There is no better time to focus on your new blog or website’s search engine optimization than during it’s initial setup. Being an SEO and Web Development hobbyist, I find myself creating new blogs and sites all the time and have become very efficient at it. You’ve already spent all that time registering a domain name and choosing a web host. You’ve probably already decided, installed, and configured your CMS. You are finally happy with how your initial page looks and now what should you do?
All the following tips are free and easy to implement. Here’s my New Blog/Website SEO Checklist:
1) MAKE A BACKUP
Even the best web-hosts can not be trusted. When I was first starting in web development, I bought hosting from a company who promised me redundant 2 weeks of backups. What I didn’t know was that really translated to 1 backup every two weeks. My website crashed on a Sunday, which turned out to be the same day it was backed up. Come Monday morning, the only backup of my site was a few hour old copy of my crashed site. I had to learn the lesson the hard way, you should not! I will soon be writing a blog post specifically on how to keep your blog’s information safe!
2) Start your Web Tracking With Google Analytics
Everyone has to start somewhere. It is imperative to track your stats from the very beginning. Not only can it be a great motivational tool when you see increases in traffic – but also provides INVALUABLE information about your site’s audience. Even if you only scratch the surface with this tool, you can track your daily visitor count and then get comparisons to the previous month. If you love statistics like myself, you can go crazy with it. For example:
- What Time of Day Do I Get the Most Hits?
- Who are my Top Referrers?
- How Many Hits Am I Getting From International Users?
- Is Anyone Reading my RSS Feed?
- What Percent of my Daily Users are Visiting for the First Time?
- How am I Doing Compared To Sites Similar to Mine?
- Whats My Most Viewed Content?
- How Long Does an Average User Spend on my Site?
- How Many Pages Does Each Person View?
- If you really want to get crazy, you can find information like What Version of Flash Player are Most of my Visitors Using?
I could go on for ever about the benefits of Google Analytics, plus it’s free. Use it and thank me later.
3) Submit Your Website to the Following Search Engine’s Webmaster Tools:
Google Webmaster Tools
Yahoo Site Explorer
Bings Webmaster Tools
Not only will submitting your URL to these services help get you indexed faster, but they also provide useful statistics and information about how your site appears in their search engine rankings. I use Google’s Web Tools the most because they have the best stats on number of pages indexed and page load times. They also display the number of pages indexed in your sitemap right on the dashboard. I love seeing this number increase every time I log in. Another good use for Google’s Webmaster Tools is that they make it easy to find 404 errors (Pages Not Found) and have great keyword analysis.
That being said I think that Yahoo’s Site Explorer has more in-depth and accurate back-link tracking (sites that link to you) and updates at a faster rate than Google’s. I normally only submit my info to Bing’s Webmaster tools for the chance at faster indexing, but they have some great new features as well. For example, their tools are the only ones who give page ranks on your inbound and outbound links. It can be very helpful to know the search engine authority and popularity of your link partners. If possible I’d make sure to check back weekly on Google’s tools, and monthly on the other two to monitor your progress.
4) Run it through Website Grader
I realize that this is a cheesy/novice tool. But, if you can ignore that – there is no better way to get a baseline/benchmark (to improve upon!). They also check to make sure you haven’t made any classic SEO mistakes (like canonical domains).
5) Do Some House Keeping
These are the types of tips that are small and you should normally only have to do once.
Take care of the little things:
- Make Sure All Your Images Have ALT Text – Check this post for Top 5 Ways To Dramatically Increase Google Image Search Traffic.
- Define Targeted Categories and Tags For Posts/Pages – Having your targeted keywords in the URL is always a bonus.
- Remove Date Information From Permlinks – Having text like “2007/11/04″ in your URLs only increases the length and can make your content seem out of date and inadequate after a few months when that might not be the case.
- Add Meta Data to Your Headers – I’m aware this is mostly useless, but it only takes a minute and can’t hurt.
- Validate your HTML http://validator.w3.org/ – the fewer errors in your HTML the more search engine friendly it will be.
One last tip, after making all these changes be sure to MAKE ANOTHER BACKUP – Both Full File System Database!
Check back soon for my next scheduled articles:
- 5 Essential SEO WordPress Plugins
- 5 Firefox Plugins for SEO and Web Development
- Best Google Adsense Alternatives
- How to Keep Your Blog Secure
