If you’re considering launching a new website to promote your business, there are plenty of things to consider, including how to get your site ranked highly in search engine results. You may be tempted to rush through this process so you can start getting traffic and converting visitors right away, but it’s much better to take some time upfront to ensure that your SEO strategy is sound. Here are five tips for optimizing your new site for SEO.
1) Get your site crawlable by Google
To rank well, your site should be accessible to Google’s web crawlers. To get your site crawlable by Google, make sure to properly use keywords in your metadata (keywords in page titles and headers), avoid common web development errors that prevent search engines from finding your content (like CSS/script blocks on pages instead of in external files), and follow best practices when it comes to internal linking.
2) Build an anchor text strategy
The concept of anchor text can be a little confusing at first. Here’s a quick breakdown: anchor text is what search engines see in your hyperlinks. If you build an anchor text strategy, you’ll make sure that every time you link to another page, it uses appropriate and natural language. If your business targets specific keywords or phrases, use them—though remember not to overdo it. Don’t include your primary keywords in every single link to other pages on your site; diversify your anchor text by including common phrasing like click here and read more.
3) Build links with your audience
It’s important to keep your audience in mind when trying to build links with other sites. Do you share a target audience? Is your topic relevant to that audience? Look for ways to include your target audience in your outreach, whether that means interacting with them on social media or sharing their content. That could make it easier for them to care about what you have to say, even if they can’t link out directly. Keeping an eye on how Google views link quality also matters—and you can use metrics like Domain Authority as a benchmark as you build links over time. Want more tips? There are tons of resources online and tools that can help automate certain elements of an outreach campaign. Keep reading and learning!
4) Include a sitemap
A sitemap is a document that includes an organization’s web pages and associated information, such as metadata. These can be submitted to search engines like Google or Bing to aid in indexing content and improving ranking. They are especially important when launching a new site since it lets them know what they’ll be dealing with. It’s hard to imagine a website today that doesn’t have one, but there was a time when search engines didn’t always index them (and still don’t recognize their importance). Don’t get left behind by creating one early! With InboundWriter you can add sitemaps directly from your account by selecting Website in your options menu: Editor -> Website Options -> Sitemap Settings. Fill out these fields and click Save Changes
5) Use relevant keywords in site content
This can mean using keywords in your site title, content and URLs. When you’re choosing what to name your site, think about keywords that are relevant to your business but also make sense in a real-world context. For example, if you sell women’s shoes, CouponShoes might be a good fit because it incorporates both keywords while being an understandable phrase that people would naturally search for. If you use relevant keywords when writing site content, each piece will help boost rankings of related pages. Try to insert as many relevant phrases as possible—but not so many that it feels unnatural or makes your content hard to read.