SEO Step Checklist for a New Site

Whenever you launch a new site you will always find yourself doing some SEO step to it which you've done before many a time before on old sites you've registered and launched. From mundane onpage SEO things like installing the site software, tweaking the settings, title, metas, themes etc to adding content, pages, products etc. To offpage SEO like social networking, setting up twitter and facebook pages (SMM/SMO) and other types of offpage SEO like building links from relevant related blogs.

There are many things one can do to "SEO" a "new site". The first thing to do invetibly is to have some good quality unique content on there so search engines know what your site is about! You need to make use of H1, H2 etc, alt tags in images and all that. I like to write a 1000-2000 word article with at least 4-5 images in a post. I find this gets indexed quite quick on its own after a little ping.

But then you'll have to set up other things to make sure your site is as SEO friendly as possible to the search engines and also as user friendly to possible to anyone that visits it regardless to what browser or OS they are using to visit your site on. So your site needs to be mobile friendly or responsive and adaptive smart that's a given. You will need a sitemap both an xml and an html version one for SE's one for people. The first is mandatory the other is optional but advised. These are SEO things, such as setting the rules in the .htaccess file and adding caching also. That's why I like to use WordPress because it makes it much more easier in secure way.

First it starts at home. Before you do any major off-page SEO or SMM. You will want to the on-page SEO first. You will need to have a great site first. In most cases you need to have an authority site around your subject or keywords you are targeting in order to have an actual good chance of being a site that could rank within the top 3 results if not 1st for your targeted keywords. Once you're confident you have a really cool site with tons of great high quality, informative content in the form of articles or blog posts or whatever. You would at some point need to work on your off-page SEO. As you know this basically involves building backlinks to your site from other sites. Those "other sites" being sites that are related or relevant to the type of site yours is. There are many way to go about doing this as well from commenting on blogs in the same niche as yours to joining related forums and such.

Truth be told, there are many ways to do the off-page SEO and build backlinks, but the idea is not to go at it full throttle but go for quality over quantity and build backlinks, and social signals from social networking sites at a normal healthy natural rate. Commenting on other authority blogs in your niche is a great way to drive traffic and build some quick rank to new sites as well and has a high success rate. But as is your social signal metrics also. How popular your site is on all the social networking sites that Google now uses as part of your overall SEO score.

Using social networks is also a mandatory method today as that's where most of the online people are today. You need to establish your sites presence on alll the best and many more social networking sites, microblogging sites, web 2.0 sites etc etc. Create profiles and get followers, populate them often with new content and build them up. Build social signals to your site from them all and from having sharing buttons on your site so they can be shared on and work on building up social signals to your site from all the top social networking and bookmarking sites.

So we know some of the main things that Google takes into consideration about sites especially new ones post panda/penguin etc updates. Some of them are obvious. Good on-site SEO and good off-site SEO. Done naturally and subtly overtime. I've personally been able to get sites ranking quite quickly on their own but some have needed that little extra.

There are many more things you can do. Just search Google for "SEO Step Checklist". To save you some time here's a couple sites I like to use that have SEO checklists you can tick off if you can answer yes to the questions. Clickminded SEO checklist or other on page seo checklist. They should be useful to newbie webmasters and some advanced l33t ones too.

You can also use SEO checker sites that can tell you a lot of information about your sites SEO such as SEOCheck.xyz that tells you about most of your sites main SEO factors. I would say that for new sites there is a lot of SEO methods to take advantage of to help them rank high quickly but one must practice dilligence and care to do it right with quality all the way. These can be broken down into individual methods or steps.

1. Have great unique high quality on page content.
2. Make sure site is super SEO friendly and user friendly.
3. Post regularly to keep the search engine spiders coming back!
4. Have an authority site on your subject with lots of quality content.
5. Establish yourself on social networking sites and build them up.
6. Create web 2.0 sites on all the web 2.0 blogs and build them up.
7. Comment on blogs in your niche and leave your links in the comments.
8. Join forums in your niche and build up your profile and advertise your site.
9. Create videos and market them on YouTube and other video sites and get subscribers.
10. Rinse and repeat these steps for extra effect.

Of course you can add other methods to this and tweak these too. But these are all proven methods that have been shown to work for new sites and not one of them has produced any kind of ill effect or penalty. Good wants quality so give it what it wants with quality.

Thanks for reading.

Hope you find this useful!

Cheers,

Tk.

 

Thanks! Your post is really helpful and interesting. But what do you think, what could be the number of blog posts to keep it my blog friendly for SEO?

 

Here is my check list when I do SEO for my clients.
-Keyword analysis
-Competitor analysis
-SEO friendly site content
-Navigation and internal links
-On-page tags
These steps will help to get some ranking. Then we can focus on following.
-Link building
-Social media
-Improve user behavior