Take all the steps mentioned below in this SEO checklist, and you’ll build your website a strong SEO base for sustainable better rankings, immense value, and free organic traffic.
Starting a blog or online business has become very easy for new people thanks to the internet. There aren’t many hurdles to getting started. It’s great that anyone can start their own online business or blog.
Even so, not all of them are successful.
Most new websites fail because they don’t regularly get people who might buy things to visit them. A lot of it has to do with websites not being able to be properly optimized for better search engine results.
There is a lot to learn about search engine optimization, or SEO. It can be hard for new website owners and people who want to start their own businesses to figure out what they need to do right away. This blog post was written for people like you who are in the same situation.
Here is a search engine optimization guide to help you get started in the right way. Set up the accounts you need, add apps that will make your life easier, and make rules that will help search engines find your website faster. Use this SEO checklist to do all of these things.
1. Install WordPress and an SEO plugin
There are many different content management systems (CMS) that you can use for your website and blog. However, if you do not have a special requirement, we’d suggest going with WordPress. It is the most popular CMS right now, and it gives plenty of plugins and features to help you get started. It is also very easy-to-use and simple for new writers and website owners.
After you install WordPress, you will also need an SEO tool to make your life easy. Our suggestion would be to use the free version of the Yoast SEO tool. It is the most famous SEO tool for WordPress.
The Yoast SEO plugin will ease adding meta information to each blog post, improve your web page for a specific term. It is also regularly updated, so you know your website would be in safe hands.
2. Set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts
The second order of business would be to set up your Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Google Analytics is an immensely critical tool that lets you track how much traffic your website receives and, more significantly, how you acquire that traffic and how those website users interact and connect with your site’s content.
Google Search Console provides you obtain an insight into how search engines see your website. You may also check other statistics that can inform you your website’s indexing status, search queries, penalties, crawl mistakes, organic click-through rate, and more. First, you will have to validate your website in Google Search Console.
3. Improve the loading speed of your website
Your website’s loading speed is one of the most essential search engine ranking elements. Your website should take no more than a second to load. Otherwise, you will have a difficult time ranking higher on search engine results pages.
You may verify your website’s current loading speed using the following tools:
Determine how quickly your website loads and strive to enhance it. If it takes more than a few seconds to load, the majority of your visitors will leave and visit other websites. This will leave a negative impression and harm your website’s trustworthiness. Furthermore, it will convey negative signals to search engines, increasing the difficulty of ranking.
As a result, this is a vital step to do before you begin generating visitors to your website.
4. Create a buyer persona
Who is your target audience? What do they like? What difficulties are they looking to solve? What is their goal?
Understanding the answers to these questions is important.
If you don’t understand your target audience, you won’t be able to provide them with the information they want and deserve.
Create a buyer persona with as much relevant information as can. This will assist you with keyword research as well as creation of content for your website visitors, which is an essential component of search engine optimization (SEO).
5. Start keyword research
Once you build the buyer persona, it is time to get started with keyword research.
As you have a fresh website, we’d recommend targeting long-tail keywords. These keywords consist of three or more words and, therefore, are more focused. Although they have relatively low search traffic, they also have less competition.
Learn more about keywords and how to integrate them into your content.
Here is a selection of keyword research tools that you might use for your research project:
7. Create long-form content
New websites have the best opportunity to rank in the SERPs if they generate extremely informative, detailed and long-form content. Research reveals that search engines are more inclined to rank long-form and comprehensive material (2,000+ words) on the search engine results page.
8. Start building backlinks
Once you have at least 10 good, high-quality blog posts, you can start building backlinks. There are various ways to create backlinks, and this post lists a few of them.
When creating backlinks, keep two things in mind:
- Backlinks should come from high-quality, well-established websites that do not follow black hat (prohibitive) SEO tactics.
- Backlinks should be produced from websites that are directly related to your niche. The links should be relevant in form.
Conclusion
Making a new website search-engine friendly can be a tough job. It takes a lot of time and work. Most importantly, it takes a lot of drive and perseverance.
Follow this SEO guidelines for new websites, and you would be on the right path.
