According to an estimate, about 23.88 billion webpages are currently present on the internet. This figure shows the strength and popularity of the internet. Not only this, every day, but many new websites are also hitting the internet. According to a study, if a person starts visiting each and every webpage available on the internet, and he spends 1 minute on each page, it would take 31000 years of continuous surfing for him to see all the webpages available now. From consumers’ perspective, it is effortless to find any deal online.

Similarly, from a company’s perspective, if they want to reach customers worldwide, they have to look for an online medium. So if you think opening a new website and start earning is a profitable job, you are absolutely right. The number of consumers shopping online has increased tremendously in the last few years. Meanwhile, the competition also increased, and search engine giants like Google, Bing and Yahoo became very popular.

If you are planning to start a new website, make sure that it is well optimised to attract users as well as search engines. Though the optimisation process varies for different search engines. Most webmasters prefer optimising for Google as it shares a significant share of the search engine market. The graph below shows the market share of major search engines, and it is clearly visible that Google has the upper hand on others.

Google gives importance to quality and uniqueness of content and backlinks of a website. Here are some SEO tips for a new website.

Research

With the increase in the number of websites every day, it is evident that when you start a new website, you will have competition. So before settling on any strategy, it is imperative to make in-depth research on your competitors. For a start, you can search for the most promising keyword you want to target in Google and see the results. The top few sites in the SERP are your competitors. Try to identify their SEO strategy and take a note on their website’s architecture. With the current update in Google’s algorithm, it is vital to niche it down your site. If you can do so, then you won half of the battle. 

Keyword research

Choosing the right keywords is the toughest job for a digital marker. Many websites try to construct their website around highly competitive keywords with very high search volume. But this may not always be a great idea. It is tough for a new website to find a place in SERP. If the keyword has high competition, getting ranking will be even tougher.

So for a start, try to optimise your website for keywords with moderate search difficulties. This will help that after the right amount of off-page SEO, you can expect your website to show in SERP. Over time your site earns some authority, and you can gradually shift your attention on high search volume keywords.

Quality of content

As mentioned above, Google (as well as other search engines) gives great importance to content. If you have unique and good enough content to attract visitors, you can expect Google will reward your work. One way to check uniqueness of content is by using www.copyscape.com. Paste your URL in the space provided on Copyscape webpage, and you can find which website has content similar to yours.

Create a backlink strategy

As mentioned above, the number and quality of backlinks play a significant role in getting higher SERP position, particularly in Google. But that does not mean that you can go for link building campaigns in bulk on anything you can place your links on. Few backlinks from relevant sites are more effective than hundreds of backlinks from irrelevant sites. For example, if you have financial website selling consulting services, then in this scenario try to get links from websites having the same niche. 

In the beginning, when you start your website, it is very difficult to get links from high authority sites. In such a situation you can go for guest posts on mediocre websites and link exchange from the other sites you own. In this form of a link exchange, you will place their link on one of your websites, and in return, the other site will also place a link of your website. Hence, both will be benefited. Try to approach sites having the same niche as your website. 

If you want to find the sites in your niche, you can use Google search with queries for a guest post, write for us, for example, or use tools for scraping. Ninja Outreach, Pitchbox and Hunter.io are great tools for this purpose.

There are some free link building strategies: directory submission, web 2.0, profiles, video, images or PDFs submissions, etc. Though they are decent for as foundation links, but they don’t move the needle as you may need in your niche. 

On-page optimisation

I explained about the importance of content and keyword research for the success of a website. On-page optimisation is a broader term for this. It includes various factors like content quality, placing keywords in content, site navigation, using different headings. The primary keyword should be evenly distributed through the website. Aim to place the primary keyword in the first few starting words of the page, preferably in <h1> header tag and first paragraph. 

Internal linking or siloing is another very effective approach to help with higher SERP positions. This form of internal linking connects pages on the same website to each other using the right keyword as the anchor text. Keep in mind that the anchor text should be the keyword which is the primary keyword for the webpage you’re linking to.

Use Google Analytics

It often happens that even if you target a particular region or age group, your website gets visits from another area or age group. This can be easily segmented by using Google Analytics. 

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tools provided by Google. Using Google Analytics, you can get full analytics of your website’s traffic like details of visitors, a number of visitors, navigation summary, site overlay (click pattern) and many other things. If you want to use Google Analytics, you have to have an account with Google Analytics and then place the tracking code on all the pages of your website. After you place the code, Google will start collecting data from your site, and you can see all of them in your GA account. This free analytics tool is very useful, and for a webmaster, it can be really helpful for optimising a website. If you want to study Google Analytics, there is a free tutorial available at http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity.

Do not panic

This is no way related to SEO but is the biggest issue new webmasters and digital marketers may face. Keep in mind, when you start optimising your website never expect rankings immediately. In fact, for the first few months, it is very difficult for a website even to appear in the top 100. This behaviour of Google is termed as Google sandbox. According to this, a new site has to prove its credentials before Google will show it in its SERP. It wasn’t formally announced by Google, but we can observe that this sandbox is approximately for 90 days. Hence, even if you are working very hard to get your site rank, please do not panic if you do not see any rankings in the first few months.

Apart from these, many other aspects should be considered when you are optimising a new website. Generating an XML sitemap and submitting the website to all major search engines. Promoting website on various social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are few of them. 

There are many more useful SEO blogs where you can get more updates and in-depth knowledge. Making a habit of keeping yourself up to date is an excellent way to enhance your SEO skills.