5 SEO Principles to Consider for a New Website

After you have launched a brand-new website, initially, you won’t be having a lot of visitors.

Yet, by following proper search engine optimisation tactics, you can get the needed organic traffic to your site sooner.

As a new site, getting the required reach to your potential customers is not an easy task to do. It takes a considerable quantity of time and effort to reach your target audience.

This is why you need search engine optimisation to make the process a bit quicker. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is what makes a website rank higher in most of the prominent search engines like Google, Bing, and so on.

The new businesses with a newly launched website cannot overlook SEO, even in such an initial stage, to get a comparatively higher ranking on the search engine.         

For a new site getting organic traffic can be crucial. But by applying a few SEO principles, you can bring the right amount of organic traffic to your website in no time.

We have picked five SEO principles that you must consider when you are going to launch your new website. So, let’s dive in,

1.Choosing low competitive keywords

For a newly launched website having almost no authority, ranking in the search engine can be difficult. There are already so many highly authoritative sites, and they are already ranking for some highly competitive keywords.

Well, keywords are a group of words that people type in a search engine to get the desired result. These words show what the people are looking for to solve the issues they are facing.

For example, people who are looking for building a website will look for the keyword “website builder.” There are numerous website builders out there targeting this keyword. Some have already ranked for it in the search engine.

The following picture from Ahrefs tool clearly shows it:

5 seo principles to consider for a new website

Image source:Ahrefs keyword explorer

This tool also shows the keyword is super hard on the keyword difficulty part. So targeting such a keyword for a new website will not be fruitful. Getting the desired rank with this particular keyword is going to be very difficult.

So, for your new website, you will have to target low, competitive keywords. After doing thorough keyword research, you will find some of such keywords. These are the keywords you should root for at the beginning stage of your website to rank quickly on the search engines.

2. Giving a better and attractive title

What do people see at first from content?

Yes, you are right. It is the title.

The title has to be intriguing enough to get the attention of the viewers.

Yet while doing so, make sure the title remains in context with the content.

In the search result, people get to see the title tag of the content. Even in all the social media networks, people get to see the same title. Then they decide if the content will be fruitful enough for them or not.

It is a widespread practice to keep the primary keyword in the title of the content. It serves the search intent of the people well.

For example when you Google “best website builder” after the ads in the organic search result you will get to see these results,

5 seo principles to consider for a new website

Picture: Google result for “best website builder” keywords

All the title has the keyword. Somehow, it was another reason that helped the articles to rank higher with such a competitive and challenging keyword.

When a title stands out from the rest of the results available in the search engine, people click it more. That is why the publishers, editors, and content creators A/B test their content title repeatedly.

3. Having a sensible and shorter URL

URL or Uniform Resource Locator is another attribute that makes a site’s content rank well in the search engines.

It is seen that content or pages of a website with a shorter URL get ranking very quickly. On the other side, the opposite happens with the longer URL. The people do not get to see a long URL in the search engine as well.

For example, the following picture would clarify it:

 5 seo principles to consider for a new website

Here, a person gets to see the whole URL of the content. But if the URL were more extended than this, then it wouldn’t be possible.

The common practice is to keep the main or primary keywords in the URL. This way, the URL or the website path is shown in the search engine. For example, for the “best website builder” keyword, you will get this organic result:

The exact keyword is used in the URL here.

 5 seo principles to consider for a new website

The URL also indicates the context of the content. So the URL has to be sensible. A sensible URL assists the human, and the search engine crawlers to identify a content or information page for specific search intent. Again, it helps to get indexed in the search engine.

It is another basic SEO principle that most of the website owners follow to get organic visitors quickly to their site.

4.Doing proper on-page SEO

Before starting to do the off-page SEO, it is a good practice to start doing the on-page SEO.

On-page SEO is what you do to optimise your website and webpages to get organic traffic.

On-page or on-site SEO excludes any external works like collecting backlinks and other related tasks. In other words, on-page SEO is the common practice of optimising different web pages and elements of your site to rank even higher in the search engines to get more traffic.

On-page SEO is done by optimising both the source code of HTML and the content of a particular site without considering any external works.

Simply put, for on-page SEO, all the tasks need to be done within the website. You don’t have to outreach to any external sources for it.

According to the search engines like Google, on-page SEO elements like internal linking, outbound linking, meta tag, meta title, meta descriptions, H1 tags all play a huge role in getting the green signal from the search engines to rank higher.

 5 seo principles to consider for a new website

Picture: On-page SEO factors

By properly ensuring the on-page SEO of your website, you make sure that your website has the authoritativeness and the trustworthiness. An on pageoptimised website works well in the search engine, and the ranking keeps getting better with time.

So, make sure the on-page optimisation of your site is correctly done at the initial stage of your website.

5. Submitting the sitemap of your site to Google

After creating a website, the most crucial task is to list it on a search engine like Google.

You can help Google to find your site to some extent.

By submitting the sitemap file, you can do it easily. You have to generate a sitemap file for your website and then submit it to the Google Search Console. Google search console or formerly known as Google webmaster tool is a free tool. It helps you to control your website according to the search engine.

Now let’s get to know what a sitemap file is.

Well, a sitemap file is an XML file, and it has all the URLs of your website.

This is how a sitemap file looks like:

sml-sitemap

(Source)

You can generate a sitemap file based on the platform you are using for your website. If you are using the most popular CMS or content management system WordPress, then you generate it using popular SEO plugin Yoast SEO. There are other online tools as well, to help you with this purpose.

Once you have generated the sitemap file, now it is time to submit it on Google search console. So, now, you have to follow the following steps:

  1. Sign in to your Google Search Console account.
  2. Select your website on the left.
  3. Click sitemap on the left sidebar.
  4. Now add your sitemap URL.
  5. Then click submit.

(Picture Source)

After submitting the sitemap file, your job is complete.

Now the Google crawler will find your sitemap file and start crawling and indexing all the URLs listed in the sitemap file that you submitted.

Even if you don’t do anything, eventually, Google crawlers will find your website. But it will take time.

By submitting a sitemap, you can directly let Google know about the existence of your website and the pages it has along with it. The search engine bots will discover your website a bit quickly this way.

Wrapping up

Getting rank for a new website is not an easy task to do. Yet, it is not impossible after some time.

By following some basic principles of SEO, you can make the web pages and content of your site search engine optimised. Even after doing all the required tasks, you might not get to see the result immediately.

Give some time, and those search engine crawlers will find your web pages and take it to the appropriate rank of the search engine if all the requirements are fulfilled.