If you’ve thought about starting a new website, you must have come across the term SEO. Search Engine Optimization is a way to increase the number of visitors to your websites, so if you’re just starting out, you must consider hiring a professional SEO agency from Austin to gain traffic.

Once you create website from scratch, you need to promote it online if you wish to see people come to your page. If you’re someone who has recently started a website, this post will help you with the SEO techniques you can use to ensure you receive a good amount of traffic to your website.

Check out below A Step-by-Step SEO Guide for New Websites –

1. Choose Your Domain Name –

The Domain name is one of the essential ranking factors that search engines check to understand what a page is about. When choosing a domain name, choose one that’s relevant, easy to remember, and includes the main keyword that you want to rank for. This will check all the boxes and will prompt search engines to consider your website over others.

If your business is called Billy’s bakery, an appropriate domain name will be “www.billys-bakery.com” and not something like “www.chocolate-cake-shop.com.” It might cause some confusion as there are many other bakeries that specialize in chocolate cakes.

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2. Create and Submit a Sitemap –

When you create a sitemap, it helps search engines discover all the content on your site, and it’s essential for both new and old websites. The sitemap is a file that has a list of all the URL’s within your website. This helps search engines discover your already existing pages, along with new pages that you will add in the future.

You should also make sure your sitemap conforms to the sitemap protocol. If this is all new for you, you can approach software companies that can automatically create a sitemap for you.

3. Choose a Reliable Web Hosting Provider –

Search engines have been straightforward about how site speed is an important ranking factor for SEO. Visitors become impatient is webpages take a while to load, so search engines like Google try to deliver results that will satisfy that need.

While there are multiple strategies to make your site load faster, one of the best and most convenient steps to take from your first day is to choose a web hosting provider that delivers consistent speeds.

4. Conduct Keyword Research –

A big part of SEO is knowing how to do keyword research. If you wish to effectively implement the other items on this list, you should have a clear idea of the main terms and areas that you want to focus your SEO efforts on.

When you choose keywords, you need to remember to be realistic. SEO is a competitive field, and a brand new website is in no position to compete for popular terms. For you to be a cut above the rest, you need to be specific and look for long-tail keywords to target. For example, something like “south colorado chocolate cake sellers” is more attainable than just “cake sellers.”

However, what you can do is find and incorporate the keywords that drive traffic to your competitors. You can use those keywords on your site in order to match up with the competition.

5. Use a Mobile-Friendly Design –

In recent years, there have been many algorithm updates from Google, and they have all been about mobile.

As an increasing amount of people turn to their mobiles to browse the internet, users and search engines alike expect websites to offer an intuitive mobile experience. So when you build a new website, it’s crucial to have a mobile-friendly website.

If you’re unsure how to check if your website is mobile-friendly, there are certain tools you can use to make the process a lot easier.

It would take less than a minute to conduct the test, and in the case that your result is negative, then you need to make sure your site is mobile friendly.

6. Optimize Images –

Not many newcomers know that the images you use on your website impact the overall usability of the website. The images you use should be as lightweight as possible to ensure quicker loading speeds. Likewise, you should name your images accordingly by including the keyword that you’re targeting in the alt text. New-website-image.jpg is a better image name than img001.jpg.

If you have a WordPress site, you can update the alt text in the media editor when you load the image. Additionally, you can also update the alt text in the HTML of the page. The HTML would look something like <img src=”primarykeyword.jpg” alt=”primary keyword”>

7. Optimize Headings and Text –

When you write web content, your headings are a great way to better organize your copy. That makes it easier to read for your visitors. As an additional bonus, the headings are another important signal to Google and search engines on what your page is about.

It’s best to strategically include the target keywords in your headings on the web page – but only where it makes sense to do so. Keyword stuffing was a thing of the past, and search engines like Google notice keyword stuffing quite easily. Your website can be penalized for it. However, as long as you use your target keywords in the right context, then it’s a good practice to include them in the text on the page.

8. Optimize Title Tags –

Just like the domain name, title tags are a part of the website that Google looks at to understand what the page is about, making it another good place to incorporate your target keyword. However, try to keep the title tag short, as Google only displays 50-60 characters on the search engine results page; it’s even less if it shows up in the tab at the top of your browser.

It’s important not to stuff keywords here too. You should use your primary keyword once, and that would do the trick.

9. Perform a Site Audit –

A website audit is an entire analysis of the factors that affect a website’s visibility in search engines. This standard process gives you a complete insight into any website, its overall traffic, and the individual pages. You can use a helpful tool like SEMRush to perform the SEO audit. You just need to add your website URL, and the tool will analyze your website to give you an SEO score. It’ll also present you with all the SEO errors and suggestions that can improve the overall website.

10. Create Unique Meta Descriptions –

While meta descriptions don’t influence rankings directly, they play a significant role in your click-through rates from the search results. Any word in your description that matches the terms they searched will be in bold, which helps draw their attention to your page. Since users want to know more about a site before deciding which of the results to choose, a good meta description would make a case for why your page is worth clicking on.

Always write relevant meta descriptions for every page on your website. Try incorporating your primary keyword of the page naturally into the description, and hopefully, it will end up in bolded text on the search results page. You can use the space to provide a brief description of what the page can offer the reader.

11. Take to Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, Social Bookmarking) –

 Social media is a great way to market your content and increase your site’s online visibility. There are many social media apps that you can use to reach out to potential customers.

• Twitter

With Twitter, you can build up a great following of relevant businesses, clients, and those in related industries, and the benefits can be amazing. You can post useful tweets that are related to your niche and occasionally throw in articles or blog posts from your site with a link back to them. Don’t use the platform to aggressively sell to your audience. Use the space as a trojan horse for links to your website. It would be better to add a Tweet it button to your pages too, so your followers can share your content easily.

• Facebook

Facebook has over 2.41 billion members, so if there’s a social media platform to add your website to, it’s definitely this one. It’s good to add Facebook share buttons to your website as well so visitors can share your pages with their friends with ease. More often than not, videos are the form of content that gets consumed the most on Facebook, so if your site deals with videos, it would be a bonus to link it to this social media giant.

• Social Bookmarking

Besides your usual social media platforms, there’s another way to spread the word about your site and hopefully gain valuable links. To social bookmark is to allow users to add, edit, annotate, and share bookmarks of online documents. So for you to take advantage of that, add pages (and not just your homepage) from your site to a few of the top bookmarking sites, such as Reddit or Pinterest.

Additionally, it helps if each page or blog post from your site offers readers a chance to share your site to the reader’s bookmarking account. You should also consider adding share buttons or a toolbar like those offered by addthis.com to your pages.

12. Carry on With SEO Practices –

The final step in this guide is basically to tell you to keep doing SEO. Don’t do all this in one weekend and then forget about it the next! You need to constantly and consistently work hard, publish fresh new content keeping your keywords in mind, talk and interact with your social media followers, build a good reputation on forums and blogs, get to know press contacts and ensure they’re up-to-date with how you are doing, and eventually, search engines will build trust in your site.

You should remember that SEO is an ongoing effort, and you should keep monitoring your website for progress. You can try tools like SEMRush, which crawls your website like a search engine bot, and give you recommendations for improving your site.

Conclusion –

If you wish to see your new website grow, you need to start on your plan for long-term SEO as soon as possible. If you can learn these SEO techniques on your own, then that’s great. However, if you need SEO optimization services to help, then you should approach an agency in that related field to help you out. Either way, it’s important to make SEO a priority. Although getting results from SEO optimization is slow, the sooner you start, the better off you’ll be.

Author Bio:

Aaron is an SEO editor who loves music, gaming and all things entertaining. He’s also a content and guest post service specialist at Stan Ventures. When he’s not writing articles, he’s probably editing someone else’s. You can reach him on Twitter|LinkedIn

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