SEO Basics for New Website Owners

SEO Basics for New Website Owners

Over the years, I’ve helped many small and medium scale businesses establish their online presence. Many SEO services remain highly in demand today because businesses know how important it is to gain a prominent ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). When you’re at the top of the SERPs, it improves your credibility, brings more visitors to your website, and increases your revenue. So, if you’re trying to build a business online, there’s no doubt you need SEO.

Today, I want to share with you some basic SEO tips you can follow after setting up your website.

1. Make sure your URLs are SEO-friendly. That means it should be descriptive and separated by dashes. Here’s an example: http://www.yourdomainname.com/this-is-an-seo-friendly-url

2. Follow the best practices for web page titles. That means keep it to less than 70 characters, avoid keyword stuffing and make it unique for each of your web pages.

3. Each web page title should be accompanied by a good description. It needs to be under 156 characters, not stuffed with keywords and it should be descriptive.

4. Use one H1 tag per page. An H1 tag is usually the title of a post. Many website owners use H1 tags for all their headings, but this should not be the case. Pick only one and use H2 or H3 tags for the rest.

5. Create unique content. Make sure that the content on your website is unique. You can check for uniqueness by using tools like Copyscape, which scours  the Web for duplicate copies.

6. Properly format your content. As mentioned earlier, you should use one  H1 tag, a few H2 and H3 tags and other techniques to format your content. That way, it’s easier to skim.

7. Help ensure your pages load quickly. Page speed is an important factor that Google uses in ranking websites. Although it doesn’t necessarily mean that a fast website will gain the top position in the SERPs, but it will definitely rank better than a slow one, all things being equal.

8. Use a mobile-friendly and responsive design. These days, the majority of people use their mobile phones for interacting with social media, surfing the web and even making purchases.

9. Build internal links. Aside from all these elements, you should also work on your internal links to make your pages stronger. These links help search engines crawl your pages better and at the same time, allow your visitors to navigate through your website easily.

When building internal links, keep these tips in mind:

  • Link to relevant pages only.
  • Make your links natural (don’t use keywords as your anchor text).
  • You can add 4 or more internal links for each page.

SEO is a Continuous Effort

A common mistake that webmasters make is that once their website gets to the first page, they stop doing SEO. Remember that SEO is a never-ending process and you need to constantly publish fresh content, engage your visitors and followers, and continue to educate yourself on the latest SEO updates and strategies. If you stop working on your site’s SEO, then pretty soon your competitors will overtake you in the SERPs.