How To Do SEO for a New Website

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Once I’ve created and launched a new website I look to promote it online using various SEO techniques.

These techniques generally stay the same no matter what type of website I launch – be it a blog, business site or brochure site. 

Here, you will be learning how to do SEO of a new website. ; hopefully, these will help new developers and act as a nice reminder for those more experienced.

When you launch a new website, there are many important and essential things you should do from the SEO perspective. Even if you don’t have traffic initially, following these steps below will help you in the longer run.

Backlinks are an essential building block to help your site and some of the methods below will help you gain those valuable backlinks, other methods will help spread the word about your site, help you inform search engines your site exists and help you track backlinks, errors and search queries.

SEO for a New Website: 15 Steps

Be it WordPress, Static Website or any other platform, when you are launching a new Website, there are few basic SEO techniques, which goes for every type. These steps for a new website SEO should be followed by everyone, and if you have questions regarding any of these tips, feel free to ask me via comments.

Before, we move ahead here are a few articles worth reading:

• A guide for beginners to learn Keyword research
• 10 Keyword placement techniques for higher ranking
• How to rank#1 in Google Search

1. Create and Submit Sitemap

Sitemaps help search engines discover all the content on your site, essential for new and old websites alike. The sitemap is a file that contains list of all URL’s of your website. This will help search engine discover all your existing pages, as well as new pages that you will add in future.

You should ensure your sitemap conforms to the sitemap protocol and there are many free and paid for website and software companies that can automatically create a Sitemap for you.

Following two tutorials will help you get started:

• How to submit Sitemap to Google Search
• How to submit Sitemap to Bing search engine

2. Use Google Search Console

Google and Bing all have webmaster sections for you to log in and tell them about your site. Once you have confirmed you’re the site owner you can submit your sitemap you made above, view details of sites linking in to you, top keywords and any errors they find when crawling your site.

• Google Search Console Guide: For Beginners
• How to get started with Bing Webmaster tool

3. Perform Keyword research

Keyword research is the process of finding the right keywords for your business. This is the shortcut to getting success with your online business. You can use one of these best Keyword research tools to find keywords that matter to your business.

Tip: You can find all keywords that are driving traffic and business to one of your competitor or most successful website in your niche.

4. Create a content plan

After researching for keywords, make a plan for the content that you will be creating over days to come. This is an important aspect for SEO of a new website, as content creating takes time. However, having a plan ensures you and your content team are aligned to the same goal.

You can use the Google spreadsheet or any content calendar tools to plan your content. In the upcoming section of this page, I have shared tips on content creation.

5. Start creating content (Add new pages and posts)

Depending upon your business goal, you should start creating new pages for your website. Every page should have a goal. For example:

• Drive traffic from search engine
• Convert into sales
• Send traffic to another page
• Convert users into email subscribers

And more…

The most important thing you want to take care of is; your content should be of high quality. Make sure your content team following our guide to write SEO friendly content and do train them about On page SEO to make most out of your content development.

Understand that, at this stage the more planning you will do, it will help you to improve your SEO effort in the days to come.

6. Optimize Images

Not a lot of newcomers are aware of the impact of images on the overall website SEO and usability. There are a few rules for using images on the website, such as:

• Images should be as light-weight as possible for faster loading
• Images should have a proper name (Ex: SEO-new-website.jpg rather than cr002.jpg)

If you have used WordPress to build your website, you can use Shortpixel plugin to optimize images.

7. Is your new website mobile friendly?

Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. You can use this free tool by Google called test with Google to check if your website is mobile-friendly or not.

It will take <1 minute to perform the test and in case if your result is negative, you should make your site mobile friendly. Adding responsiveness to your website will do the trick. This is how a positive result looks like:

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8. Perform a site audit (Find SEO errors)

Use a tool like SEMRush to perform an SEO audit. All you need to do is, add your website URL and this tool will analyze your website to give you a SEO score, present you with all SEO errors and suggestions to improve the overall website.

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9. Check loading time and improve if it requires

Often a new website looks great but the loading time sucks! It is vital that you run a speed test for your website and make sure it loads within less than 3 seconds.

You can use the Google page speed insights tool or tools.pingdom to run a speed test for your website.

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If your pages are loading really slow, more than 3-4 seconds, you can do a few things to improve the speed. Read below resources:

• How to improve speed of WordPress website

10. Blog Commenting

Make your comments useful, not spammy as this will only waste your time when the editor deletes it. Comment on blogs relevant to your website and hopefully they’ll allow you a backlink. If not at least you are spreading word about your site to the relevant readers and you never know, they might have websites and add a link to you.

• A definite SEO guide for Blog commentators
• Why commenting is important for your blog

11. Social Bookmarking

Another useful way to spread the word about your site and hopefully gain valuable links back is to take advantage of social bookmarking. Add pages (not just your homepage) from your site to some of the top bookmarking sites such as; Reddit, Pinterest.

It also useful if each page or blog post from your site offers readers the chance to share your site to their bookmarking account. Consider adding share buttons or a toolbar such as those offered by addthis.com to your pages.

12. Twitter

Build up a good following of relevant businesses, clients and those in related industries and the benefits can be huge. Post useful tweets and occasionally throw in articles, news, or blog posts from your site with a link back to them. Don’t just jump right in for sell, sell, sell or you’re liable to put off followers. Add a tweetmeme.com button or similar to your pages too.

• How to use Twitter as a marketing tool effectively

13. Facebook

This site has over 2.41 billion members so adding a page on here is a must. Add Facebook share buttons to your website too so that visitors can share your pages with their friends. We have a good number of articles, related to Facebook marketing for a new website. Here are a few links, which will help you to get started:

• How to create a Facebook fan page for your brand

14. Internet Directories

Submit your site to web directories

Some of these are paid and none offer guaranteed inclusion so ensure you meet all terms and conditions before submitting your site. Some directories are deemed to offer good quality backlinks so it could be well worth the initial investment.

15. Don’t stop your SEO Effort!

This one’s simple, don’t steam ahead, and do all this in one weekend and then forget about it! You need to constantly work hard, publish fresh new content, talk to your twitter followers, post updates to Facebook, build a good reputation on forums and blogs, get to know press contacts and keep them up-to-date with how you’re doing and eventually the web will build trust in your site.

Do remember, SEO is an ongoing effort, and you should keep monitoring your site for progress. You can try tools like SEMRush, which will crawl your new Website like a search engine bot, and will give you the recommendation to improve your site. 

So there you have it, the 15 things you could do to SEO optimize a new website.

Is there any other trick that you want to suggest? Let me know in the comment section below.

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