In this article you will read SEO Tips For New Websites. If you just launched your new website on the market, here is a beginner guide with SEO tips to kick start your new website. Once your website is settled down, it is time to welcome crowds of new visitors. And for that, you need your website to get ranked and found on Google, so people can see what you have to offer.

Here is when SEO and earning organic traffic through search engines come into play. Search engine optimization and organic traffic have been two core elements for every website owner for more than 20 years.

What you need to know about SEO is that it is not simple, and it takes a lot of time and action to do SEO in the right way. Organic traffic is often considered the lifeblood of many websites and significantly impacts your rankings. You need to understand that no matter your skill level, you still have an opportunity to improve your website. And a bit of devotion will help you stand out from your competitors.

How to monitor SEO impact?

1. Setup Google Analytics to track site traffic.

No matter what else you do, installing analytics software is a must-try SEO tip (#1). Google Analytics is a free, flexible, and powerful tool that lets you track how many people are using your site and what they are most interested in when they are on your website. GA can also track your sales, the most-wanted content, and how your audience finds your website.

Read More: The Best SEO Tools from Google.

Getting started with GA requires technical skills, but if you use one of the most popular CMS (content management systems), WordPress, you will have several tools and in-depth advice to make it easy. 

2. Setup Google Search Console to see.

Another thing you have to do is set up GSC, a free service to help monitor and optimize your website’s performance in search results. Google Search Console is one of the numerous powerful tools that Google has; it can tell you exactly how often Google bots crawl your website, what they think your site is about, and even some free advice or suggestions on things your website has trouble with. 

Getting started with Google Search Console is simple. All you have to do is: 

• Verify that you are the owner/admin for a website (add a meta tag to your homepage’s HTML code).
• Upload a file to a server.
• Upload a file through your Google Analytics (or Tag Manager setup).

In simple terms, you need to use Google Search Console to make sure Google understands your content, sees which queries drive the most traffic and how often visitors click on your website in the search results and also ensures Google monitors spam issues. 

3. Use Bing Webmaster Tools to get even more information.

Even though in the UK and some other countries, Google is by far the dominant player in the search engine market, millions of daily searches come from using Microsoft as a search engine. So another way to improve your SEO efforts is to understand what Microsoft’s web crawlers think of your website. Like Google, Microsoft also has a great Bing Webmaster Tools tool that provides free information.  

This tool gives you different data to Search Console, including other ideas on how you can improve your site. Bing Webmaster Tools also includes SEO reports and an SEO Analyzer to get you started with actionable recommendations. 

How do you research keywords?

Even though they aren’t the most important factor in SEO, they are still useful and can significantly improve your site’s performance on search engine rankings. Every period you utilize a search engine, you practically use a keyword. Many SEO strategies start with keywords as the first element to focus on because understanding what your audience is exploring is a powerful advantage. 

Here is how to research your keywords:

• Provide your website a home for all cases;

Think of all the essential topics your content is about and group your ideas into buckets. Then, expand those topics into a list of relevant keywords (topical related). When creating this list, put yourself in your audience’s shoes and try to figure out what words they would search with to find your content. 

• See what keywords your website is visible for:

Before finding fresh and original keywords, we suggest you get ideas by understanding and seeing what your website has already been ranked for. The topics you will see are why Google or Bing think your website is a relevant resource. This little investigation will probably reveal some topics you will be surprised about, or parts of your website that have already made progress, etc. 

You can use SEMrush or Serpstat to get a snapshot of the keywords your website is visible for. These third-party tools provide numerous free reports about how much traffic you earned or how your website ranks on Google. 

• Notice which keywords transmit the most traffic to your website:

If you have already set up an account with Google Search Console, or Bing Webmaster Tools, you will be able to get some free keyword ideas for your website. These tools will show how many people have clicked on your result and the keywords/ search terms they have shown your website for.

• Expand your keyword targets with related searches:

Using Google’s data for every search is a smart and free way to get fresh ideas for keywords in your niche. As you probably have noticed, after any search you do on Google, you will see other searches related to it listed at the bottom of the page. Similarly, you can get numerous ideas using this Google’s Suggest functionality – the list of Google indicates when you start typing in the search bar. The search terms appear as Google’s most frequently used search terms. 

You can use tools including Keyword Tool and Ubersuggest that let you enter your seed keyword and find other topic-related keywords based on real searches. You can also use Youtube, Amazon, Wikipedia, etc., which can help you get other search types, such as video or retail. 

• Check out your competitors.

Another SEO strategy you can use is seeing what your competitors rank for. You can do that by entering the competitor domain name in one of the tools used to check out your rankings. Then, you will quickly see what search terms they are getting traffic from and take the best for yourself. 

If you don’t understand who your candidates are, you can search for some of the most important search terms or keyword targets. Websites that consistently rank well are the ones to take a look at. 

• Choose suitable keyword targets: 

Now it’s time to complete a list of potential keywords, and for that, you need to find a way of choosing the best ones to concentrate on. What we consider the best keywords are often referred to as a mix of head and long-tail terms. 

Head terms: 

• Are searched more frequently 
• Have fewer words (3 or less in most cases)
• Are more generic and competitive as a result

Long-tail terms:

• Are less popular 
• Are long phrases (more than three words long)
• Are more specific 

You must remember all the benefits of keywords and generate a healthy mix of head and long-tail targets. 

What do we understand with on-page SEO, and what are the rules?

On-page SEO is the tactic of improving your web pages to earn more traffic by being more relevant to search queries. Everyone can do on-page SEO; you only have to put your efforts into relevancy and try to be as helpful as possible. Below you will find a set of on-page principles detailed that you need to apply:

1.Create better title tags.

One of the main things a searcher sees of your website, the title tag, isn’t visible on the web page itself. Instead, the title tag displays as the blue link in the SERPs and as the main heading when a web page is shared on Facebook or other social media. 

This lets you optimize the title tag in 2 ways:

• First, you can put your primary keyword subject targets in the title tag to show search engines what your web page is about. Preferably it needs to be directed towards the beginning.
• Second, you can build interesting titles that grab attention. This will help you stand out in Google search results, making you earn some extra clicks. But keep in mind that all this depends on your audience and the type of your web page. For example, a blog post and a product description page will have very different title tags. 

2. Use more interesting meta descriptions:

Like title tags, meta descriptions are a simple and highly effective way to improve your search engine optimization. Meta descriptions generate the (small) paragraph of text that appears below a page’s title in the Google search results. 

Meta descriptions are designed to concisely describe what your audience will find on the web page. Even though meta descriptions do not count as a ranking factor, they still impact CTR (click-through rate). Remember, a significant and compelling meta description helps make a result stand out amongst its peers. 

3. Don’t worry about the meta keyword tag:

Regardless of what some guides say, you don’t have to worry about using the meta keywords tag. That’s because it doesn’t help with SEO. 

4. Have sensible URLs:

When creating new web pages, many site owners focus on a more technical topic; reviewing and optimizing their URLs. A simple way to do that is by making URLs short, readable and keyword-subject rich. 

There are a few guiding principles when writing your URLs:

• Use hyphens – not underscores
• Add your primary keyword target (in the first few words)
• Keep them short and simple
• Make them comprehensive
• Don’t use auto-generated URLs 

5. Make the most of your images:

If your new website has many beautiful images, you shouldn’t just stop there. You must use them to their full potential and make sure you have made them as qualitative as possible. It would benefit if you also created them to load as fast as possible by reducing their size in both data and physical size. Then, you have to use a descriptive filename and alt tags to provide the text so Google and different search engines can reasonably understand what your images are about. 

6. Have clear headings:

The web page’s main header tells visitors and search engines what the whole page is about. A heading tag lets you mark up what is a heading/sub-heading on the web page. You can use the H1 tag to show the primary header; most CMSs do this automatically. 

This is what you need to keep in mind:

• Review your H1 tags across your website
• Using a crawler to find the headings
• See if they describe your web page accurately
• Make sure they use the keyword target
• Ensure they match the title tag with what the page is about

Note: Don’t repeat the keywords through your sub-headings. Instead, use variations and natural language to describe your content better. 

7. Improve your content.

Improving your content is the biggest and the broadest topic of doing on-page SEO. First, ensure your web page’s content covers the topic you have chosen. Your content must also address all the relevant keyword variations and the most common audience questions. And last but not least, your content needs to be written well to improve engagement. 

How do you get started with technical SEO?

A technical SEO refers to the elements behind the scenes that your audience don’t see, but still affect their experience on the website. 

Basically, technical SEO is concerned with:

• How a site works
• How search engines crawl and index a web page

8. Do a monthly SEO health check:

You can do a basic SEO check with Search Console, without signing up. Use Google Search Console to check for large issues (a drop in traffic) or to see if your website has been penalized by Google. GSC will email you with the major issues, but still, you need to do proactive SEO health checks. 

Here are some improvements you can make to your SEO by using GSC information: 

• Check your robots.txt files 
• Check the XML sitemaps
• Monitor for new broken links
• Provide a weekly check to help your website in tip-top shape

Is your website mobile-friendly?

Smartphones are now a major part of our daily life. Being so important to all of us, means that smartphones’ usage is huge. And we can clearly understand that most searches are done on smartphones, rather than on computers. 

That’s why it is essential to make sure that your website is mobile friendly. Another massive reason to do that is because Google rewards websites that provide a great user’s experience on mobile phones. Plus, they already have separate search results for smartphone users. 

So the best would be to test your website and work to improve your website in order to succeed in the mobile-first world of search. 

• Have a really fast website:

A slow-loading website can possibly frustrate your audience and they will immediately leave the website. There is a lot of evidence that shows that a slow-loading website performs less well. In this case, you need to audit your website using tools such as Pingdom’s speed test and Google’s Page Speed Insights. With these tools you can quickly compile various options to help your website improve the loading time. You can also review your hosting service and see if it’s doing its work as it should. 

9. See how your website looks to Google.

The best way to check how Google crawls your content is by looking through their eyes. Here is how you can do this:

• Use BROWSEO and involve it in your web page. This tool works as a basic browser and shows you all the tags and content for the website within all the design elements. If you see something missing (yout content), that means that Google and search engines can not read it. 
• Use GSC (Google Search Console) and put in your URL. Then select if you want to check the mobile or desktop version. Next, bring back all the information on how Google sees and interprets your page. This will help you spot the differences (if any), between how search engines, i.e. Google sees your page, how they think the audience sees it, and how we know a browser displays your web page.   

– Fix broken links:

It is normal for any website owner to lose or remove certain web pages. But that will frustrate visitors when their journey is suddenly blocked by a dead web page. What’s worse is that these pages that are removed lose the importance Google or a search engine has given to them.

We suggest you regularly and frequently check your site for broken links and pages. You can do that by:

• Using Google Search Console to see all the errors  Google has found on your website
• Using a web crawler to hunt errors down yourself

Then you can edit your internal links so they point the audience to the right web page. Then it is time to think about what you should do with the old URL. So, if you have to do with a valuable web page or with a page that has a direct replacement, use a 301 redirect to redirect your old URL to its successor. Although it might sound complicated, the good news is that this process is simple in most CMSs. 

– Upload a XML Sitemap:

You can give Google and Bing a list of all the web pages you want them to notice by using XML sitemaps. A XML sitemap is a file you can add to your website that lists all the URLs for a website. Many CMSs create this file automatically for you and you can choose yourself which page to remove. 

10. Fix any duplicate content issues.

One of the most common issues that you can encounter on a website or web page is duplicate content. Duplicate content generally refers to a specific content that appears more than one time on a website. You need to know that some content management systems (CMSs) allow you to access the same content via different URLs, if you don’t set them up right. And that often causes issues and confusion to search engines when deciding which is the best version of content to choose. But the good news here is that most duplicate content issues do not cause a website to get penalized by Google, unless you are being spammy. 

There are some excellent ways to fix duplicate content issues:

• Check your indexed web pages by using a website search.
• Crawl your website to find any duplicate content issue.

Another smart way to fix duplicate content and remedy the situation is using *canonical* tags or adjusting your settings. 

– Check your robots.txt file:

A robots.txt file is a must have for all types of websites. It is a small but useful file that is positioned in the roots of your server and you will find it in this format: yourdomain.uk/robots.txt. Robots.txt file is used to instruct Google bots crawling your website where they are allowed to. 

Hence, you need to have a look at your website and see if you are blocking any of your web pages you want Google and other search engines to see. You also need to check if there are sections of your website you need to block access to. 

GSC (Google Search Console) has a user-friendly tool that can test your robots.txt file and see if it is working as it should. 

How do you earn links?

Links play a major part in most SEO strategies and campaigns. That is because they connect paths of the Internet and are the primary way to move from one website to another. Another reason is that a link from one website to another acts as a citation (citation is evidence that a specific website is useful and interesting). Furthermore, search engines like Google view these types of citations as a sign of authority. 

Here are some ways to build links:

• Discover out who is linking to your website:

The first thing you should do is know what your current link profile looks like. If your website is on a new domain, you may not have many links. You can use Search Console’s report “Links to your site” and see the domains linking to you. If you like what you see, you are in good condition. Otherwise, it would help if you take further action. You can use backlink tools to investigate further how to build links. 

• Look at your competitors’ backlinks. 

If you want to understand better the challenge you face to rank well in your niche or even to steal ideas on how to get started, you need to turn to your competitors. Once you are there, please look deeply at their earned links and how they got them. Then you can uncover new tactics and get inspiration for your ideas. 

Another thing you can do is construct a reasonable idea of how many links you need and how authoritative they should be to compete. To check out your competitor’s links, you need to search for their most popular URLs (use the link: command in Google). If you desire to go further, you can use any backlink tools and search for the most influential links. To start with, you can use the “Open Link Profiler” tool, which provides you with a lot of data for free. 

• Compile your assets:

Creating something new that can be in the interest and use of your audience is one of the best ways to start generating links. To do that, you need to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and consider what they are interested in in your market. You also need to use all your business assets and then work to get as much attention as possible and increase your site’s authority. 

Remember: Building links is much easier when your content is worth linking. 

11. Design a link-earning strategy. 

After seeing what links you and your competitors have, it is time to start building up your profile. Also, the best method is to set your goals and keep the same compatible line with your overall marketing focus. 

What you should do is turn your focus on finding what your audience wants and create the right content that matches their needs and interests. 

Note: Link-building process is not something that happens overnight; hence the results are not spontaneous. 

How do you optimize for local SEO?

Some websites are built to support offline businesses. If you have one, we can say that you need to spend a large portion of your initial SEO effort on local SEO. 

Local SEO involves promoting your website when potential clients are looking on your website for a certain product in your area. It is all about appearing on the top of the search results when your audience uses a local keyword/search term or even when a search engine tells their location. 

Despite having its tactics and rules, local SEO has a wide range of hugely beneficial principles:

• Get your NAP accurate and consistent

If you want your local SEO to be as effective as possible, you must ensure you have an accurate and consistent NAP (name, address, and phone number). Not only that, but all your citations need to be consistent because they serve as an online reference for your business. 

• Claim your spot on Google My Business

If you are fresh to local SEO, you must first claim your listing with search engines like Google. With this, we refer to those business listings that appear when you search in Google and when you get Google Maps in your results. For that, you will need to use Google My Business tool. With GMB, you can add opening times, diverse photos, ensure your NAP is up-to-date, etc. You can also start collecting reviews about your business/website and try to put it in the right category. This acquires an entire long-term process, so it will normally take several days. 

• Build citations

Essentially, a local SEO campaign builts the number of your actual listings. With that, we refer to the number of places you can add your website/business and then get a citation. To expand your portfolio, you need to do a simple competitor analysis. 

It would help if you started searching for your competitor’s name and postcode to find other areas where your competitors have grabbed a listing. 

• Encourage your customers to leave reviews. 

Even though it may seem scary, reviews are a core factor if you want to improve your local SEO. It is important to know that search engines like Google favor websites with more reviews in their local packs. 

You must encourage your visitors/clients to add more reviews on places like Yelp, Google Maps, etc. 

Note: You must beware of fake reviews because Google may notice them and penalize your website. 

• Target the community with content to reach local links 

Now that you’ve started your local SEO effort, you must create content matching your audience’s needs and interests. Of course, the best is to create content of the needs and interests of your local readers. 

Like in other aspects, in local SEO, your ranking weight is influenced by the health of your backlinks profile. What is more interesting is that creating local content for your community can attract local press attention. You can also attend neighborhood guides, sponsorships, local events, and many other options to earn links from your target community. 

I hope you enjoyed this article, and it helped you create a more in-depth analysis of what SEO is and what are the best SEO tips if you are launching a new website on the market.