Last modified on: April 15th, 2024
Did you just build a new website and looking to grow its traffic? Consider SEO for your new website. If done right, SEO doesn't have to take months to start seeing results.
These proven SEO tips and tricks will help you increase your website's authority in the eyes of search engines, rank higher on Google, and attract new visitors to your site.
1. Improve Your Technical SEO
Making sure your website is technically sound is essential to ranking higher in search engines like Google.
Technical SEO is the foundation of your website. It involves many pieces that make your site easy to access, easy to navigate, and most importantly, easy to crawl.
There are potentially endless ways to improve your website’s technical SEO. Here are some of the most important aspects to check on:
- Secure your site with SSL, where the website URL starts with “HTTPS://” rather than “HTTP://”.
- Ensure your site is mobile-friendly. You can use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test Tool to check individual page URLs.
- Your site pages are indexable in Google (use Google Search Console to submit your sitemaps, check page indexing, and submit page updates).
- Test the loading speed for each of your web pages. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to check page speeds and suggestions.
SEO audit software like Screaming Frog and Siteliner can save you time and help you audit your site for hundreds of potential SEO issues like broken links and missing elements across your pages
Finally, theme design and plugins can impact your site's ranking potential by slowing down your site or affecting the user experience. Aim to choose lightweight (code-wise) plugins and themes that have SEO in mind.
2. Install Google Analytics & Google Search Console
Once your website’s technical SEO is on point, you should start setting up tools that will help you analyze and track your SEO performance.
To start, create Google Analytics and Google Search Console properties for your site and follow the simple instructions for adding the required tags to your site.
Google Analytics is perhaps one of the best free SEO software tools you can use to understand where your site visitors are coming from and how they navigate your site.
This tool gives you insights into how much time people spend on your website, which countries or cities your visitors come from, and a ton of other valuable data on your potential customers’ behaviors and browsing habits.
Google Search Console is another free web tool to help you manage your site's visibility in Google Search. Use this tool to submit sitemaps, submit new content, and ensure your pages are mobile-friendly and are crawled correctly by Google.
Search Console also provides insight into the clicks, search impressions, and keyword positions identified by Google for your website.
3. Perform Keyword & Competitive Research
Without conducting research, you're shooting in the dark. Use keyword research to ensure you're writing about the topics and keywords people are actually searching for. Check out these top keyword research tools to improve your research efforts.
Similarly, do competitor analysis to reveal the content and keywords that are generating traffic for your competitors and related websites. Researching your competition is especially important because it allows you to see what's been working.
SEO tools with competitive insights like Semrush are invaluable to check competitors' top traffic-generating pages, top keyword rankings, historical data, and more. This can help you identify the content and keywords to optimize for or add to your site.
If you're on a budget, you can perform initial keyword research with free tools like Google Keyword Planner, Keyword Surfer, and AnswerThePublic to better understand your audience and relevant keywords being searched online.
4. Optimize Your Content for Search
You don’t have to be a professional SEO content writer to optimize your content. All you need is catchy titles, a unique take on topics being searched related to your audience, and helpful, fresh content on a regular basis.
If you find yourself struggling to write SEO-optimized content, consider these tools.
Generally, detailed and well-researched blog posts rank higher on SERPs (search engine results pages). Check out these blogging tips for more ideas.
When it comes to SEO, avoid creating plagiarized or duplicate content. If your content isn’t original, Google can potentially reduce or prevent your content from ranking, as it's already out there.
5. Optimize Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
While not a ranking factor in and of itself and Google often decides to display its own meta descriptions for your site pages (generated by content on your page), it's still an SEO best practice to write unique meta descriptions for each of your pages.
A meta description is the small paragraph of text found below the title of a search engine result. This description can help entice searchers to click on your site listing.
Try to use unique meta descriptions that are concise, around under 160 characters, and describe each of your pages in a way that compels a user to click on the search result.
6. Include Internal & External Links
Link building is one of the most important aspects of SEO, which includes incorporating links in your site and earning links from other sites that point to your site.
Adding external links (links that point to pages on other sites) in your pages of content is a good way to improve the helpfulness and authority of your pages if the links support the topic and point to another high-quality page and site.
Choose high-authority informational links that add value to your content. Just be careful not to link to direct competitor pages attempting to rank for similar topics or keywords.
Internal linking is just as important as external linking. Internal links are links that direct a website visitor or potential customer from one page on your domain to another.
Adding internal links between your content is an easy way to improve rankings, especially if you have many pages or posts. This is due to the ability to incorporate keywords into the internal link text (anchor text) and enhance user navigation.
7. Stay Informed About SEO
SEO changes every day. If you want your website to stay on top of its game, it helps to stay informed and research the latest SEO best practices and industry updates.
Generally, SEO blogs contain a wealth of resources that can expand your SEO knowledge on a daily basis.
You can also tune in to podcasts, attend webinars, or even discuss the latest trends with people who own and optimize websites for search engines.
Finally, you should audit your website on a regular basis so you can quickly detect any performance or technical issues that may prevent you from ranking on the SERPs.
In Conclusion
Building your new website and optimizing it for search engines can be a daunting task, as content development and SEO strategies take time and experimentation.
However, if you stay consistent with your content creation and implement these new website SEO tips, you should see your site's organic traffic grow on a monthly basis.
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