SEO tips for new websites

This is a guest article from Ran, an SEO specialist and Hotel Marketing Strategies reader in the UK.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your site to increase the volume of traffic from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, AOL and Bing via natural search results. Fundamentally, the higher your site is ranking for a particular search term, the more traffic you’ll get. Therefore your goal is to increase your ranking within the search engine guidelines as it will directly influence your revenue.

Here are 10 SEO tips to get a new site off to a great start:

1. Save On the Site’s Development – Whether you will own your SEO work or hire a 3rd party agency to manage it, optimizing your site will cost you time and money. Consider launching with the absolute basic of features in order to keep a decent budget for marketing and later on for site tweaks.

2. Don’t Save on Hosting – While saving on the initial development cost could work well, investing in quality and reliable hosting is where you should not save. Ensuring your website loads quickly is crucial for your optimization success and for user experience.

3. Get the Domain Name Right – Buying the right domain name is one of the most important decisions you’ll need to make at the very start. I would suggest buying a descriptive name which unlike a generic name can make life just a little easier when optimizing the site. An example for a descriptive name will be hotelmarketingstrategies.com, while Google.com is an example of a generic domain name.

4. List the Keywords You’d Like to Rank for – Normally optimizing your site means shortlisting the keywords which you’d like to rank for and optimizing each page around one key term. You should pick the keywords which describe your product or service and most importantly pick the keywords which are likely to convert well for the business.

5. Use the Metadata Tags Correctly – Once you have shortlisted your keywords you would need to insert them into your pages using the metadata tag location. Don’t stuff all those key terms into each page, but rather insert one term per page together with descriptive information. To optimize your site for Google, limit the page title to 70 characters and the page description to 140 characters. Here’s how the metadata comes into view when users search for a specific term:

6. Invest in Content – Original content in the form of articles, reviews, guest testimonials and even elaborate FAQs are very important for your optimization success. While not to underestimate other factors, the search engines place huge weight on the level of content on your site. By adding high quality original content closely related to your keywords the search engines will associate your site with the search term and over time it will become an authority site. The best example to demonstrate this point is probably Wikipedia.

7. Consolidate Homepage Versions – Some websites have multiple versions of their homepage which will result in poorer performance as your authority will be spread across a few homepage versions. The most common issue is having non www and www versions. To test how many versions of your page exist use a content duplication checker and fix the issues found.

8. Leverage Your Image – Traffic from users searching for images such as hotel locations could benefit your site. To optimize your images for Google Image Search, make sure you use a descriptive file name so park-hotel-ca.jpg is better than 9h80.jpg, images are hosted on your site on a folder /images/park-hotel-ca.jpg and always use alt text to describe the image.

9. Find and Fix Error Pages – Ensuring that all the site’s pages are working and loading quickly will increase their chances of getting indexed. If you have Google Analytics installed you can find this information under the content tab -> contact by title. Otherwise, try the free utility xenulink. This software will verify your internal link types such as normal links, images, etc and will highlight any issues found.

10. Add Privacy Policy or Terms and Conditions – It is important for the engines to send traffic to reputable websites. Adding privacy information and terms & conditions (when applicable) can help your ranking and it won’t cost anything if you use of the free privacy policy generator.

Now you’ll be off to a great start!

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Ran is the online marketing manager of hardwood flooring seller Wood and Beyond.