Top 10 SEO Tips for New Websites

Just a quick post today. One of the most common questions I get asked is how to maximise your chances of getting to the top of Google’s organic search results pages with a new website. While there isn’t a one size fits all approach, below are my ‘Top 10 SEO Tips for New Websites’ for  ensuring strong ranking in Google and other search engines when building a new site from scratch:

Tip #1

Choose a ‘keyword rich’ domain name. If you’re a landscape gardener, servicing clients in the Limerick City/County area, a domain name such as “landscapinglimerick.com” would be perfect.

Tip #2

Choose an Irish web hosting company, such as Blacknight. If you’re focusing on the Irish market, it’s essential that your hosting server has an Irish geographic IP address.

Tip #3

Build your website on the WordPress CMS platform. Very user friendly, some great integrated SEO functionality and plenty of themes & plugins available to create a professional looking site.

Tip #4

Make sure you activate SEO friendly permalink settings in WordPress admin. I adopt the custom structure “/%postname%/” on virtually all my websites.

Tip #5

Install the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast and follow the plugin configuration instructions here

Tip #6

Write optimised meta titles & descriptions for each of your pages & posts.

Tip #7

Optimise each of your pages & posts for a specific keyword/search phrase. Include the main phrase you’re targetting in the meta title & description and also the first paragraph of your content. Don’t use the keyword too often within the content as Google may interpret this as ‘keyword-stuffing’ which could result in a penalty.

Tip #8

Set up a blog page within your WordPress website and publish relevant, informative articles regularly. Using our landscape gardener example, you could post articles about common landscaping/gardening problems such as ‘best time to sow a lawn’ or ‘best bedding plants for cold weather’. The trick is to publish content which mirrors the information your prospective customers/clients are searching for online. By doing this, you will gain traffic from the SEO pull of your content and, perhaps more importantly, your content has a good chance of being shared and linked to across social networks which will establish you as the ‘go to’ person in your particualr industry and location.

Tip #9

Set up a Google Places for Business listing. Online searches for services are often appended with a geographical location, e.g. ‘landscaping limerick’. If there are relatively few suppliers of these services in your area, there’s a good chance you will get a fairly high listing within Google’s geographic search results. As these appear above the organic results, this is a great way of getting near the top of Google even if your website is relatively new.

Tip #10

Install Google Analytics tracking code to monitor your traffic and enable you to gauge where your visitors are coming from and how they are engaging with your site.

Source: http://goo.gl/sTm4vR