How does a new site start ranking? Does it magically appear on Google after you launch it? What do you need to do to start ranking on Google and getting search engine traffic? Check out this SEO tips guide on what are the first practices on new sites to rank higher in search engines and get better traffic.
Here, I’ll explain the first steps you’ll need to take a right after launching your new website. Learn how to get started in SEO for new sites with the following guide!
First SEO Practices Top 7
1 – External Links
After my friend launched her website, she celebrated and asked her friends, including me, what they thought of her new site. I love her site, but I couldn’t find her on Google, not even if I googled the exact domain name. My first question to my friend was: do you have another site linking to your site? And her answer was ‘no.’ I linked to her site from my site, and after half a day, her website popped up in the search results. One of the first best practices tips when working on SEO for new sites is to get at least one external link.
Google is a search engine that follows links. For Google to know about your site, it must be found by following a link from another location. Google found my friend’s site because I put a link to that site on my site. When Google came around to crawl my site after I put the link there, it discovered the existence of my friend’s site. And indexed it. After indexing the site, it started to show the site in the search results.
2 – Setup
After that first link, your site probably will turn up in the search results. If it doesn’t turn up, it could be that the settings of your site are on .noindex is still blocked by robots.txt. If that’s the case, you’re telling Google not to index your site. Sometimes developers forget to turn either of these off after they finish working on your site.
Some pages are just not the best landing pages. You don’t want people landing on your checkout page, for instance. And you don’t want this page to compete with other – useful – content or product pages to show up in the search results.
Yoast SEO can help you to set up these pages with .noindex. That means Google will not save this page in the index and will not turn up in the search results.
3 – Keywords for First SEO Practices
My friend’s site now ranks on her domain name. That’s about it. She’s got some work to start ranking on other terms as well. When you want to improve the SEO for a new website, you have to carry out some proper keyword research. So go find out what your audience is searching for! What words do they use?
If you execute your keyword research properly, you’ll end up with a long list of search terms for which you want to be found. Make sure to search for those terms in Google yourself. What results are there already? Who will be your online competitors for these search terms? What can you do to stand out from these results?
4 – Writing
Then you start writing. Write about all those topics that are important to your audience. Use the words you came up with in your keyword research. You need to have content about the topics you want to rank for to start ranking in the search results.
5 – Snippets
Take a look at your results in the search engines once you start ranking (the so-called snippets). Are those meta descriptions and the titles of the search results inviting? Are they tempting enough for your audience to click on them? Or should you write better ones?
6 – Structure for First SEO Practices
Which pages and posts are most important? These should have other pages and posts linking to them. Make sure to link to the most important content. Google will follow your links, and the post and pages that have the most internal links will be most likely to rank high in the search engines. Setting up such a structure is basically telling Google which articles are important and which aren’t.
7 – Link Building
Google follows links. Links are important. So get the word out. Reach out to other site owners – preferably of topically related websites – and ask them to write about your new site. If Google follows multiple links to your website, it’ll crawl it more often. This is crucial when you SEO a new website and will eventually help your rankings. Don’t overdo link building for SEO; buying links is still a no-go.
Links are an important ranking factor and a great indicator of what content is relevant and important. However, it’s about more than getting hundreds of links quickly. It’s about getting quality, reputable sites that link to your site.
Conclusion
I hope this guide with top tips on SEO first practices on new sites gives you an idea of ‘where to start your search engine optimizations on your new website.
But remember to be patient, as search engines take time to crawl your site and start ranking. So feel free to use the comments section below if you have any questions.
