SEO Advice for a New Website Launch

[Samwise89]

Let's say I'm about to launch a new website. It's going to be on Wordpress and I want to roll out with 25 pieces of content.

I'm asking a really broad question on purpose so I don't guide the answers.

What advice would you give me in terms of...

• On-Page SEO
• Technical SEO
• Interlinking
• Site Structure
• Link Building
• Content types
• Keyword volume to target

 

[Ryuzaki]

Yeah, that's pretty broad.

I'd recommend getting an minimum viable product out.

That means I'd get my design most of the way there but not perfect. This is particularly easy if you are using a pre-built theme. I'd launch with a logo, don't skimp there.

I'd then populate it with enough content to make Google happy and give you enough insight into your indexation to find patterns. I'd use the new Search Console coverage dashboard for this to find any problems along with crawling myself. This can include items that should be nofollow'd (like "reply to comment" and crap like that). I'd make sure I'm showing a noindex directive where I need to and not assuming blocking it in robots.txt is enough, etc. Get the technical part down very early.

I'd make sure each page is optimized around a term so I can see how Google is responding to the site in the early days. Sometimes they prefer a site over another for no clear reason. If you can determine this is you then you can set out a business plan that includes higher spend, time, and energy earlier, getting to scale quicker.

Start with a mixture of very low competition keywords on some posts, low competition, medium, and hard ones. Get a lay of the land so you can watch how your site performs as it ages and gets links. But beyond that focus on the very low and low competition terms so you can start making money faster.

After that is all rolled out, I'd start finding "easy win" links to get. Set up your social profiles (do this before registering the domain or bots will claim your name and try to sell it to you). Google is claiming they aren't counting "most" user generated content, especially profiles. So take that into account.