You got a new website and you want to make sure you’re doing the right things in the right order. You’ve got to have everything set up for success. What are the things that you should be doing and what are some things that you shouldn’t be doing. Here’s a good SEO checklist for websites that has just launched and aren’t ranking yet.
Accessibility
Users and search engines both need to be able to reach all of the pages, all the content that you create in your website in easy ways. Make sure that you don’t have some common mistakes that can harm your SEO. These are things like 404 errors, duplicate content, missing title tags, etc. where there is not material in the page for the search engine to grab on to and for users as well. A great free tool for solving this problem when starting a new website is Google Webmaster tools.
Keyword Targeting
For the things that you want to target and work on early and short term, you have to choose the right keywords to target. Make sure that it has good search volume, with high relevance to the website, and with low difficulty. If you get these taken care of your basic keyword targeting is running smoothly.
Content Quality & Value
First site visitors will look for details on your new website. They will be glad if you have rich content. This means you’ll have to have some good video, images, nice graphics, data set, references, and not just a bunch of texts. Show what your product/service is all about by being creative summing up the whole process that will make your visitors happy and satisfied for getting that clear content and information.
Design Quality, User Experience & Usability
Unless you have the background in professional design, you need to hire the help of a trusted web designer. You may opt to do it yourself with a basic design that’s very user-friendly, survey people in your company or your friends of their opinion about it. But there’s no point in ranking unless you’re nailing these two because you’re not gonna get many customers as people will be frustrated by the website. There’s a few tools on the web useful for testing the usability user experience of your new site: Five second test, Feedback army, Silverback app, etc.
Social Account Setup
Social and SEO come together like never before as Google have its own social network, showing +1’s in search engine ranking, Bing is showing in its search engine results stuff from Facebook, and so on. It really pays to go social as the social signals help search engine better rank and order things. The very least you want to have are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. Have your pages setup to these and make sure the account experience is the same across using the same photos, description, and branding so people will get a good sense as they see you in the social world. You may probably start setting something up monitoring and tracking these social accounts. Once you got these social account setup, you can feel good about sharing the content that you’re producing through these social accounts. Spend an appropriate amount of time finding connections and building up your brand.
Link Building
Getting low quality, easy-to-acquire links for a new website is so dangerous because search engines like Google is on top of throwing people out of the indexing and penalize them heavily when the link profile looks spammy. Low quality links can hurt the most when you don’t have any trust-worthy quality signals to boost you up. Good things to do in the first scenario of doing your SEO are as follows: Business Contacts and Customers – Start with your business contacts and customers as they are great places to get links from. Get your customers, even the people you know personally and professionally, to link you in the business world. Guest Posts and Content – This is a great way to do content production and earning backlinks. Find trust-worthy sites that have lots of RSS subscribers and are well-known. Those who can give you visibility in-front of your audience and can give you links back if you contribute. High Quality Resource Lists – If you are starting up in the SEO world, you need to have a Crunchbase listing, wikipedia list, industry-specific lists, etc. to increase authority and visibility. News Media & Blogs – Getting the press to cover you, emailing the editors leting them know that you’re launching this website is a good time in saying that your business is transforming. Make press-worthy information that will leave the audience looking more from your brand.
Relevant Social/Industry/App accounts link
If you contribute something to a Google Chrome Store or Apple Store, or a design gallery, all of these kinds of industry account that you can get are likely worth submitting to and get your new website listed on. Social Media Link Acquisition – Spend time to connect with people across your social media platform and build your relationship overtime. The simple notice or like, or just people enjoying your posts Content Marketing – That’s all the Safe ways of link building strategies requiring at least some effort, investment of time and energy, creativity, good content and authenticity in your marketing.
Tactics to Avoid
Don’t try the following when starting your new website or otherwise face the judgement of Google.
- Reciprocal Link Pages
- Low Quality Directories
- Article Marketing or Spinning
- Paid Links
- Forum/Open forum Spam
- Link Farms
