SEO top 3 for a new site.
We’re planning a new site for one of our services and I had to go trough the planning exercise of what I wanted it to rank for and how our team would achieve those rankings.
Here’s our 3 must dos
1. Build in WordPress
As Matt Cutts has said in the past WordPress does SEO pretty well. It implements things like nofollow tags, canonical tags etc very intelligently. This means you rarely see a WordPress site suffer from SEO problems that other Content Management Systems do, like duplicate pages or things being crawled by the bot that shouldn’t be. There are also some great plugins for it that help you manage your SEO efforts like Yoast SEO.
2. Chunk the content
Before you start to create any content do your keyword research first. Then establish the distinct keyword silos. For instance if you are a motor mechanic you may decide that “vehicle servicing” “mechanic with courtesy car” and “mechanic pick up service” are the main areas you want to rank for. They should all have their own areas in the site and you should plan to publish content to each area on a regular basis.
3. On page SEO
I’m amazed how often I talk about this and how often I see people get it wrong
Key phrase in your page title
The more focused the better. Don’t over do it.
Key phrase in your URL
The closer to the start of the domain the more important it becomes.
Key phrase in the H1
You can make sure this happens by default in WordPress
Related Key phrases in other headings
Make it sensible and readable.
Related key phrase in title elements and alt tags.
If you have a photo of a thing the relates to your keywords, simply label it as such.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
