to have quality content on your website. Quality content can be of anything like:
- Blog Posts
- Industry Articles
- How-To Guides & Tutorials
- Infographics
- Videos
- Podcasts
Creating quality content for your website is a huge investment. But it’s worth it. Search engines love good quality content. The visitor will love your content and share it on their social media profiles which will generate more views. You can start with a blog and later diversify your content.
- Off-Site Optimization or Link Building
Link building is one of the most talked-about SEO tasks. The basic goal of link building is to get the link of another website to yours. Getting links attached with keyword anchor text will help your website to rank especially for the keywords that are linked. There are a lot of ways to get links. Some are good and some are not so good. There are three kinds of links and link building techniques.
- Organic Links – These are the best kind of links that you don’t have to ask for. You can them in major news outlets and other well-recognized sites.
- Whitehat – This basically stands for good quality link-building process.
- Blackhat – This stands for the spammy low-quality link building process.
Most websites will face a hard time generating enough organic links to improve their rankings in search engines. For this reason, link building is a popular service. You can start the link building process by following these activities:
- Submit guest blogs to the popular blogs in your industry. Generally, you will receive a link back to your website.
- Reaching out to businesses in search of links.
- Create social media and local search profiles.
- Submit your website to applicable industry directories. For instance, if you are in the wedding business, you could get a listing with a link back to their website on The Wedding Channel, The Knot and other similar sites. Don’t submit links in low-quality directories like an adult, pharmaceuticals, or online casino industries.
- Make sure your content is link-worthy. Infographics are a great example of how you can allow others to use infographics on their own website in exchange for a backlink.
- Data for SEO – Use DataForSEO to get SEO data straight to your custom application. You can use Data for SEO’s rank tracker API to track keyword rankings, keyword data, SERP results and more.
- How Google+ Can Help with Rankings
If you want to dominate Google by creating social profiles for links, you should ensure to join Google+. Google’s own social media network is a tool to rank better on search engines for the people you are connected with. It goes to show that personalized search results can beat local search results. If you want personalized results, your goal is to do the following:
- Create a Google+ personal profile and business page.
- Recommend the website you want to rank. Share the website on your profile or page as your status update, and link to it in your profile information under preferred websites.
- Fill in the information completely so that people feel encouraged to connect with you.
- Make sure your profile information is public with your status updates.
- Share other updates on your profile so that it doesn’t look self-promotional.
- Start connecting with those who want to find your website in search results. Use the search box to add people to your circles. Hopefully, most will add you back.
The more you are popular on Google+, the better chance you will influence the people who are following you. So, it is always advisable to take the benefits of social networks.
- Monitoring Your Results
Last is that you want to keep an eye on your SEO progress by checking the results. The three most important tools that you can use to track results are:
- Authority Labs – Create a free account that you can avail yourself of after using the 30 day trial of the pro account. Use the Authority Labs tool to track keyword rankings for your website so you can check if they are making progress in search results.
- Google Analytics – Use Google Analytics to underst6and more about your website visitors. Keep an eye on the organic search traffic sources to check which keywords people are using to find your website in search results. You can set up goals to see which keywords lead to visits where visitors perform what you want them to perform on your website like sign up for a mailing list or purchase a product. This will help you to learn which keywords you should be targeting for your SEO campaign.
- Data for SEO – Use DataFor SEO to extract raw SEO data straight to your custom application. You can use the rank tracker API to check the keywords ranking, keyword data and more.
Barring these, there are various other valuable SEO tools out there, however, these are the best tools to start with to help you learn if your SEO efforts are making a difference.
