Use SEO effectively for a new website

So you’ve finally taken the plunge and decided to create a website for your business? Great idea! But where do you start? And how can you make sure that you don’t end up being one of the plenty in a pile that no one is sorting through?

SEO can be incredibly effective for your website, but you need to get your fundamentals right to do a good job. This guide aims to help you get started with optimising your new website effectively for search engines.

What Does Website SEO Mean?

The goal of SEO is not to cheat search engines to reach the top, but ultimately to achieve the following:

  • Create a good user experience.
  • Communicate your content to search engines so they can endorse your website in relation to specific searches.
  • Increase the number of visitors and quality of traffic to your website.

Google promotes high-quality web pages to the top of search engine rankings, so it us important for you to create content that resonates best with your target audience. This involves creating content that is useful for readers because helpful content is typically shared on multiple platforms, which results in Google recommending the website for higher search engine rankings.

How To Use SEO Effectively For Your New Website?

Basic SEO is essential and will help position your website as an authority page. Employing certain strategies will help you use SEO effectively for your new website:

Understand What Search Engines Look For

Your first step is to better understand what search engines look for when it comes to promoting certain websites over others. So what are search engines looking for?

  • Content – Well-written content relevant to specific searches will enable you to deliver what users want to read.
  • Authority – Does your website have enough quality content that other websites want to link to? If not, you may want to rethink your content strategy to promote content that is authoritative in nature.
  • Performance – Is your website performing optimally? How fast does it load and is it user friendly? Poorly performing websites will have less traffic than higher performing ones.
  • User Experience – How do users find your website? Can people navigate through different pages easily? What are your bounce rates? Answering these questions will help you create a better user experience for customers.

Search engines are always updating what they look for, so make sure you refresh your content accordingly.

Avoid The Techniques That Will Bring Down Your Rankings

Search engine bots and spiders are always going through websites to audit their performance, so it’s important to avoid techniques that will hurt your rankings over time. If you undertake shady tactics, like the ones below, you will end up hurting your long-term efforts:

  • Keyword stuffing – Some people think that stuffing keywords into content will help optimise them for search engines, but the reality is the opposite.
  • Purchasing links from shady sources – Buying links will ultimately hurt your SEO efforts, so make sure you avoid this tactic even though other websites may be employing it.
  • Heavy videos and slow load speeds – While tempting to load your website with videos and rich content, always consider load speeds. Slow load speeds will hurt the user experience and will result in higher bounce rates, which will hurt your long-term SEO rankings.
  • Avoid too many ads – Too many website ads will make it hard for users to find relevant content, and will result in them turning to your competitors.

Be Clear About Your Business Model To Create A Clear Call To Action

While obvious enough, many websites create confusion for readers when it comes to establishing a clear call to action from them.

Your goal should be to clearly understand your business model, so that you are able to create a clear call to action from your users. Consider the following:

  • What do you want from your users?
  • Are you intending to make a sale, sign up new customers for your database, build contacts or get people to download information?
  • What are your main business goals?
  • How will you position the call to action on your website?

A clear call to action statement is important to generate the results you desire. Failure to pay attention to this factor will hurt your long-term SEO efforts.

Optimise For Multiple Social Media Channels

There is no point of building a website that no one can see. But many businesses don’t realise the power of social media when it comes to driving enhanced visibility. Your SEO strategy should not only be confined to your web content, but it should be extended to social media channels, including:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Snapchat

While all these platforms may not necessarily be right for your business, some of them will certainly be vital to drive visibility. Be consistent with your messages across these different platforms to facilitate your branding efforts and optimise your web pages.

Focus On Metadata

Content on any website should have meta descriptions and title tags as part of the overall SEO strategy. Consider the following for your website’s meta data:

  • Meta keywords should be formatted correctly and should clearly explain what the content refers to.
  • Meta descriptions should be accurate, unique and should clearly articulate the content of a specific web page.
  • Avoid duplicate meta descriptions from one page to another because this may harm your SEO efforts.
  • Focus on creating unique title tags that are not to short or too long, and should be enticing enough to get readers to click on them for more information.

Metadata can play a key role in your SEO efforts, so don’t ignore how important they can be for your brand new website.

Creating a new website can be daunting when you haven’t done it before. These fundamentals will help you get on the right track, so you develop a website that search engines will promote during searches. At the end of the day, search engine optimisation should always be at the forefront of any strategy to maximise results for your business.

Mike Smith
Mike Smith
Executive Editor at Best in Australia. Mike has spent over a decade covering news related to business leaders and entrepreneurs around Australia and across the world. You can contact Mike here.
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