SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is crucial to the success of your website. With the right SEO strategy, your website will appear at the top of search engine results when someone searches for something related to your site. For example, if you sell women’s handbags, you want your site to be one of the first people see when they search for “discount handbags” or “designer handbags.”
Implementing SEO is an ongoing responsibility for promoting your site and maintaining your site traffic. Google is constantly changing its search algorithms, and every time it does, it changes what site owners have to do for their SEO. To give your website the very best start, you have to begin implementing SEO strategies as soon as you register the domain. In fact, the domain name you choose can influence your SEO, such as if you choose keywords for your site name, like designerhandbags.com.
Here are a few things you can do to give your website the best start with SEO:
Choose the right host
One of the often overlooked components of SEO is reducing bounce rate and improving page loading time. You can do both by simply choosing the right web host. A professional service like Hostgator shared hosting will provide all the bandwidth you need for your growing site and ensure fast loading times for pages, graphics and other site elements.
With the faster loading times, your visitors will happily click through to your content, reducing your bounce rate and improving your page rank. The best web hosts will also include tools to boost your SEO, such as automatic search engine submissions, analytics that help you identify your site’s weaknesses, and page crawlers that identify errors.
Do keyword research
Before you can implement the proper SEO strategy, you have to identify the right keywords for your website. Otherwise, you can put a lot of time and effort into ranking for keywords that your target audience do not use, which can get you a lot of traffic but not the conversions you need to be successful.
Google offers a free keyword tool to help with your research, and there are several paid options available. Perform extensive research on potential keywords, noting both their local and global search volume and the competition for them. Ideally, you want to target keywords that have a moderate to high search volume but not an overwhelming amount of competition.
Implement SEO in site creation
Once you have identified the right keywords for your site, you can begin using them right away. SEO should be at the top of your mind while you are creating your site. You should be including keywords in your title tags, meta descriptions, headers, alt images, content and more. Keywords should be used throughout your page architecture, giving search engines more ways to catalog your site and rank it.
The right template will include the framework for you to add these elements. However, if yours does not, you can use plugins to help you boost your on-page SEO. WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of the most popular plugins, but many others are available.
By implementing the right SEO strategies into your site right from the start, you will improve your page rank much more quickly and start getting the traffic and conversions you need. Any time that your site is up and is not fully optimized is time that is wasted.
Do not think that SEO does not matter because your site is new – the best way to make it the established and respected site you want it to be is to start to develop a good SEO strategy now, from the beginning.