Yippee! You had a great new business idea. For that, you have registered the domain name, created a website design and launched your business site too.
But is that enough?
Unfortunately, no!
You need to make sure that you are easily discoverable and can rank on Google and other search engines. And if you fail to achieve that, there will be no clicks, no visitors, and ultimately no sales.
The fact is, SEO is not rocket science. It is a lengthy process, you cannot expect immediate results from it. But, the best part is, your first steps after launching a new website put a great impact on the ranking of your website in Google search.
For SEO, getting things right from the starting will save you from hours and hours of overwork fixing the website that was not built keeping SEO in mind.
So, if you have just launched your new website, here are some basic guidelines that help you get a solid SEO start.
First steps in SEO after creating a website
Research the right keywords and make them structured
Before you add some content to your new website, you need to research the relevant keywords, the keywords that your audience might be using when they search for similar products or services of yours.
Questions to ask yourself before you do the keyword research:
What is your web page about?
Is the page about your product and services, or for some useful how-to guide. Once you determine what topic and information you are going to include, it will be easier for you to determine the type of keywords you need to target on that web page.
What is the intent of the page?
Decide on what is the main goal of your page. Are you intending to sell your service or product, or you want to provide some information to your visitors so that they can make an educated decision? When you figure out the main intent of your page, you can focus on researching the right keyword, rather than using the generic one.
Use various keyword research tools to get the suggestions of keywords and phrases that people use to search for your intent service.
The fastest and easiest option to find the relevant keyword is Google suggest. It gives you suggestions based on the words you type in the search bar, even before you hit enter. These suggestions are the most common searches that people perform when looking for the services you are providing.
Now structure your website to rank for your target keywords. A structured website ensures that each page targets a closely related set of highly relevant keywords.
It means you need to break down the structure of your website into categories. Make sure each page rank for its target keyword and gets discovered by the visitors looking for a specific service.
Craft a Google-friendly content
High-quality content helps you interact effectively with your customers and achieve top ranking. So, before you start making active SEO efforts, make sure you have engaging and educating content on your website. With content we mean:
- Web page content
- Blogs
- Ebooks, white papers, and reports
- Brochures
- Tips sheets
- Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
- Sales pages
- Videos
- Pictures, infographics, and more
Once you have an idea of what your users are searching for to find a page like yours, you need to write and optimize content for it. Search engines crawl your website and identify what your webpage is about and then decide for what queries your web pages should rank for. Make sure you write visitor-centric content before you write search engine-centric content.
Add action-focused meta description below your website title
The meta description is the short snippet that appears below your website title and provides information about the content.
Your meta description affects the CTR of your page, therefore it is important to add a relevant keyword-focused meta description. A detailed meta description encourages the visitors to click your webpage link instead of the website of your competitors. It increases your search impression count.
When writing a meta description for your webpage keep the following things in mind:
- Create different meta description for each page
- It must inform about the features or ideas that users would benefit from
- It must be between 100 to 150 characters, including spaces
- It must include a call-to-action to your webpage.
Each web page must have its meta description.
Optimize your website code
URLs are another important element but often overlooked. If your URLs have some random numbers and punctuation marks then, not only users but search engines will also find it hard to understand what your page is about.
Keep the following things in mind to achieve an SEO friendly URL structure:
Integrate the www and non-www domain of your webpage
If you do not consolidate your www and non-www domain version then when someone types the non-www version of your domain it will not redirect to your www version of your domain. It means the search engine will see both domains as two different sites and thus consider the content as a duplicate.
To avoid this, set a preferred URL and implement 301 redirects for all other versions of your URL, this tends the other URLs to redirect visitors to your preferred domain.
Use static URLs
Avoid using dynamic URLs as they look ugly and say nothing about your page. Whereas, static URLs describe users which helps them figure out what’s on your page.
Add canonical tags
This helps the search engine bots to identify duplicate and original pieces of content. This signifies the bot to pass over the duplicate content and provide link credit and index to the original content only. Add the rel=”canonical” tag into your URL for the canonical URL specification.
Provide an XML sitemap
A sitemap provides the path to every page on your site so that the bots do not miss anything. To create a sitemap easily, use the XML Sitemap Creator tool. After creating the sitemap submit it to the Google search console so that search engines can easily index and crawl your website.
If you have created your website and implemented these above-outlined first steps, you are way ahead on the path of SEO Services.
