Understanding SEO for your new website

There are so many things to learn when you create a website. I remember my first blog, it was overwhelming! Back then you even had to program everything, whereas now with just a few clicks, you can pick beautiful templates and have a professional looking website.

If you want to learn how to make a website, Wix is a great place to start. They have step by step guides for every important aspect of web design and SEO. Their new SEO guide covers the basics, like the purpose of SEO, and everything you need to know about keyword research. Unlike website creation, where you basically just pick a template and get your design ready in just a few minutes, SEO requires you to input a lot of work.

But the results are worth it, since this is what will help you grow your website. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and helps you rank for keywords that will attract readers to check out your content. Wix’s SEO guide will take you through SEO planning for your site, be it a small business or just a personal blog, and give you pointers on how to do the outreach to other sites and get some traffic referrals.

You want other sites to link to your content, as this is what search engines see as a vote of confidence. Linking to your post is them saying “check this out, this is interesting”. And because search engines want to give their users the best content, the more links you have, the more likely you are to rank up the search engine.

Let’s take an example. Say you have a dog sitting website. This is a business. nice, so you want to try to rank locally, for example when people search for “Dog sitting in San Diego”. You can use keyword research tools to see how many people look for that keyword every month, and also get inspiration for other similar keywords. Such as “Dog Sitting Southern California”, “Dog sitting costs San Diego”, and so on. Sometimes, there is a lot of competition for a specific keywords, but others are less competitive, and this is a chance for you to work on them and attract quality traffic to your website.

So once you have your list of keywords, you will need to do a couple of things. First, you will need to produce quality content that covers such keywords. In your post, you can use the keyword a few times, and try to insert it in the title and the URL as well. Don’t overdo it. Mentioning your keyword every 100 or 150 words is more than enough. Some websites used to write sentences that made no sense with a ton of keywords, but search engines are very smart and they got flagged.

You want the user to have a good experience, so they stay on your website as long as possible. And if the search engine sees they bounced from your website and got to another one for the information, they will rank you down.

Next, once you have produced quality content, you will be able to start your outreach to other websites. You can do so by offering to guest post there, or simply by asking the owner if they would list you as a valuable resource. Do that only once your content is top quality, or you may miss a lot of link building opportunities!

Again, taking a few hours to go through Wix’s SEO guide is going to be time well spent. SEO can be complicated at first, especially is you are not used to all that online lingo. But once you get the hang of it, it is actually pretty straightforward. It all boils down to how do you want your clients to find you. What would they look for on a search engine to get to the information you want them to see?

Generally, when you are doing some SEO efforts, it is a long and ongoing process. So you want your content to be evergreen, or at least current. Like when you search for “taxes 2017”, you would need to update that content for next year, and so on. So you wouldn’t try to build too many links with the specific year, rather links about the tax information you provide. However, you then have control over the post title and the meta description. A meta description is the short text you see under the link in the search engine results. It is what is going to make people click. So there, every year, you can update your description if it needs to be.

If you have a lot of content, you can keep a spread sheet with all your links and what needs to be done, in order to stay on top of your SEO.

The importance of SEO cannot be emphasized enough when starting a new website. This and sharing on social media will bring traffic which in turn will bring revenue!