Discover everything you need to know about ranking your website.
When your website is new, doesn’t have a lot of traffic and your company does not have a large budget to work with, it can be difficult to figure out what to do if you want to improve the visibility of a new website. And this is a common problem for most small Singapore business owners. The good news is, if you focus on a few specific SEO strategies, you can get a nice head start. Let’s discuss a few of those tips. But first, let’s define SEO and why it’s so important.
The world of SEO may be intimidating and overwhelming for some people and entrepreneurs. What appears to be a straightforward idea might be pretty complex and time-consuming to learn and requires years of effort.
The same timeframe applies to new websites trying to build momentum and establish themselves through solid search engine optimization strategies. New search patterns, expanding sectors, regular changes in technology, and Google Core improvements can make it more difficult for new domains to gain traction and establish a competitive advantage. For new websites, search engine optimization is a crucial aspect of marketing since it is critical that your site is seen early and begins bringing in visitors right away.
It is possible to witness results in search optimization after a while. It requires more time for new websites, in particular, to be discovered by Google’s scanning bots and to begin climbing the search engine results page (SERP). So, how does a new website go about creating an SEO plan for itself?
The good news is that if you’re completely new to the worlds of search engine optimization and website design, you don’t have to become an expert immediately. Simply knowing the fundamentals of search engine optimization and developing a strategy before creating your website will save you a great deal of time and effort later in the development process. For a greater chance of success, we’ve put together some SEO suggestions and methods. So, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of search engine optimization.
What is SEO?
SEO, also known as search engine optimisation, is the process used to make your website visible to, and rank high on search engines. When your site is not well-optimised it means that it will experience very little growth. Even though your business is small, SEO is a must. Not only does it improve your search engine rankings, but it increases your targeted traffic, reduces your dependency on PPC, and helps you to better brand your company.
What Are The Benefits of SEO For New Websites?
One of the biggest benefits of SEO is that it works great for a low budget. With PPC, you only get traffic if you pay for people to click on your ads. However, with SEO, you pay little to nothing. Your traffic is organic. All it takes is a little hard work on the front end and patience and you can achieve the same results as you would with PPC ads.
Another great benefit of SEO is that you can actually do this on your own. While there is a learning curve to the whole process, you don’t have to be a genius in order to figure out it. Most Singapore marketers find that there are countless amounts of SEO tutorials and guides that can be found online. And most of them are completely free. This makes it easy to learn the basics. When your company starts to grow, you can then hire SEO experts or SEO consultants to come in and do more advanced marketing for you.
Also, SEO has a lasting effect. Sure, you could always get a quick boost in traffic by spending parts of your budget on Facebook Ads and Adwords. However, if you want to create a business with a solid foundation, then you should invest your time in SEO. And this is target because your traffic is targeted. Users tend to convert more when they are entering your website through the search engine than through an ad. PPC can be incredibly useful for increasing conversion rates, but targeted traffic means more profits.
Learn On-Page SEO Basics
Next, you should become as familiar with on-page SEO as possible. Essentially, you should form good habits. Before starting a new blog, always do your keyword research. This will give you a better idea of what your users would like to read as well as how long your post should be. You should then use these keywords in your titles and descriptions. Before you officially publish your post, make sure that it is readable–meaning it contains H1, H2, and H3 headings, small paragraphs, and visuals.
Using Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves the way that you set up your website. When done well, technical SEO makes it easier for search engines to access your site. There are several things that you need to keep an eye out for during this process. For instance, make sure that your robots.txt isn’t making it hard for the search engine spiders to index and crawl your site. You should make sure that your website is registered with Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console.
Also, create an XML sitemap and then submit it to Bing and Google. Make sure that your URL structure is SEO-friendly. Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. Your website needs to be migrated to HTTPS, even if you don’t sell products or services. The best thing about technical SEO is that once you have taken care of it on the front end, you don’t have to continue to do it on the backend.
Selecting An Appropriate Domain Name And Home Page URL
The domain name of your website and the URL of your homepage might be tiny aspects that assist search engines in understanding what your website is all about.
However, in recent years, domains have lost their significance as a means of monetising your keywords. Using your company’s name as the domain name and homepage URL is a realistic option for many people (for example, Singapore-bakery-house.com), so it’s a nice place to begin.
Choose something simple to understand, relevant, and contains a core keyword you wish to rank for if that is not suitable for your goals. Though it may be tempting to jam as many terms as possible into the homepage URL, doing so not only makes your site’s URL harder to remember, but it can also have a detrimental impact on your site’s ranking in search results (for instance, best-.com).
The technique of precise match domains (offering a specific term as the domain name in order to rank for that specific keyword) is now mostly rendered ineffective by Google.
Take the natural, non-spammy path when it comes to keyword utilisation, just like you would with any other component of SEO.
If at all feasible, avoid separating your site into separate m-dot domains for mobile platforms, as well as the use of sub-domains in general. If you do this, there is nothing wrong with it, but you incur the risk of spreading your domain power across many domains.
Planning The Design Of Your Website
Even a simple website with only a few sections needs a systematic structure to function well.
Most web pages have a pyramid structure, with the homepage at the top of the hierarchy. Your most significant pages will be located underneath it, and they should be simple to access through the use of a navigation bar. Then there are subcategories, specific product sites, and blogs, and so on.
A strong, logical structure enables Google to determine which the most important information on your website can be found, allowing it to be searched more quickly and efficiently. Consequently, it prevents comparable pages from competing with one another in search results. The more significant pages should appear first in the “pyramid” and, ideally, be scanned first and appear higher in search results.
Being able to locate what they are looking for quickly and easily can result in a great user experience for visitors who have a clean, structured structure. Create an outline of your pyramid on paper if necessary, to acquire a visual sense of how you wish to organise the layout of your website’s navigation menu.
Making the structure of your website even more evident is possible by including breadcrumbs, which are clickable links at the top of each page that serve as a visual trail so that people know where they are and the rest of your website.
This suggestion also aids in the better understanding of your new website by search engines such as Google and Safari. These crawlers are capable of reading breadcrumbs and using them to establish categories and sub-categories, as well as identifying new URLs to explore.
The greater the ease people may discover new connections, the more rapidly your site will be indexed by search engines. You are giving your new website a competitive advantage in search engine results.
Conduct A Search For Useful And Relevant Keywords
You are the only one who truly understands your brand, its products, and its services. Identify relevant search keywords that best represent your products and services and compile a list of them. Consider yourself a potential consumer who is searching for a product they require or solutions to a query on Google.
To observe what autocomplete recommendations Google provides, try typing in a few of your major terms into the search field and see what happens. They may give you ideas on how individuals look for items or services in your industry, which can provide you with insights on how to approach them.
Identifying your keywords immediately will be a major approach for increasing the visibility of your new website as soon as possible.
In addition to providing keyword ideas and search query information, Google’s Keyword Planner also provides additional valuable information for the keywords on your list, such as competition and other relevant information about the keywords. Take advantage of this information to determine which keywords you might want to use in your website’s title tags as well as inside the content.
Create a Content Marketing Plan
Perhaps one of the most important elements of SEO is content marketing. This is the process in which you will promote your content. And it requires that you create a solid plan and stick to it. A well-executed content marketing plan can result in a lot of exposure in Google’s search engine. It can also help you to gain more followers on your social media accounts. This can be especially helpful when you’re on a new website and you’re just getting started.
Coming up with a great content marketing plan can take some time, but it’s more than worth it. Start by using a tool that allows you to analyse the rankings of your competition. For example, SEMRUSH can be really helpful. This tool will let you know the number of pages your competition has in the Google Index as well as the keywords that rank well. If the site has been established for quite some time, then you should get a lot of information from this.
Here’s the ideal approach:
First, choose your keywords and add them to a spreadsheet. These keywords should ideally be long-tail and low competition. You can then search for these keywords in Google, paying close attention to the top 5 listings. In the next columns of your spreadsheet, include the number of words used in the blog post, the type of content, as well as when it was published.
You can then create a publishing schedule with the help of a Google calendar. Each day will include a certain post as well as the date that the post should be published. While this process may seem simple, it can help a lot in the beginning. However, you will only truly benefit from this schedule if you actually follow it.
Make Your Website’s Platform As Efficient As Possible
Page speed is an essential ranking element in search engine optimization. Furthermore, visitors are frequently impatient and anticipate your website to load in a matter of seconds. Therefore you must be on the top 10 of search engine results.
Several approaches can be taken to improve page performance; nevertheless, it is beneficial to start with a trustworthy hosting services provider and content management system (CMS) to offer your new website a boost from the get-go. A well-designed website ensures the satisfaction of both Google and your future clients.
The typical internet page takes around 15 seconds to load fully. The longer it takes for an individual page to load, the more probable it is that a user would abandon the site altogether. The likelihood of leaving a website that takes between one and three seconds to load is around 32 percent. Grow your loading speed to 5 seconds, and your conversion rate will almost certainly increase to 90 percent.
In some situations, slow server response and page load times might impair Google’s capability to index your website by lowering the crawl budget available to the search engine. Generally speaking, a crawl budget is defined as the number of pages that the Googlebot crawls in a certain period of time.
If the Googlebot is overburdening a website’s server (and hence potentially degrading its performance), Google will scan the website more slowly as a result of this.
According to Google, a fast-loading site is an indication of good servers, which implies that Googlebot can monitor and index more material across a similar number of connections if the website is loaded quickly.
Large eCommerce sites may have a delay in indexing as a result of the factors mentioned above. Pay close attention to the Crawler Problems report in Google’s Search Console and maintain the number of server errors on your new website as low as possible to improve your new website’s SEO.
The less issue it has indexed your site, the sooner your new website will begin to receive SEO results from search engines.
You may also go to the “Speed report” that is provided in Search Console for further information. This report tells you how quickly your site’s pages load in real-time, based on real-world data collected from visitors.
Google will notify you if the page speed of your new website is having an adverse effect on your SEO in this section. Another Google service is the PageSpeed Insights tool, which is designed for developers who want to learn more about the performance of their websites on mobile and desktop devices.
Make Sure The Design Is Mobile-Friendly
Websites that are optimised for mobile devices are more important than ever. Many individuals still prefer computers and laptops to access websites. Still, plenty find that browsing with their cell phones is indeed faster and more comfortable than using a PC or laptop. In order to accommodate this, make sure that your webpage is mobile-friendly and straightforward to see and navigate on mobile devices.
Although mobile compatibility is an important topic with many aspects, it is important to guarantee that a new website is ready for mobile use in order to improve its SEO performance. Ensure that you are designing your website with mobile users in mind when you begin developing your site.
Google recently declared that the mobile-first index would be utilised for all websites, regardless of their size or kind. This implies that if a website has a mobile version, the mobile version will appear first in Google’s search results for that site.
Here are some pointers for determining whether or not your website is mobile-friendly:
- Make sure that the text on your mobile website is legible and well-organised. Your new site’s SEO performance may be hampered if your text is too tiny or too close together.
- Include a viewport tag in your website to aid in the automated resizing of your website to accommodate any mobile device screen size (meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0′′>.
- In recent years, page load time has become a ranking factor in mobile search results, thus ensuring your website runs fast is a critical approach for creating new web SEO.
- Load times may be reduced by reducing picture size, optimising server reaction times, and minifying code, among other things.
- For mobile-specific URLs, avoid utilising m-dot domains or sub-domains. However, while this method may be effective, it is not suggested by Google; instead, concentrate on developing a responsive design if at all possible.
Page URLs Should Be Optimised
The URLs of the rest of your site’s pages, like the homepage URL, are only a minor ranking influence. Consequently, it might be helpful to design a new URL, so it is easy to remember and remember to express how each page is about and organically target relevant keywords without the use of any forced keywords. A URL that ends with everything-bagels-dozen.html is preferable to one that ends with product15.html.
Almost all content management systems will optimise your URLs for you automatically; but, if yours does not, you should try optimising them manually before launching your site. Making your URLs indicative of the page’s content is an important part of creating a decent Url for new websites.
Create An Account In Google’s Search Console For Your New Website
Google’s Search Console portal is a freemium resource that allows web admins and online companies to track and analyse the performance of their websites. If your website is listed in Google’s search results, you can use Search Console to monitor, manage, and troubleshoot your site’s performance. You can also be alerted to any cautions or concerns that may arise straight from Google.
This tool will be beneficial for SEO and knowing your rankings for brand new websites. It will also be suitable for existing websites. It will also assist you in strategising the SEO strategy for your new site by providing you with information on the search phrases that people are using to find their way to your website.
Sign up for a Google Search Console account and authenticate that you control the domain that hosts your website. Typically, this entails including a snippet of code on your website that corresponds to the information included in your Search Console user. You may submit an HTML file to your website, or you can add an HTML tag to the confirmation information page for your webpage to make it more visually appealing.
You may also verify ownership by utilising a DNS server for your domain name provider, a tracking code for Google Analytics, a Google Tag Manager code, and other methods such as these.
Google Search will enable you to register your domain name directly to Google’s index, which will aid in the discovery of your website more rapidly in the search results. This will assist in the improvement of your new site’s SEO performance more swiftly. The sooner your website is included in Google’s index, the faster you will begin to see results.
The Search Console also provides you with information regarding the effectiveness of your search engine optimisation efforts. Using the “Performance” report, you can see the keywords you are ranking up for, how many hits you receive in search, how often people visit your website in search, and where you rank on an average basis for specific keywords.
When a webpage’s title tag is used, it informs Google about the page’s content and is an ideal area to focus on the primary keyword. Keep title tags brief because Google will just show about 50-60 characters in search engine results, so keep them concise.
Make sure that all of your title tags are distinct from one another since repeated titles might appear spammy and do not provide much keyword variation. Additionally, avoid keyword stuffing in an effort to rank for many keywords; instead, focus on a few essential keywords.
Similar to this, you should always provide distinct meta descriptions for every page on your website. In spite of the fact that they have no direct impact on ranks in search engine results, they increase the click-through rate.
Ensure that you include your targeted keywords for each unique page as well as a relevant description that will succinctly educate visitors on what they can anticipate to find or learn on that particular page. Google will typically choose what will appear on the actual search results page based on the length of the meta description, which should be between 145 and 155 words.
On-page titles or H1 tags, which are used to construct the meta title tags, can help you boost your search engine optimization on new websites. If your H1 tags are appropriate, incorporating keywords and unique information will help your website appear more quickly in search results.
On-Page Text Should Be Optimised
On each page of your website, you must provide text, which is commonly referred to as “content.” For several pages, around 250 words is an appropriate beginning point; nevertheless, even a few lines are preferable to nothing in most cases.
What matters most is providing authoritative and informative material that contributes to understanding the page’s goal. In this way, search engines can better grasp what a website is about and how to rank a website for specific keywords and key phrases.
With that in mind, avoid keyword stuffing. Rather than trying to impress Google, write organically with the goal of informing your visitors about your goods and services. It’s usually a good idea to incorporate your goal keywords along with comparable phrases and principles related to the individual page and your website as a whole in your meta description.
Concentrate on creating high-quality, E-A-T-friendly material for Google’s search engine. Search engine giant Google has underlined the importance of user-focused content that gives users the information they require. If you can create high-quality EAT content, you’ll have a leg up on the competition when it comes to optimising SEO for your new website.
Internal linking instructs Google about a website’s content by utilising the anchor text, that is, the text that will be viewed when the link is activated. There are two primary functions served by linking. First and foremost, it demonstrates to search engines where your sites are interconnected and offer information about the content of each page.
It also encourages consumers to invest more extended time on your website, which lowers the bounce rate as a result. When a person leaves a homepage without visiting any additional pages on a website, this is referred to as a bounce rate. A high bounce rate is a solid indication that something on your website isn’t doing as well as it might be doing.
Because search engines employ links to crawl around your site and discover new pages, effective internal linking will aid in getting your new site indexed as quickly as possible. If your new domain is wholly indexed as quickly as possible, the faster your new site’s SEO performance can begin to improve.
A weblog and other shareable material on your website is a terrific method to augment the goods and services you provide to your customers. Great content not only educates visitors on vital information but also provides a natural link-building opportunity for you to link to relevant portions of your website.
Google Will Index Your Site If You Submit A Sitemap
Submission of a sitemap is a critical step in the search engine optimisation of new websites.
Search engine crawlers (such as Google) must scan your website before it may appear on search results pages. Though it is possible for this to occur slowly over time without taking any action, it is preferable to upload your sitemap using Google Search Console to get the business started as quickly as possible.
As a result, Google will be informed that your page exists and which pages are contained inside it. Taking this step is something Google strongly promotes.
Prior to having your site indexed, you must select which pages should be indexed and which pages should not be indexed. It is recommended that you just submit URLs with status 200 when creating your sitemap instead of including the original version of every page.
An online sitemap can be divided into various categories. A page that lists all of the valuable pages on your site may be included directly on your site; alternatively, you can construct an XML file that you can upload to your server and have Googlebot locate it there.
You may automate the creation of your sitemap by utilising a third-party programme or service.
To increase the likelihood of your new sitemap being discovered by Google, there are a few things you can do. As a result, Google suggests the following alternative strategies:
- Create a robots.txt file and include the following line at any point in it, identifying the location of your sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap location.xml
- Request that we crawl your sitemap by using the “ping” capability. Ping Google via an HTTP GET request that looks something like this: https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=*complete URL of sitemap* In the case of Google, for example, https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap= https://example.com/sitemap.xml
- Another option is to wait for Google to discover your sitemap on its own. However, for SEO purposes, submitting a new website using Search Console is the ideal option. In your Google Search Console, navigate to the sitemaps area and enter the URL for the tail end of your sitemap.
You don’t need to resubmit your sitemap once you’ve already done so; Google will crawl your sitemap on its own every so often. Maintain it by adding new page URLs and deleting any 404 or redirected URLs when they are created and implemented.
Perform Off-Page SEO
At this point your website should have a large amount of content, your mailing list will have a lot of subscribers, you will have more followers on your social media platforms, you will notice return visits, and your pages will show up in the second and third pages of Google. These are signs that you have executed the previous steps well. However, there is one thing that can take your site to the next level–promotion, specifically, off-page SEO.
Off-page SEO is everything that you do outside of your website to secure higher rankings. The most popular form of off-page SEO is link building. However, be forewarned, link building can be hard to master, time-consuming, the effects aren’t instant and if done wrong it can actually hurt your rankings. With that said, there are a few things that you can do in order to make link building easier.
Here’s the ideal approach:
You need to focus on earning links from niche-related sites that have more authority and followers than you. No matter what you hear, where your links come from matters. One authoritative link is worth more than 100 links from sites that are not trusted. Before asking for a link make sure that your email is well-crafted and polished.
Do your best to build and cultivate relationships with those in your industry. You should also be willing to link to the content of others. If you’re applying for a guest post spot, then you need to be prepared to show other examples of your work and in every length. There are two things to keep in mind: build slowly and create excellent content.
With Backlinks, You May Be Indexed More Quickly And Rank Higher
Although a brand-new website will have few options for backlinking, it is a good idea to take this into consideration as your website evolves and improves with time and experience.
It is possible to build backlinks when one website connects to another. An inbound link is essentially a “vote of confidence” from another site to your website. When it comes to earning backlinks, strong websites are more attractive, and even being referenced on another website may offer your site a boost in rankings.
Keep in mind that backlinks must be acquired rather than purchased or manufactured through deceptive or unethical techniques. The consequences of doing so might include your website receiving a penalty and ultimately ranking low in search results.
The ideal practice for SEO strategists is to generate backlinks organically rather than using a variety of different strategies to do it. Creating blog entries and utilising social media to drive traffic towards a website might eventually create natural backlinks for the domain in question.
Developing High Quality Content
Develop content that will organically attract visitors to your new website in order to increase its search engine optimization. Blogs, tutorials, videos, and engaging social media material are all effective methods of generating interest on their own. Produce content that is relevant, intriguing, and educational in order to boost your inbound marketing performance.
Visitors will be more inclined to spread or connect to your website if it has high-quality EAT material and useful information to them. Concentrate on offering insight to searchers and addressing the root causes of their problems.
Bear in mind that learning about SEO requires time and effort. Even if you establish a visually appealing, fast-loading website that serves users helpfully and logically, don’t expect to see quick results.
It will take time for Google to crawl and index your website, and it will require time for users to reach your website through natural search results. Continue to be proactive by studying more about the SEO market and making small, incremental changes to your website to make it more user-friendly.
Use social media networks to promote your new website as well as your products or services. You can also invest in paid advertising and contact related websites and blogs to request a mention or partnership. These are essential tactics for improving your new website’s search engine optimisation and obtaining natural backlinks.
Build An Online Community
While most Singapore marketers are initially focused on monetising their traffic, this should not be your first priority. When you are getting a new website off of the ground, instead of monetising your traffic, you need to figure out how you can turn this traffic into a community.
This means that you should be getting people to signs up for your newsletter. You need to be encouraging people to comment on your latest blog posts. You should also be asking them to follow you on all of your social media platforms. This is an important stage of your website because it is the point at which you can build a lot of trust and credibility with your visitors.
Here’s the ideal approach:
1. Make sure that you have a system that captures the email addresses of your visitors. You can encourage new people to sign up for your newsletter by offering something for free. This could be an ebook or something else that is related to your niche. And place this offer in a prominent place so that it can easily be seen. Facebook Lead Ads is a great way to increase your mailing list.
2. Always reply to comments, even if you’re simply saying thank you. Also, make sure that you remove all spam from the comments section. And only approve those comments that actually add value and relates to the topic.
3. Create Twitter and Facebook business pages. And make sure to post on these accounts every day. It’s also a good idea to use Facebook ads to your advantage as it can help you target your audience and experience quick growth.
4. Search for your brand on Google. This will help you to find conversations that people are having about it. Not only should you pay attention to what people are saying, but you should join in on the conversation. SEMRUSH provides a brand monitoring feature that can assist you with this.
5. Pay attention to your Google Analytics account. This will let you know what your bounce rate is. If your bounce rate is high, then it means that visitors are not satisfied with your content. And it also means that it will be hard to build a community.
Conclusion
When you’re working on a new site, SEO can take a lot of work and patience. However, in the end, it’s all worth it. It costs very little, it’s a process that you can start on your own and it can lead to a lot of exposure.
