Learn the Basics of SEO for your start-up company website. Part 2

Welcome back to our second part of this guide. Hope you enjoyed and learned something from the previous post !

So you have researched what keyphrases are going to be successful for your Business, registered your domain name and have created the content for your website. You are now eager to get things online and watch as new customers start streaming to you business!

And why not, that’s how it should be. So lets get started with building your website.

Step 4 - Building your website

Hopefully you will either be experienced at building websites yourself or you will employ a professional company to take care of this for you. If you are looking for a company to design your site, then make sure that they understand the basics of SEO at least. Your website has to be mobile friendly, and easy to use for your customers, no matter what type of device or size of screen they are using.

For a new website, your home page is the most important page for SEO, as it is the place that the search engines will index first and give more priority to. So your focus here is your primary keyphrase that you researched earlier. This keyphrase has to be in the meta TITLE of the page, the page description, and also the h1 heading of the page. Apart from this, your keyphrase should be placed throughout your text content.

Your service or product should be displayed to the user in an easy to read and viewable fashion. If you are selling a product then the checkout experience should be very simple for the user. They must be taken to the payment process in as few clicks as possible.

Step 5 - Hosting your website

Where your website is hosted plays a part in SEO as well. It is also important to have a reliable hosting account, in a reputable datacentre. You do not want your website to go down just as someone is about to buy your product!

In terms of SEO, the search engines will know if your website is hosted next to sites that are less reputable or even spammy in their nature. These types of websites tend to be hosted on cheap hosting packages. So, look for a good company that will vet you, and only allow websites that are genuine to be hosted with them.

It is also important to host your website in the country where most of your business is going to be. And if you have a country level domain name, then host your website in the same country. This looks more natural to the search engines and will help promote you in local country searches. It also means that your website will have a quicker response time for your clients.

Step 6 - Grab your social media accounts and set them up

Now that your website is up and running, it is time to start promoting it. What better place than through Social Media. If you already have a social media presence, then you can immediately attract clients just by posting a few links to your new website and some engaging photos or images.

Facebook and Google Plus also allow you to create pages for your business, and it is a good idea to do this, as they get indexed quickly in the search results and can bring you traffic from sources you would not normally reach.

Twitter and Facebook can also be great places to advertise without spending too much money. It is easy and quick to setup advertising accounts with both these social media places. They are both very good at targeting people in a very specific way.

Step 7 - Create more content and blog it

Before we get into link building, lets look at extra content building. To entice other websites to link back to you, you must have content that is worthy of their attention. One of the best ways to do this is by blogging about your expertise. Setting up a blog on your own website is the best way to go about doing this, as it will naturally draw links back to your site, which in turn will promote you in the search results.

Blogging must be done on a regular basis, and should include interesting images or infographics to make the post more readable. People can then post the article you write on their own social media, and share it in all sorts of other ways.

From your blog posts, you can also link out to other blogs in your niche. When you do this, write to the blogger and let them know, asking them to share your blog on their social media and linking back to you if possible.

You can also use your blog for internal linking. Create keyword rich links back to your most prominent pages on your website. Internal links are not as powerful as external links, but they do add SEO value to the page.

Step 8 - Start building citation links with local and niche directories

This is a great way to build up some trust through the internet. Citation links will improve your search result placement for local search as well. So take the time and find some good local directories where you can manually place your business info. Make sure the business name, telephone number and address are the same everywhere you do this, but always keep your company description unique.

For local search you can also create a Google Maps business listing as well as a Bing Maps business listing. Map results appear top or near the top of local search results, so they are a great way to bring traffic to your site.

Step 9 - Start to build authority backlinks to your website

With any luck you will have posted some blog articles by now, and received some links and social media shares for your trouble. You will have started to build up citation links, and now is the time to look at getting some high value backlinks from other websites in the same niche as your own business.

How do you go about this? Well you can look here for 7 ways to gain natural backlinks to your website. It does take time and effort and backlinks need to be acquired constantly over time, not just a case of “Lets get as many links as possible this week” and then do nothing for the rest of the year. You need to find quality websites that are in your niche and willing to link back to you.

So you can do things like guest blog, maybe do an exchange guest blog, let someone post an article on your blog in return for you positing on their blog. These are all credible ways of doing off-site SEO.

You should also make sure that you diversify the type of links you go after and even buy some quality links from a professional link building service. The anchor text that you use for your backlinks should contain your main keywords on only a few of the best places that you have acquired links. Make sure you create links with different anchor text, use images for the link and link back to yourself using only your business name. This helps to build up a natural link profile that will sky rocket your website in the search results.

Conclusion

I hope you find this article useful and learn the basics of SEO to help make your new business succeed online. Remember to plan ahead and take your time with SEO. Planning your SEO project over time is the best way forward.