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Basics of SEO are the same they were a few years back. Looking at the basics not much has changed, but out of the many things that remained the same one sticks out, and that is the failure to learn proper SEO implementation, which is one of the most important parts when starting up a website. Tips that we will cover in this post can be used by beginners planning to start a website or already established brands looking to improve their online presence.
Setup Monitoring – Webmaster Tools and Analytics
This has become a regular routine for me, so the first thing I do when I purchase a domain and add it to a hosting account is to setup Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. Why is this important, and it is whether you are creating a new website or you failed to add these to your existing one. Webmaster tools will allow you to monitor any broken pages on your site or to add a sitemap which will increase the number of pages indexed on your site. Not to mention the fact that you can use the linking data and keywords for further SEO efforts. The same goes for Analytics, which provides valuable metrics pertaining to your traffic sources and helps you target the right audience and tweak your marketing campaigns accordingly.
Keyword Research – Content and Linking
The next part is keyword research. We rely on keywords for majority of organic traffic we receive. So this is a three step process, and again, although best implemented from the start, already established websites need to analyze and modify their pages accordingly. The first step is the actual keyword research. You can start it by using several market defining keywords, like “sport” “travel” gambling” “marketing” etc… Use Google Adwords keyword tool or any other keyword tool you prefer to get massive list of related keywords.
Now break it down to your specific market and choose at least 100 keywords related to your market that you want to target. Save them in an Excel sheet and order them by priority, search volume, competition and trends. Once you ordered your keywords the next step come to play and that is optimising your pages for your chosen keywords.
This usually doesn’t take a lot of effort, and most of the times once you finish with this step, assuming that you created high quality content on your website, you can start with the third step, link building. But in order to maximize your pages you need to focus on quality, to avoid being seen as spammy you only need to add your most important keyword into several strategic locations: URL, Page Title, Headings, anchor texts, and maybe a mention here are there throughout the page including variations of the main keyword or LSI keywords.
Link building is the last part, the ongoing part of SEO. The idea is simple, build quality links from quality websites and pages, the ones you yourself find useful. Don’t go around creating links blindly and without a plan. The keywords you used to optimise your pages are your linking keywords as well. So if you optimised a page for “Nike summer running shoes” you should link with the exact match anchor text or LSI keywords. Define your priority landing pages and start from the top and work your way down the list of pages and keywords.
Brand Outreach
Social media becomes more important each passing day. The number of people using social media is rising, at the same time you are getting a larger targeted audience all in one place, ready for you to engage them and promote your brand and your products and services, all if done right. By identifying and establishing your brand early you are building up your authority and outreach, so a presence in the most used social media networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as well as your market networks (if any) is absolutely necessary. But simply having an account and promoting your services won’t do, engagement is the key to success here, so there is a lot of work involved with social networks, but the benefits are endless.
This is a basic overview of search engine optimisation from the very start. Following these three simple guidelines can take you a long way if implemented correctly. Most websites and business with online presence started the wrong way and are now paying large amount of money to have their mistakes corrected, so make sure you start the right way by optimising your website from the very beginning.
Alex Petrovic (@Alex_DejanSEO) is an Advanced SEO strategist for Dejan SEO company. You can find more information about what services they provide on their website. You can also find the company on Twitter.