Eight Quick SEO Wins For Your Brand New Website
- SEO |
A new article on Search Engine Journal reports on eight quick ways to get a new website's SEO off the ground and kickstart your performance in organic search.
The author says that websites can take time to return on your investment of money and resources you put into them. However, there are specific SEO factors that you can take advantage of to get quick wins with your new site.
The author says that websites can take time to return on your investment of money and resources you put into them. However, there are specific SEO factors that you can take advantage of to get quick wins with your new site.
- Set Up Analytics And Diagnostic Tools: To know how well your site is performing and to measure improvement and gains along the way, you'll want to get Google Analytics or a similar website analytics tool for tracking visitors to your site and behavior within it. You should get Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools accounts. Those will provide more information about how the search engines see your site and provide additional keyword performance data that Google Analytics lacks.
- Map Out Optimal Site Architecture: Much like outlining a paper in school or the flow of a book, we should do the same with our website content. Adult books aren't often a single chapter with everything crammed into it. Likewise, a website shouldn't have everything jammed into a single page. Whether it is informational, ecommerce, or other types of topics, arrange it in a way that makes sense and goes from general to specific. Long-form content is great for technical and specific topics.
- Be Strategic With Internal Link Structure: Inbound links to your site from other sites provide authority status for the pages and your site overall. That process of sharing value doesn't stop at the page that receives the link(s). How you link to pages within your site can have a big impact on the page value and link value distributed throughout the site. Keep your top-level navigation focused and only link where relevant and necessary. That will help you pass the page value into the areas you want to in a focused way.
- Create Quality Content: More content - as long as relevant, high quality, and helpful for your audience is always better. Whether you're lengthening existing pages, adding more, or going further in-depth, go for it. If you have thin pages with little text or a lot of pages that have significant overlap or duplication of content relative to others on the site, find a way to enhance or eliminate those pages.
- Monitor And Troubleshoot Indexing: Priority number one is to make sure you've got your XML sitemap, robots.txt, and any in-page canonical and indexing commands in a good place. From there, you can monitor how quickly the search engines index your pages. Get things submitted, watch for errors, and monitor the overall indexing process to ensure that it is moving as fast as possible and that any errors are addressed immediately.
- Optimize Page Speed: Like content, don't settle when it comes to page load times. Evaluate page speed on your site using tools like the Google Chrome Lighthouse auditing developer tool. Don't ignore speed or push it off until later in the process. Lean on dev and IT resources as you can to push for the maximum speeds you can reasonably achieve.
- Maintain Clean Code: If you have speed issues, indexing issues, or concerns overall about the code, you should dive deeper. A lot of content management systems include plugins and bloated code that is not needed or useful. Developer shortcuts (I love developers - I'm not disparaging them) or out-of-the-box things that you don't need can impact speed and indexing. They can also cause headaches for you when uploading or updating content if things break often.
- Build Links And Citations: External authority and validation signals are important. Building on what I noted in the internal linking section, you should think about any and all relationships that could result in another, credible site linking to your site. Think about partnerships, charities, customers, memberships, trade associations, credentials, and credible directories that could and should be linking to your site.
