A new site lives and into the search index is a daunting task there is no query. If you do not know SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tricks and tips which will get your website to the top?
Your Site will be in the dark if not understand the SEO best practices which mean no one will know your site even exist. No sales, No clicks, No visitors.
SEO isn’t rocket science. The reality is this. Mastering SEO takes effort and time, but you don’t need to spend years optimizing your site properly by learning fundamentals if you use the right tools especially. There are limitless SEO tools that will work for you.
If you are just getting started with a new site, this blog article will help you a lot to make a great start and shows you where you can get the help you needed to implement everything which you need to be done properly.
What are Search Engines looking for?
Search Engines like Yahoo, Bing, or Google wanted to direct users to a site and content that are relevant to what they are searching for. But to determine relevancy?
When determining which site is more relevant and should show up higher in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages):
- Content: What the User is Searching for the content is relevant to them?
- Performance: Does the site works properly and site load fast?
- Authority: Do other authoritative sites use that website as a reference or cite the information available or the content is useful enough to link to?
- User Experience: How does the site behave and look? The site is easy is navigate around. Does it have a high bounce rate or does it looks safe?
These are the most necessary steps you needed to implement when you are optimizing your Website. Here are the SEO steps which are vital you needed to follow to make sure your website has what search engines are looking for.
Step 1: Choose a great domain name
Select the best domain name possible for your website. Think about it when selecting this important piece of real estate:
Branding Potential: It has become very easy to link to branded domains and build credibility as people will take your company. in the UK more serious manner as compared to keyword – keyword. UK whiteish looks very spammy and isn’t fooling anyone. With the help of a brand domain, you can build trust online and also maximize the value of your content.
Use a Domain Search tool like the one we have at 123 Reg which will allow you to check if your desired name is available when you are searching for a domain.
Spelling – Your company name will be missed if the name is easily misspelled. Then it can be missed easily too. Many people will look online and fine probably find you if your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is right others may be found by word of mouth so if your name or domain seems to be something else, they would end up missing you. Your domain name is easy to spell and easy to remember and short.
Keywords – Possessing a keyword you are focusing on to rank in your domain isn’t as necessary as it used to be. In the year 2012, September 12 released an update which was EMD (Exact Match Domain) which was updated to stop poor quality keyword-keyword.com sites from ranking well simply because they had their main keywords in their name of the domain. While so it can’t hurt to register a domain with a keyword on it, you shouldn’t take tension over it.
You also read to make sure to choose a domain name and business name to find out what should out be focusing on when you are selecting the right name.
What if you decide on buying an old domain rather than a new one? That’s very cool too but if you are purchasing a domain that has been owned by anyone else, always remember that its old owner is not done anything bad to cause the domain to get penalized.
Read this article to find out more about buying pre-owned domains and how to make sure there is not any issue you might inherit.
Now let’s start building your site after you have a domain
Step: 2 Research the Right Keywords
You need to do the right keyword research to find out which words your audience is using when they are searching for your services or product before you start adding content to your new website.
Ask Yourself before you get started with the keyword research process:
- What is your page about? – It is about the service or product you are selling, like burst pipe repair or water heaters. Or an important how-to guide on how to fix a disposal garbage unit. When you know what information you will include and what will name topic will be, it will become an easy task to determine the keyword type you needed to target on that page.
- What is the main intent of the page? – What are your primary objectives for this page? Is it to provide more information that can help visitors make an educated decision, Is it to sell a product or service? By finding out the main reason for the page you will able to concentrate on more relevant keywords as compared to generic ones.
Let’s take an instance to provide how you practice the keyword research process.
For intance, you are selling water heater repair services. Utilize this as the beginning point of your keyword research. Add “water heater repair” to so many keyword research tools to get more propose on what words and phrases variated people are proving for these services.
You can take the help of this tool:
Word stream’s free keyword tool (shows you often how the keyword is being searched for)
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keywordtool.io
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If you tap on the Questions Tab you will also find the questions which are common users have about “water heater repair” when they search on Google, which is pretty helpful as well.
uber suggest
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There are a lot of suggestions present here and they are alphabetically organized here.
Google Suggest is the fastest option. This is because it provides you with suggestions that are based on your search even before you click enter. These suggestions are based on the searchers which are most common which people perform when looking for the service or product you are selling,
In Google search when you write “water heater repair” this is what shows up:
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Rather all the relevant keywords you are founding using the tools above and then group them based on this thing:
(i) Product Type: e.g. electric water heater repair, Ariston water heater repair, ge hybrid water heater repair.
(ii) Location: e.g. water heater repair near (location of your business), water heater repair in London.
(iii) Price: e.g. water heater repair estimate, water heater repair cost.
Every group of keywords is helpful as it provides questions that are specific that prospects might have about your service or product.
When you write about the content of the page, always make sure to include details about:
(i) Product: Which category of water heater do you repair?
(ii) Price: Is there any special discount or offer during the week?
(iii) Location: Do you cover also an area?
(iv) Properties: Is your team has experience in different categories of water heaters?
(v) Extras: How faster can you repair it when the team comes?
If your list has so many keywords and you do not know where to start to take a look at the monthly estimated search volume to see how much interest there is and how often people are searching for a specific keyword. You can use your favorite SEO tool to get suggestions of keywords as well as estimated search volumes for your keywords.
SEO competitor analysis you can also use this tool to see what your competitors are doing in terms of Website optimization.
Step 3: Craft Your Content
Content that is of high quality is the cornerstone of how your sites achieve top rankings and interact with customers. We refer to anything you publish on your website that educates by content, delights customers, and attracts them, such as:
(i) Web Page Content
(ii) Blog posts
(iii) White papers, Ebooks, and Reports
(iv) Sales pages
(v) Videos
(vi) Tips sheets, brochures, and FAQ (Frequently asked questions)
(vii) Pictures, Infographics, and more
You need to start writing write content and then optimize it. You have got a better idea of what users are searching for to find a page like yours. Search engines like Google or Bing will crawl your site and try to figure out what is it all telling about and then you decide what questions each of your web pages should be ranking for.
The main aim should be you should write for first visitors and then search engines. Your content needs to be enticing and fresh, if you don’t do that you won’t stand any changes of converting users into customers. Never sacrifice the persuasiveness and usefulness of your content for User-friendly and SEO Friendly Content.
Pay attention to the following things when you write content for search engines and users :
Title: Write a catchy title that grabs the attention of visitors
Keywords: Focus more on adding useful and relevant information that will bring users to your website. Combine also keywords that are relevant together and focus on adding various forms of keywords rather than adding as many keywords as you can.
Topics: Every single page needed to be focused on unique topics. Make sure you optimize more than one page for the same product at the same time as this not only confuses but you will 2 pages competing for the same keyword. You don’t want to be your competitor, do you?
Quality: You Content needs to be unique and purposeful. People are Searching for information this is the reason they come to your site, for a problem solution so always make sure you provide them so they do not go elsewhere. Find out ways to create it on your site and what Google sees as high-quality content.
Freshness: Regularly Add new content. You can easily create a blog where you share constantly information your visitors might find useful, or you can share whitepapers or ebooks.
Length: Having more than 500 words on a page we recommend. Your Content should be long enough to answer the visitors related to services or products.
With the help of SEO tools, you can save a lot of time on research. It will help you show the type of keywords that users are searching for on search engines so you know very well what to focus on on your page.
Step 4: Optimize Your Code
You need to pay attention to how you optimize your website code while writing content for people so that search engines can read your content too.
Let’s now look at how you optimize properly your code of your Website and improve your site ranking in search engines:
SEO – Friendly URL Structure
URLs are one more important elements which are not what most people focus on. Search Engines will have a hard time understanding what your page is about if your URLs have gibbering numbers and punctuation marks.
To make an SEO-friendly URL keep these few things in mind to attend an SEO- friendly URL site structure:
Consolidate your non-www and www domain versions – If you enter in your browser www.example.co.uk and you type another one example.co.ul and the “non-www” version does not redirect to www.example.co.uk, this means that search engines are noticing 2 different websites which are duplicate content. This isn’t the right way for the efforts of your overall SEO as it will dilute your inbound links, as external sites will be linking to www.example.co.uk and example.co.in.
Set up a preferred domain this is what you need to do, with or without 301 redirect implementation for all the different versions of your URL which will redirect visitors to the domain that is preferred.
It doesn’t matter which URL version you choose as long as you are consistent with it. This is how you do 301 redirects on any platform.
Avoid Dynamic URLs – URLs that are ugly and do not say anything about your page. You might want to use static URLs like www.example.co.uk/topic-name. instead of a www.example.co.uk/? p=3355474. URLs that are descriptive low the visitors to figure out what the pages in about just by looking at the link.
Use Canonical Tags – The work of these is to tell search engine bots which pieces of content are the original and which are duplicates. In this way, the bot will pass over the duplicates and index only and give the link credit to the primary piece.
You need to add the rel = “canonical” tag to your URL. To specify the Canonical URL. Find out how to add canonical tags.
Create an XML Sitemap – Roadmap of search engines are sitemaps. They mention every page on your website, which makes sure bots of search engines don’t miss anything. With the help of XML Sitemap Creator create an automatic sitemap for you. You should submit the sitemap in Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools once you create them in XML Sitemap so that the search engines can index and crawl easily your website.
The title tag
Each of your web pages needed to have a unique title tag that describes what that page is about. The title tag is what people pay attention to on search engine result pages that’s why they are important. Also telling you the title tag shows in posts shared on social sites like Facebook for intance. You only need to include your main keywords in the title but you also have to make it enough enticing to convince people to click.
Make sure you when you write your title tags :
Each page has a unique title tag
Mention the name of your product or the main topic you are focusing on.
Your title tag should be 42 and 60 characters which include space. This is just estimated because it’s no longer about the no. of characters but about the no. of pixels the characters occupy. Try not to go over 60 characters to make sure your title isn’t cut off.
The meta description tag
The meta tag shows search engine results together with the title tag why they need to summarise the content on your page. But it will not help you rank higher, a meta tag that is well-written can have a big impact on whether the user decides to click through or not so it should be written to “sell”.
Make sure when you write your meta description :
(i) You can make different ones for every page.
(ii) It takes about ideas or features users would benefit from.
(iii) Including spaces it’s between 100 and 150 characters.
(iv) It involves CTA (Call-to-action) which entices people to click.
Let’s use the .uk domain page to exemplify the 123 Reg website.
From the source code here how the title tag looks like:
.UK domain registration | Order your own .uk from 123 Reg
From the meta description to this source code :
This is what we find if find a search for “register. uk domain ” on Google
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This is what it looks like if we share this page on Facebook :
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Headings
With the Heading tags, you can break up the content into different sections (from the usability of view) and tell spiders of the search engines what the page is about.
Header tags from h1 to h6 form a hierarchy in HTML Coding.
This is how coding should look like :
Main Heading
Secondary Heading 1
Sub-section of the secondary heading 1
Secondary Heading 2
Sub-section of the secondary heading 2
This is how headings are organized if you look at the source code for our .uk domain page for instance.
Register a .uk domain from 123 Reg
The shorter, sharper extension for UK-based sites
Why is the .uk domain name ideal for you and your business?
Who can register .uk domains?
Why register a .uk?
Search for a .uk domain now!
Make sure you when it comes to the heading :
(i) Always have an h1 tag on every page but not more than one h1 tag.
(ii) Each page is relevant for the section it represents to make sure each heading is.
Alt Tags
The bots of Search Engines can see the images so you need to help them by adding an alt tag for each. This alt tag is a description that is short of an image and it can be also a good place to use your keywords and help, maximizing your chances of showing up in image search results.
Make sure the alt text is relevant to the image, however. For instance, the alt text “affordable online marketing services in London” for instance label and as does not make any sense. It could hurt your SEO, So Never try to trick Search Engines.
You will find a tool that saves you time for SEO, with so many elements which you need to be optimized on every single of your page. With the help of the tool you will alert any issues the site has, which include duplicate or missing description and title, more than one h1 tag, ALT tags that are missing so on, you don’t need to check these manually these elements across every page on your Website.
Interlinking
The process of linking certain words or phrases within the text body of your page, to other pages, where it is relevant. If you look at this blog post or any other post entry on the 123 Reg Blog, you will notice that we have mostly linked to another one of our posts or pages which are specific to the 123 Reg Website. We are linking basically to other resources which are relevant to the topic which is specific and that we believe you find important.
Why Internal Linking is Necessary?
(i) It will help out the user guide around your site, to the other content they may be focused on.
(ii) With the help of this search engines better know the relevancy of the page content.
(iii) It can be also beneficial to lower bounce rates. There are chances users will click on the website rather than exit the site if a user is on the page on your website and find fastly link to something they are interested in.
Here are mistakes of interlinking you should stay away from:
(i) Linking always to the keyword phrase or the same keyword in the hopes that will maximize the keyword ranking. This can harm your SEO and is over-optimized. You need to be relevant to the content you have placed them in for the anchor texts to work in your favor.
(ii) Over Linking – Only add a link if it is relevant and useful never link every third word on every page to another page.
(iii) Broken Links – You always check the pages you are linking to so that they are functional always make sure.
Step 5: Technical Setup
Verify and Set up Google Analytics
You needed to calculate your SEO effectiveness and find how your site is doing. How many every month visitors are getting? Which pages are getting more reach? How many minutes or seconds they are spending on your Website? There are a few steps to remember you can uncover by using an analytics tool to make sure you set up your analytics software now so you can start gathering right away.
Google Analytics is free, easy to set up and use, and provides so many useful details about the behavior of a user on your site that is why it is always a good choice.’
Set Up Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console
The help of Webmaster tools products from Bing and Google allows you to go in more to the bottom and see things like this: what search terms are sending visitors to your site, who is linking to your site, and whether your site has any issues which are need to quickly fixed and many more.
To find out how to set up Google Search Console and information that is valuable you can see and uses to improve your Website.
Install an SEO Plugin
Make sure you install an SEO plugin to optimize your Content if you have a website of WordPress. Yoast SEO is one of my favorites because it is easy to use and packed with powerful features. With the help SEO plugin like this installed will meet all the criteria of SEO recommended.
Robots.txt
Robotx.txt file carries each page’s instructions as to which pages of your sites to ignore during the process of the crawl. This file includes all the orders, such as disallow and allow, which tell web crawlers which web pages they cannot or can retrieve. That URL and its content won’t appear in Google Search Results if the URL is disallowed in your robots.txt files.
You are not stopping search engines from indexing your site always make sure. Some people prefer to use the “disallow/” command while their Website is under construction, but it’s necessary to recall to remove it once the website is ready to receive visitors.
Step 6: Earn Links
Links are a most necessary factor of ranking and they carry on to become a great indicator of what content is relevant and necessary.
It is all about getting authority and quality site links to your Website it’s not about getting hundreds of links.
In today’s your strategy of link building should be about earning links, which can be done by following steps:
(i) Creating Content that is purposeful (for instance infographics or guest posts ) which is so engaging and useful that people wanted to share it with others and link it.
(ii) Building strong relationships with big influencers and powerful them that your content is of high quality to share.
(iii) Promoting your Content so it extends to the right people who will be inspired to link to share it online and link to your Content.
You can read this blog post to know more about more great ways to earn backlinks from your small business website.
Step 7: Things to check post-launch
Test Usability
With the help of Usability, you can keep your customers happy. Great user experience mentions a Website that is very easy to navigate through, with details that are easy to get and very helpful.
You can test the visibility of your Website or you can ask your relatives or friends. Check to make sure there aren’t any steps that are important in the process of checkout and that it is easy for viewers to control or navigate through your Website, contact you, and buy a product.
Test Your Site Speed
Website speed is an important and increasing factor in ranking, so do not forget to test your website loading times and speed if important. With the help of the Google PageSpeed Insights tool. You will need to make some changes such as optimizing and compressing images, and loading scripts after your website’s main content, wherever possible if your speed is less than 90.
Check Your Mobile Website
If you have a website that works properly on all devices – tablets, desktops, and smartphones then it great thing but if you don’t then it is extremely important. You need to make sure that your Website is mobile-ready and that there are not any issues. With 56 % of traffic to the top websites and mobile-friendliness is now a ranking factor. In this blog, you will learn more about the importance of mobile-friendly design here.
Your SEO Checklist
Conclusion
You are setting a healthy base for your site so it can get more free or organic traffic. But always remembers to be patient as it takes time for search engines to index your website and start ranking it.
There is no Shortcut when it comes to SEO. Your websites may be penalized and get caught if you do anything shady to speed things up like any black hat SEO. Creating sites that give users what they are looking for and optimizing them for search engines so people can find it easier online.
