Taking Your First Steps In SEO
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If you’ve just started your own website, then you’re probably looking at Google and wondering how you get your site on the rankings. Google and the other search engines are your route to free traffic, and it’s more attainable than you probably think.
In order to make the most of the opportunities Google offers you though, you’re going to have to implement good SEO (search engine optimization) and follow some important rules with your website. The good thing is, following best practice isn’t that difficult, it just takes take consistent time and effort.
There are lots of different considerations in SEO, some more important than others, but these four points are great places to start out.
Produce Exceptional Content
When you break it down into simple terms, the function of Google is simple. It wants to send people to the content that best answers their queries. If you’re consistently producing the very best content out there, then Google is going to start sending people to it – because that’s its job.
If you want to sit at the top of the rankings, you’ve got to earn it. You need to help Google fulfil its job by offering content that’s answers peoples’ questions and entertains them. If you do this better than everyone else, then you’re going to be rewarded.
Do Your Keyword Research
Google can’t know what your content is about unless you tell it what it’s about. One of the ways you do this is through keywords. By using keywords in your headings, subheadings and texts, you’re letting the search engines know what it is you’re talking about.
Doing keyword research before you start is important because you need to go after the right keywords to give yourself the best chance of ranking. As a new website, you don’t want to be going after extremely competitive keywords when you’re competing against huge websites.
Instead, you want to find less competitive keywords that still get search volume and gradually work your way up as your site becomes more established.
Build Your Authority
One way to give yourself a better chance of ranking for those more competitive keywords is to build your authority. This is done by building backlinks – links from other sites that point back to your website.
The more you can get links from authoritative websites, the more your domain authority is going to go up and the easier you will find it to rank.
Reach out to other websites in your niche and ask if you can get a link. A great way to get backlinks is through blogger outreach, where you write content for other peoples’ websites and include your link.
Keep User Experience in Mind
As much as SEO is important to your website, you’ve still got to cater for the humans that are actually using it. Make sure your site is easy to use, works well on mobile devices and loads quickly. Websites that load slowly and don’t work for mobile frustrate users, and therefore struggle in the rankings. If you keep things simple and make your site fast and intuitive, you’re going to make the bots happy as well as the humans.
Do Not Cheat The System
Many people attempt to apply the fundamentals of SEO in an underhanded way in order to get ahead. They’ll input lots of keywords into areas that perhaps they shouldn’t, and they’ll throw in a lot of spam. They think this will make things a lot simpler for them and that it’ll help them to score high in terms of their SEO rating. That’s not how it works, of course – you need to create organic and real content if you’re to receive genuine results when it comes to the ROI of search engine optimization. If you try to cheat your way through, you’ll be found out immediately and receive a terrible rank.