Started a new eCommerce or informational website and wondering how to promote this to generate traffic and queries through it. It is a tough challenge with growing competition on the web. According to Internet Live Stats, there are over 1.5 billion websites on the World Wide Web today. Integrated digital marketing is the way to stand out.
Integrated Digital marketing comprising of the SEO, Copywriting, SMO, and Content Marketing is the solution to beat the competition and reap the rewards of the new economy. We will summarize the whole process in 35 steps presented in 5 blog posts to rank your website higher on search engines. This blog post will comprise of the first 7 steps that you can take to begin the long arduous journey well for achieving huge traffic on your website.
Use the Ubersuggest tool by trying out various combinations related to your products/services to arrive at a list of long-tail keywords and short-tail keywords. Traffic estimation for a keyword in a month and competition for that keyword could give you an idea of which keywords you shall target to rank for your website.
As Moz points out, Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for the right keywords can make or break your website. By researching your market’s keyword demand, you can not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole.
For example in the UK, using the keyword ‘Printer Toner’; Ubersuggests provides you 915 suggested keyword results along with the result on this particular keyword.
Collaborate gives some tips to choose the right keywords.
Relevancy: Keywords shall be relevant to your business. For example, if your website sells unique hand-crafted jewelry and one of the most promising keyword phrases is “buy jewelry supplies,” think again. It doesn’t matter how much traffic that phrase will bring you because it’s attracting the wrong audience. People searching for that term want to make their own products, not buy yours.
Variety. Choose a variety of related keywords and plan on incorporating them into a single page. Target both short-tail and long-tail keywords.
Range of Keywords: You shall start with few keywords to begin with to focus upon and slowly built upon a significant range of keywords that are covering more than 50% of traffic in your industry and shall see how much percentage of that traffic can visit your website.
The next step is as suggested by the Digital Marketing Institute; you need to structure your website so that each page targets its own set of closely related, highly relevant keywords.
“For example, pretend you’re launching a website for a men’s shoe shop. You sell a variety of different men’s shoes, from leather shoes and boots to sports shoes. You’d like each category to rank for its target keywords and attract searchers looking for a specific type of shoe.
This means breaking down your website’s structure into categories, with each category aimed at a different search keyword. Below, we’ve included an example site structure, with the homepage targeting the main keyword (“Men’s shoes”) and subpages for each secondary keyword. Each main category can be broken down into the subcategories based on your products/services, and target keywords.”
Thrive agency provides guidelines for how to write page content for websites. Don’t plagiarize, don’t repeat yourself, don’t oversell your product or service, don’t forget your target audience, Create creative Anchor Texts, Know what the goal is for each page is and write accordingly, use Call to Actions, Use an outline, provide the answers and details that your target market needs. While writing the content of a page, you shall ensure that your targeted primary keyword and secondary keywords are naturally fitting in your content.
URL1: https://i4consulting.org/hire-wordpress-developer/
URL2: https://i4consulting.org/Page345/
URL1 has a clear URL link with having the primary keyword in its link name whereas URL2 is just having Page 345 as a reference in the URL. URL1 is clean and all pages of a website shall be like this.
Each Webpage shall be given an SEO friend page Title. According to Webpagefx, A web page title is the value you assign the <title> tag that’s typically found on top of an HTML/XHTML document inside the <head> tag. Most web browsers will display the web page title at the top of the browser window and/or in the browser tab.
In CMS like word press, if you have an SEO plugin like Yoast, whenever you create a new page, it will ask for the Title of the page. Page Title is about 70 characters long and it shall be relevant to the targeted keywords for that page.
As Michiel from Yoast describes, “Meta description is a snippet of up to about 155 characters – a tag in HTML – which summarizes a page’s content.” Search engines show the Meta description in search results mostly when the searched-for phrase is within the description, so optimizing the Meta description is crucial for on-page SEO.
Example of Meta description is as below
In the above example, the meta description is, “Hire WordPress Developers for remote working from India that is best n dedicated for Offshore locations like Dubai, UAE, USA, Australia, Singapore.”
You shall ensure that you write a unique Meta description of about 155 characters, comprising of primary and secondary targeted keywords in a natural way as possible. Meta description shall be in active voice and shall include Call to Action like shown in the below example by Yoast.
Call to Action words are like ‘Learn More Now’ and ‘Buy Now’.
In a web page, the headings introducing the content in the HTML language are identified by the <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> and <h6> heading tags (h for “heading”). These heading tags have two main purposes to inform the visitor with visible and summarized texts about the content of paragraphs and to indicate to search engines (Google, Bing…) the most important information included on your page
According to the site, Yakaferci.io, H1 to H6 Headings shall normally come in a certain order only like Main Heading, Sub Heading, Sub Sub Heading, and so on. H1 heading shall come only once, rest heading can be repeated. However, there could be exceptions to this depending upon the content structure of your page and how you want your content to be classified in different headings and sections. Normally, it is a practice that the H1 tag comes only once and the rest can be repeated multiple times but in a logical order like how content is divided normally in a book or a report.
For example, this particular blog , will have H1 Tag same as its Title, <h1> First Seven Steps to make a new website ready for digital marketing in 2018 </h1> and different steps like <h2> Creating right structure and Pages of your website </h2>
So, if you have a new website and writing content for your web pages, it shall be ensured that Heading Tags are used in a natural way to organize the content and to make it more search engine friendly to index the content better.
You can also do a quick competitor analysis to see how your near competing sites are using headline tags. You can use several tools. One such tool is accessible using the below link:
https://www.seoreviewtools.com/html-headings-checker/
As you develop pages and write content for them, Internal linking of pages is another factor that is important from the SEO and Digital Marketing Perspective. Neil Patel in his article, Seven Commandments of Internal Linking that Will Improve Content Marketing SEO, “An internal link connects one page of a website to a different page on the same website. In an internal link, the source domain and target domain are the same.”
Use a reasonable number of natural internal links as per the best user experience, and using effective Anchor Texts. Though it is difficult to quantify the reasonable number of internal links large, popular websites tend to have a lot of links in the menu and footer. We shall see that depending on the overall number of pages of your website, a normal guiding number of internal links on a page could be around 100 but again it all depends on the context and what is natural.
Ensure you set up the Google Analytics account for your new website. Google Analytics account would help you analyze the performance of your website in terms of where you are getting the traffic from, how many visits, user profiles, pages that are getting the most traffic, bounce rate, and a lot of other important key indicators for analyzing the performance of your site.
Similarly, as a business owner; you shall ensure that the Google Webmaster tool is configured for your website. According to the Search Engine Watch, “Google Webmaster Tools is the primary mechanism for Google to communicate with webmasters. Google Webmaster Tools helps you to identify issues with your site and can even let you know if it has been infected with malware.”
Jason Roy explains the importance of the Robots.txt file for your SEO, “Your Robots.txt file is what tells the search engines which pages to access and index on your website on which pages not to. For example, if you specify in your Robots.txt file that you don’t want the search engines to be able to access your thank you page that page won’t be able to show up in the search results and web users won’t be able to find it.”
The sitemap is another important technical aspect required for search engine optimization and it basically lists all the pages of the website. Jessica Kandler of Semrush defines it further, “Sitemaps are XML or HTML files that list out every single URL on your website, along with important metadata for each URL that includes when it was last updated, how relatively important it is within your website structure and how often you make updates to it.”
There are several tools to generate Sitemaps. You can explore some of them in the following article:
https://www.semrush.com/blog/10-awesome-visual-proven-sitemap-generator-tools
The above seven steps are the starting points to consider when developing a new website from the perspective of SEO and digital marketing. If you do not have a technical background; you may need to hire a digital marketing agency like i4consulting.org to carry out these steps. Choose a long term partner for the same.
For any advice, you can write to our team at info@i4consulting.org as well.
