SEO for your New Website
A common concern for businesses that create a new website is whether it will be found. Does the adage “if you build it, they will come” apply to search engines? The answer is largely yes, if you build your new website with SEO in mind.
You will need:
- Content that uses the language people use when looking for a site like yours (keywords)
- A site structure that search engine crawlers can read
- Links at one or more websites to your website (external links)
Offer Content that Matters
Search engines want to help people find the information they want, and you want to be that source. To make that happen you need to offer great content. Know and use the words and phrases your target audience uses. Address their common questions and pain points. Provide content that people want and you will be rewarded with great visibility in searches for that content.
This means you have to do keyword research, so you are sure you are using the words that searchers use. Your gut is a good place to start, but research and verify. Then write your content using those keywords.
Put Out the Welcome Mat
When a new site is under development, you can apply a setting that prevents it from being crawled by search engines. This prevents your not-finished site from being found. Be sure to undo that setting when you are done!
Also, use all your channels to invite people to your website. Use your email list, social channels, and even a press release to call attention to your site. If you invite them, they will come!
You know your site is amazing, but Google needs more than your say-so to be convinced. Visits to your website helps, but even more important are links from other websites to your website. These “external links” tell search engines that your site content is well regarded within your industry or sector.
Links also help your content to be found by search crawlers. If Google finds a link to your page on another website, it can follow that link and crawl your page.
By external links, not only will Google crawl and index your site, it will also attribute some extra value to it based on the value of the website where it found the link. And that value is what will get you ranking.
Internal links are also important. These are links within your content to other areas of your website. Your most important pages should have other pages and posts linking to them.
Again Google will follow your links, and the post and pages that have the most internal links will be most likely to rank highly. In this way, your internal links signal which content is most important.
