Essential SEO Checklist For Startups

If you want to slip in SEO for your new site to increase your presence on the web, there are a few things you need to take care of before you can actually take off and start earning some revenue.

What are those things? Let’s take a look:

• Accessibility: Users and search engines should be able to find you quickly. For this you can make use of Google Webmaster Tools or SEOmoz Crawl. These tools will take care of things like error 404 or 500, thin or replicated content, missing tags and other stuff that could potentially harm your site’s SEO.
• Keyword Targeting: Make sure that they keywords you select are actually relevant for your site. You can take a look at what words people are searching with, and include them in your list.
• URL structure: Try to include words in your URL that are relevant to your business. Keep them short so that they can be remembered easily by the visitors.
• Content is all important: you may have managed to ensure that your site is crawlable, and you start getting decent traffic to your site. But are they going to be happy with what they see when they get there or they going to feel that there’s a lot missing? Make sure your content will satisfy your visitors. Include interesting details, graphics and videos that will answer queries of potential clients. Post great content and Google will rank your site high.
• Design and User Experience: Ensure your design is not so complicated that users will find navigating or otherwise using it, a tough job. Use tools like Feedback Army or Silverback app to check out the user friendliness of your site. Also ensure to have call to action buttons on ALL your pages. This is very important. Link your internal pages well, and provide catchy titles to each of your pages. You could also include some audio content to make it a little interactive.
• Tags:  Use of tags is very important for SEO. Meta tags give meta data on your pages and anchor tags are basically links to related pages. Optimizing these tags will make your site more SEO friendly. You could also optimize images and add keywords in the descriptions so that they will turn up in image search results.
• Google Sitemaps: including the sitemap.xml will enable search engines and visitors to understand your site’s content.
• Social Media: Google gives a lot of importance to social media shares, likes and comments. So, sites or pages that have been shared on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter receive a higher ranking from search engines. But be sure to understand your target audience, and make use of the social network that they are most likely to use.
• Back Links: Plan how you will create back links to your site. You could make use of discussion forums, blogs, competitions, newsletters, reviewing articles, commenting on other blogs and a whole lot of other things. You could use a plugin like EZineARticle plugin.

 

Of course this checklist is just a primer. You could have some more ideas as to how you could gain more visibility for your site!

 

This is a guest post by Ethan Millers of bw9.com, a site that offers savings and current information on comcast cable and internet, as well as other Comcast.com services.