You have a new site and are expecting thousands of visitors a day? Dream on.
Why should Google put your brand-new site at the top of its search results?
Even Google needs help to find you.
What can you do to make your website stand out from the thousands that are created every day?
Optimize, Optimize and Optimize Again
SEO, Search engine optimization, is the process of making it easy for Google to read your website content. Some people regard SEO as cheating, but that’s plain stupid.
Having a website and not using SEO is like printing a 400-page book, gluing all the pages together and leaving a title off the front cover. What’s the point?
Can you do SEO yourself? Yes, you can. Yes, there are professional SEO companies that will charge you a president’s ransom for their services, but you can do a lot yourself.
Optimizing Your Website’s Pages
Optimizing your web pages is something that is simple to do and needs to be your top priority. If you are using WordPress to build your site, then there are a couple of free plugins you must install; Yoast and W3 Total Cache.
What does the Free Version of Yoast SEO Do?
Yoast does everything except building links to your site. Yoast is incredibly simple to install and use and gives you a simple red, orange and green code regarding each aspect of any blog post’s SEO.
The Yoast WordPress SEO plugin looks at your keywords, where you have used them and checks images for alt-tags and even includes a readability test.
What Does W3 Total Cache Do?
Google loves speed because web-users attach great importance to a site’s loading speed. Most authority bloggers recommend using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) by using a caching plugin that will improve your site’s loading time, which will reduce your bounce rate, both of which will improve your Google search ranking.
If you install W3 Total Cache, then your website will sit on the W3 cache servers, which are much faster than yours. You can also adjust many settings to make your site load even more quickly.
Checking Your Web Pages
Once you have optimized everything using Yoast and W3 Cache, you need to check using other tools.
Check speed using GTmetrix and SEO using SEO Analyzer from Neil Patel.
GTmetrix is free, you just paste in your URL and wait a few minutes to receive a detailed report that tells you how long each component of your page takes to load. This tool also tells you what to do to improve your results.
Even SEO sites have issues, as you can see from the GTmetrix report on Yoast.com above.
Most new website owners are like children wandering around Santa’s grotto when they see the range of free WordPress plugins that are available to download. Resist, resist. Every plugin that you install will slow down your site.
SEO Analyzer gives you an independent verification of your site’s SEO status. Yes, Yoast is good, but you still need to check.
SEO Analyzer tells you the optimization status of any web page, including keywords, sites that link in, speed issues and high-priority SEO tasks.
But there’s more. You can use each of these tools to analyze your competitors, too, just as they can run an analysis of your site.
Check rival sites’ speeds and make sure yours is faster. You don’t need the fastest or most optimized website on the Internet; you just need to be better than your competitors to outrank them
Use SEO Analyzer to find the keywords your competitors rank for and then steal their keywords. Is that dishonest? No, you could analyze competing sites manually, but tools like Neil Patel’s just make the job easier. If you aren’t examining your website, you can be confident that your rivals are doing so, and stealing your thunder.
It is best to check page speed using GTmetrix or SEO Analyzer after installing each WP plugin because the effect of the new plugin is easily identified and you can consider whether the speed slowdown is more important than the benefits the plugin gives you.
Never-Ending SEO Tasks
Search engine optimization is something you need to look at every time you add material to your site. Write posts with your users’ needs in mind, but remember Google’s needs, too.
If you want to make your new website more visible in Googler, you need to optimize your site in every way. You can improve your Google rank with every post you write, but you need these tools to stay on top. You can be certain on one thing – Your competitors are using free and paid tools to work out where they can do better than you.