Effective SEO Tips for New Websites

Categorized in: SEO

It’s true that it is never too late to do SEO on your website. However, the sooner you start doing it, the better. What’s even better is if you can start working on the SEO before the website even launches. Doing so will give you an edge over the competition. In fact, you should start with your SEO in the planning stages because even something like keyword research can uncover information that will help you compose your website content and give you some data in how to create a website that will connect to your audience.

Are you wondering on some SEO tips that will help new websites? Here’s a look at the best way to approach it:

Keyword Research

All SEO programs should begin with keyword research, and working on it for a new website isn’t any different. The one difference is that you may be doing the keyword research before the site goes live, which means that the content may not even be written yet. For more established websites, content will play a factor in helping you do the keyword research. Remember that keyword research will help you gain new insights about the state of your industry, what your customers expect, and more.

For new websites, you have a bit more of a blank slate. This means that whatever keyword research you do will impact your content if it isn’t written yet, rather than the content impacting the keyword research. In both cases, it is important to analyze keywords in reference to the target marketing, the industry, and more. So, this should always be a factor.

Once the keyword research is done, you can use them to help you write the page-by-page content. While you won’t want to stuff the content with keywords, you can use them to inspire the content itself. They don’t need to be present on the page in order to be returned in the search engines, the page just needs to be helpful and relevant.

On-Page Elements

Just like with an established website, you will need to optimize the on-page elements for SEO. The only difference is that, with it being a new website, you will likely get to establish the SEO for these elements before the website goes live. Here’s what to look at:

URL – The URL for a page should be clean and simple and not contain any filler words. It should describe the page. For example, if the page is called “Contact Us” the URL would be websitename.com/contact-us.
Title Tags – Each page will have its own, unique title tag. This won’t be visible on the page, but is rather in the backend. The crawlers will see it. It can help the search engines discover what the website and page is about.
Description – Also known as the meta description, this page element also describes the content on the page. These should also be optimized for SEO.
Header Tags – Be sure to write header tags for each page, where possible. Think of these as your page title (usually H1), subtitle (usually H2), and subheadings (usually H3 tags). These can help the search engines determine what the page is about, and also help the users, too.

Remember that with a new website, you can do the SEO as you are creating the site and won’t need to backtrack once the site goes live.