Launching a new website is an exciting journey, but to ensure it stands out, effective SEO is crucial. In this blog post, we’ll provide a step-by-step guide for SEO for a new website. From keyword research and on-page optimization to advanced strategies, we’ll help you lay a strong SEO foundation to boost your site’s visibility and attract organic traffic.
Conduct keyword research
Implementing SEO involves optimizing your website’s pages, whether by improving existing content or creating new pages. The goal is to ensure these pages rank well on search engines and attract traffic to your site.
Keyword research involves:
- Brainstorming terms related to your website
- Analyzing competitors to uncover relevant keywords
- Using tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Keywords Everywhere to check search volume
- Choosing a mix of short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords
Through keyword research, you can discover the words and phrases people are searching for that are related to your business. Potential customers will use specific terms in search engines to find results, and it’s your job to identify the most relevant ones for your site. After selecting these keywords, you can start integrating them into your site’s content and on-page SEO.
You can conduct keyword research using several free tools, such as Free Keyword Tool by WordStream or Free SEO Tools by Ahrefs.
Develop a content strategy
After compiling a list of target keywords, the next step in SEO for a new website is to develop a content strategy. This involves creating a plan that details how you will create, publish, distribute, and manage your content.
While building a content strategy can be complex, we recommend keeping it straightforward for a new website by following our guide – How to create a successful SEO content strategy.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages to boost search engine rankings and increase organic traffic. It includes the following elements:
High-quality content
Content is the cornerstone of any web page, and creating valuable, well-researched, and engaging material that meets user needs is essential. Poorly written or irrelevant content, especially when combined with unexpected self-promotion, often leads to a negative user experience and usually fails to rank on search engines.
As search engine algorithms increasingly prioritize content quality, publishing contextually rich content is key to capturing the attention of search engine spiders. The more relevant and in-depth content you provide, the better your chances of ranking well and delivering value to your audience.
Distributing target keywords
The target keyword has to be present frequently throughout the page. It should appear organically and shouldn’t look forced.
The target keyword must be included in the following locations:
- Page title
- First 100 words
- Sub-headings
- Meta description
- URL
- Image names and alt text
Use h tags
Htags, or header tags, are used to structure your page’s content, making it easier for both visitors and search engines to navigate and understand.
There are six types of Htags, ranging from H1 to H6. The H1 tag is the main heading of the page, while the others nest beneath it.
Optimizing URL, title and meta description
Your page’s URL should be concise, descriptive, and include relevant keywords.
For example, the URL for a post titled “10 Best Tools for Keyword Research” should be something like: https://example.com/tools-for-keyword-research/. Notice that the number is omitted. This allows you to update the article with more tools in the future without needing to change the URL, as altering URLs can negatively impact your page’s SEO.
The title and meta description are crucial elements of your page, as they appear in search engine results and play a key role in persuading users to click through to your page. Both the title and meta description should include target keywords, be unique, engaging, and relevant. Additionally, they should adhere to search engine character limits to ensure they are fully displayed in search results.
Internal linking
Ideally, your website contains multiple pages with content relevant to your business and audience. Linking these internal pages naturally can enhance your site’s ranking power and improve navigation for visitors. Internal linking helps search engine spiders create meaningful connections between different pieces of content when they crawl your site.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO involves optimizing factors outside your website, such as acquiring backlinks, leveraging social media signals, and forming partnerships or sponsorships, to enhance your search engine rankings and overall online presence.
Social media presence that links to your site
Creating branded social profiles and linking them to your new website connects your owned media with the social networking landscape. As you build a following on social networks, you can establish relationships with potential clients.
Social media is also an effective way to reach new audiences, as satisfied customers might share your posts and page with their friends. While this doesn’t directly affect your SEO, it can drive more traffic to your site, ultimately benefiting your business.
Company profile on third-party sites
For businesses seeking local search traffic, claiming your company’s profile on third-party sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp can significantly boost exposure from authoritative sources.
Often overlooked by new webmasters, establishing a presence on these sites can improve your site’s ranking in search engine results and enhance users’ trust in the credibility of your brand.
Look to your competitors for inspiration
When you’re unsure where to begin, examining your competitors can help guide your SEO decisions. Analyze their link profiles to see which sites are linking to them and assess whether these links are benefiting their websites. At the very least, this can reveal some valuable linking opportunities worth exploring.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves optimizing website infrastructure to ensure that search engines can crawl, index, and rank your website properly.
The key components of technical SEO include:
- Installing an SSL certificate: It adds “https://” to your domain name and ensures secure, encrypted data transfer on your pages.
- Optimizing website speed for mobile and desktop
- Implement schema markup – Schema markups are codes added to web pages to help search engines interpret the content and display it as informative snippets on search result pages.
- Generating XML sitemaps, robots.txt, and canonical tags – XML sitemaps help search engines crawl and index website content efficiently. The robots.txt file guides search engine bots on which pages to crawl or exclude. Canonical tags are used to indicate the preferred version of a webpage when duplicate content is found on the site.
Are you ready to implement SEO on your new website?
If you’re new to building your web presence and need help with SEO for a new website, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. QuarkHive team has extensive experience in developing websites from scratch and we would be delighted to assist you!
Contact QuarkHive today for more information!