There is no doubt that getting your website live and making sure it gets indexed is a daunting task, especially if you only have minimal knowledge with search engine optimization.
After establishing a good looking interface, you need to start publishing your content. But how do you go about optimizing your content and the entire website?
Before writing, editing and publishing a topic, post or infographic, you must ask yourself the following questions:
> What is my site all about?
> Why did I start a website?
> How much commitment do I need to pour in my website?
Once you have the answers for these three questions, you will have a clearer picture on the direction of your website. To effectively build an SEO campaign from the ground and up, you need to think about the following ten practices to gain lasting traffic:
- Decide On A Website Niche
This is the specialty of your website. Typically, it is best to focus on one thing but it can also be about other topics. You just need to make sure that you have one primary topic and it will be the most essential part of your website.
Choosing your website niche is important as this will also be the basis on what type of audience you are going to attract. Naturally, if you are selling beauty and health products, your blogs and other posts should be related to these two topics.
- Do Keyword Research
Mentioning relevant keywords is very important especially in ranking your page. Make that you domain name, site title, tagline, keywords, description, blog categories, page content, page titles, videos, photos and other content are in line with your website niche.
- Write Like A Human
Years ago, article spinning was an effective way to cheat with your site’s SEO. However, search engine bots have become smarter now. In fact, Google penalizes websites that publish poorly written posts or articles.
Make sure to write naturally and avoid creating content that would sound like a robot has wrote it for you. You can search on writing SEO pages for you to determine the correct ways on how to publish an article that search engines would love.
- Use a Permalink Structure For Individual Posts
Some websites have a very random permalink structure that usually use letter or numbers to identify pages. However, this does nothing to SEO. Instead, you a URL structure that shows texts and make sure that you include relevant keywords in your URL. If you are using WordPress, you can easily edit your permalink however you want it.
- Utilize Your Images for SEO
Images are not just there to beautify your website. It can actually benefit you in terms of SEO by adding a title, description and alt attributes. Make sure that you use words that reflect to your website and article topic. It is also a good idea to re-title the image’s file name of it does not reflect the relevant keywords that you want to use.
- Provide Reliable Links
As a website owner, you should think about serving your readers. This means you can include a link list, a blogroll or a resource page.
But make sure to use this sparingly as every outbound link is a vote for another website. But if you add reliable links of authority websites and your readers click them, this tells search engines that you are reliable source on the niche you have chosen.
- Link To Internal Pages
Getting a web hosting company that provides content management systems will usually do this for you. However, if your web hosting provider does not, you can do thin on your own by linking important pages directly to other relevant content in your website. This is called cross-linking.
- Update Frequently
It is one thing to publish relevant, insightful and dynamic content to rank higher on search engines. But it is also another thin to stay consistent. No matter how well-written your posts or articles are, they will be all for nothing if you do not update your website at least once a day. Search engines also track the websites that are constantly active and being updated.
- Have Other Websites Link To You
When it comes to SEO, it is incredibly vital that you have other well-performing website to link to you. This somehow transfers some of their link juice to your website.
You can either visit other similar-niche blogs and apply as a contributor or you can offer them a compelling guest post. Regardless of what you do and as stated by Nimeskern, inbound links are essential to SEO and it should be done as naturally as possible.
- Stop Changing Your Domain Name
One of the biggest mistakes many new website owners make is that they keep changing their domain name. The age of your URL is a factor in your site’s search ranking and frequently changing it will only sabotage your chances of ranking higher in the search engine results page.
The bottom line is building a well optimized website take time. But if you stick to the correct practices, it will surely pay off.
