Do you know that Google has officially turned 24 this year? While it might be news to you, to others, it’s twenty-four years of incredible succession. They’ve spent years ranking at the top of this amazing search engine until it got saturated, and ranking is no longer a child’s game. 

A lot has changed in these years, but one fact remains intact. Everything’s available for your assistance; you just need to put in a little focus to get your website ranked. 

If you’ve recently finished your website, it is easy to get overwhelmed and distracted. Well, the next step is to rank it, which makes the SEO part mandatory. But before that, you need to optimise your website for the search engine.

Here’s a complete guide on how to optimise your website for SEO:

What is SEO? A Brief Introduction

SEO refers to “Search Engine Optimisation, ” a process to increase your website’s traffic organically. Firstly, SEO aims to rank your web on the first page of Google, and secondly, it makes your web easily discoverable. This means when someone searches related to your brand, your web will appear at the top of their results. 

Let us make you understand the context with an example. Imagine you run an online fitness club, providing diet plans and workout sessions on your website. On your website, you’ve posted an article on weight loss. When end-users search with a key phrase like “weight loss tips”, they will immediately get connected to you. That’s the power of good SEO: connecting your potential prospects as a solution to their struggles. 

How to Optimise your Website for SEO?

There’s barely anything more daunting than starting up a new business endeavour. After all, building your brand among competitors is a challenging feat. Fortunately, great SEO techniques will fight half of the battle for you, resulting in ranking you on search engines like Google and Bing. 

Here’s a step-by-step checklist for newly-born websites in this beginner-level guide:

• Choose a Short and Concise Domain Name 

Your domain is the identification of your website, so it must be well-groomed and properly aligned with your business. Upon reading it, users must be able to get an idea of your brand and its offerings instantly. For that, you need to keep it short, catchy and memorable. You aim to make it easy to remember for others to recall your domain’s name whenever referring to your niche. 

In addition, it’s also vital for your ranking purpose. Search engine crawlers will pay special attention to a domain name to see what a website is about. In this regard, you need to place your primary keyword in it to get it ranked. The keyword showcases a user’s intent and makes you unique from others. 

At last, your domain name must be unique and not plagiarised. In this case, you can walk through the market online. Having a unique website name will also help build your credibility as a new website.

•  Outline your Website’s Structure and Architecture 

Search engine crawlers must swim through your pages to help index your website. It helps them collect the info needed to classify and rank each web website accordingly. For this reason, sketch out a site’s map of what pages your website must include beforehand. You might initiate with a homepage, about page, contact page and services. 

Once you’re done with the granular details of your business and services, the required web content will quickly add up. Structuring your site’s design and architecture is handy for a few reasons. Firstly, it ensures you’ve organised the content for humans and robots. Secondly, you’ll know how much content you need to add and how many web pages are required to store it.

•  Decide if You Want To Lend Extra Hands

Now that you’ve got the website’s structure in hand, you must’ve got an idea of the work your website is still demanding. Since you’re a beginner, it’s the moment to decide whether you want to build the web or hire an expert.

For instance, you can hire a developer to shape the skeleton of your website and guide you about management, also known as a content management system (CMS). Then, you can populate the web pages with content. Whichever path you choose, ensure that you can expertly handle the CMS. 

• Place a Content Calendar for Future 

There’s nothing harsher than leaving your new website without a feed. How would you notify the users about your existence? Of course, with gentle reminders in the form of content. That’s why you should be updating and expanding your website regularly. A professional tip from successful bloggers is to create a weekly calendar, to line up one week’s content in advance. It lets you stay ahead of the game and inform Google that you’re actively participating in the ranking race.

• Prioritise On-site and Off-site SEO 

Regarding onsite SEO, it demands more than creating appealing content. And so you’ve to chisel every page with keeping onsite and off-site SEO in mind. In the onsite checklist, you’ll include the targeted keywords, title tags, strong meta description, and optimised visuals. All these factors work to improve your search engine results on SERPs. 

On the other hand, off-site SEO demands authority from already-progressed websites, which is quite hard to achieve as a newbie. When starting, it’s wise to focus on onsite SEO first. However, there’s a way to immediately pave the path to off-site SEO: to build a strong website with which other websites would like to connect. And the best way to achieve it is by creating excellent, SEO-friendly content.

•  Learn All About Tracking and Analytics 

Before launching your website, get a hold of analytics tools to assess your website’s SEO success. Google Analytics will be a good start. Once you’ve done with account creation, you can achieve valuable insights about customer acquisition, conversions and behaviour. 

For instance, it allows you to see the geographical location of your audience and determine the time they spend on various pages of your website. This info makes it easy to acknowledge what your visitors do and don’t like about you. Let’s assume they’re sparing more time on blogs; you need to work on videos.

• Stay Updated with SEO Best Practices 

SEO isn’t a one-time effort but requires constant attention. It isn’t a task you can complete once and never touch afterwards. If you’re concerned about how to optimise your website for SEO regularly, you can easily pull this off with consistency. 

Regular site edits are necessary to identify ranking problems and make improvements. In this regard, reading blogs from industry experts helps you stay updated on best SEO practices. Reading about SEO will provide an endless pool of useful insights. Later, you can implement these practices to make your ranking game strong.  

• Optimise your Website for Smartphones 

Our last suggestion for newcomers is to make your website mobile-friendly. With more and more users accessing the web through digital gadgets, do you want to get lost in the crowd? Of course, no one would want that. 

Furthermore, ever since Google launched its mobile-first index, it’s indicating that the chances of your ranking might increase upon focusing on mobile-friendliness. A responsive and easy-to-understand design serves as the easiest solution. So, keep that in mind too.

Launch Your New Website Today! 

While the tips mentioned above will be handy when starting with SEO; however, for real expertise, you need to contact experts. And that’s where Zoom Digital steps in. We have a team of highly experienced SEO experts who will help you in every step in order to make your website optimised for search engines.