10 vital steps for proper SEO of a new website

“The best way to sell something: don’t sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect, and trust of those who might buy.” — Rand Fishkin

It is not enough to create a website and expect that it will immediately begin to attract users and bring profits. For users to get to your site, it needs to appear in search engine rankings. This aspect is the responsibility of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

So how do you make sure that your new website is ranked high in Google search? Let me share it with you!

#1. Register your site in the Search Console

Google Search Console is an essential tool for SEO optimizations for the Google search engine.

Positions in the results are influenced by the relevance of content to the search query, page load speed, behavioral signals, the presence of technical errors, and many other factors. You can get a complete picture of a resource’s performance in Google searches with Search Console.

You need to register your site with this resource to start optimizing. It is important to remember that the console is just a tool that shows you the weak points. Your job is to fix them.

#2. Choose the SEO plugin

Everything is simple here. Depending on the platform on which the site is made you need to choose an SEO plugin or module that will help you make the initial SEO settings.

#3. Robots configuration

The robots.txt file is responsible for proper site traversal by Google search bots. Its absence or incorrect setting can lead to incorrect indexing, which in turn will have a negative impact on the position of the site in search engines.

How to create robots.txt?

Since this is a text file, you should use any text editor. Once you have opened a new text document, you have already started creating robots.txt, all you need to do is compose the content, depending on your requirements, and save it as a text file named robots in txt format. It’s simple, and creating the file shouldn’t cause problems even for beginners.

Here’s a complete guide on robots.txt creation.

#4. Run a technical audit with Screaming Frog Seo Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop website scanning program. An indispensable tool for technical audits. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that helps you improve onsite SEO, by extracting data & auditing for common SEO issues.

With the help of this utility, you can quickly pick out the technical problems of the site to make a competent requirements specification for improvements. But to see the problem, you need to set up the crawler properly. You can find answers to all your questions about this tool on their official website.

#5. Fill categories and product pages with content

Regularly filling the site with unique content is a key factor that affects the site’s ranking.

Google uses the Freshness algorithm, which captures the relevance of content, and therefore content is a priority ranking factor.

Filling a site is a really important task for search engine promotion. But first and foremost, you need to please your target audience. After all, users like to be given fresh, relevant information that they can apply today.

The main thing is to publish useful and interesting information for your audience on the site.

#6. Linking

Linking is an important element of search engine optimization and usability. Without quality linking, that is, the correct placement of links between sites and between the internal pages of the resource, you will have difficulties with getting your site on top of search rankings.

Linking is an effective way to increase user engagement, it involves placing links from one page to another. This forms a link structure, with which the user can get from one section to another, click on them, learn more about products and services. This will lead to greater interest in your resource and spending more time on the site.

Linking helps to achieve the following:

• Increased engagement
• Improved usability
• Reduced bounce rate
• Improved indexing
• Distribution of link weight (you can redistribute the weight of pages so that the most important pages get the maximum authority, thus increasing their chance to reach the top in search engines)

#7. Optimize metadata on main pages

More often than not, metadata is hidden from visitors of web portals, although it is significant for SEO optimization.

Metadata is used to promote a resource. It should be understood that the content management system used can do almost everything for the owner of the resource. Meta generation can occur automatically and in the correct format. But this is not always the case, so you need to be prepared to optimize them manually.

#8. External links

External links — an effective tool for website promotion.

They allow:

• Speed up the pages’ indexation
• Increase PageRank, and therefore the position in the search query
• Boost traffic

One of the easiest ways to get external links is to try to get as many links as possible from various forums. When you start your store, you can write in various threads or discussions yourself and leave links to your site there.

#9. Advertise

Paid promotion, contextual advertising — a working option to bring your site to the first position in search results for a particular query range.

The user enters a search query into the line of Yandex or Google and in response to it receives results. In the first place is just a block of contextual advertising.

Advertising is a costly way to promote your site, but it is much faster than SEO.

#10. Check pages and re-index

The last step is to check the created pages. You need to check when the pages are indexed. If any of the pages do not appear in the search engine for a long time, you need to submit it for reindexing in the Search Console.

SEO optimization isn’t easy, but it offers great opportunities for the future success of your business by helping to ensure your brand’s presence in the search engines. And remember:

“The best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google.” — Unknown