Over 160,000 new top-level domains were registered yesterday. 160,000! This huge volume of new sites being birthed wasn't unique to yesterday; this happens every day (you can check out today's progress at DailyChanges.com). The sites that start out pre-optimized and that continue optimizing immediately after publishing will be at an incredible advantage over those that were made without SEO in place from the get-go. Of course, there's a lot of work to be done for a new site, and it can be hard to remember everything and prioritize work. This week, per PRO member request, Rand presents an SEO checklist that SEOs can use when optimizing new sites.
Have any boxes of your own to add to the checklist? Let us know in the comments below!
Video Transcription
Hi everyone. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I have a special request from one of our users to talk about an SEO checklist for new sites that aren't ranking yet. I've created a new website. I want to make sure I am doing all the right things in the right order, that I have got everything set up, and my website is not yet ranking. What are the things that I should be doing and maybe some things that I should not be doing? So, I wanted to create a brief checklist with this Whiteboard Friday, and if we find this useful, maybe we will expand it and do even more stuff with it in the future.So, let's run through. You have a new site that you've just launched. You are setting things up for success. What do you need to worry about?
First off, accessibility. What I mean by this is users and search engines both need to be able to reach all of the pages, all the content that you've created on your website in easy ways, and you need to make sure you don't have any dumb mistakes that can harm your SEO. These are things like 404s and 500 errors and 302s instead of 301s, duplicate content, missing title tags, thin content where there is not much material on the page for the search engines to grab on to and maybe for users as well. Two tools that are great for this, first off, Google Webmaster Tools, which is completely free. You can register at Google.com/webmasters. The SEOmoz Crawl through the SEOmoz Pro Web App, also very useful when you are looking at a new site. We built a bunch of features in there that we wish Google Webmaster Tools kept track of, but they don't, and so some of those features are included in the SEOmoz Crawl, including things like 302s for example and some thin content stuff. That can be quite helpful.
Next up, keyword targeting. This makes some sense. You have to choose the right keywords to target. What I want to have is if gobbledyzook - probably an awful word for anyone to be targeting, no search volume, just bad choice in general - but we want to be looking at, do these have good search volume? Are some users actually searching for them? You might not be able to target high value terms because you are also looking for low difficulty when you are first launching a site. You don't want to necessarily shoot for the moon. Maybe you do on your home page or some branded page, some product page, but for the things that you know you want to target and you want to work on early short term, maybe some content that you've got, some feature pages for the product or service you are offering, and you think to yourself, I am not going to be able to target gobbledly, which is really tough, but maybe gobbledyzook. That will be easier. So, you can look at search volume, the relevance to the website, please by all means make sure that you have something that is relevant that is actually pulling in searches you care about, and low difficulty. If you have that taken care of, you have your keyword targeting.
Content quality and value. If you have a bunch of users coming to this page and they're thinking to themselves, this doesn't really answer my query, or yeah, maybe this answers one portion of it, but I wish there was more detail here, more video, more images, maybe a nice graphic that explains some things, a data set, some references to where they got this information. Not just a bunch of blocks of text. Maybe I am looking for something that describes a process, something that explains it fully. If you can do that, if you can build something remarkable, where all of these people change from "Huh, huh, what's this?" To, oh, you know what, instead it's "I am happy." "I also am happy." "This page makes me do happy. Yea, I am going to stick my tongue out." If you can get that level of enjoyment and satisfaction from your users with the quality of the content that you produce, you're going to do much better in the search engines. Search engines have some sophisticated algorithms that look at true quality and value. You can see Google has gotten so much better about putting really good stuff in results, even sometimes when it doesn't have a lot of links or it is not doing hardcore keyword targeting, when it is great stuff, they are doing a good job of ranking it.
Next up, design quality, user experience, and usability. This is tough. Unless you have a professional designer or you have a professional design background, you almost certainly need to hire someone or go with a very simple, basic design that is very user friendly that you know when you survey your friends, survey people in your industry, survey people in your company, survey people in your ecosystem, that they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, this looks really good. I am really happy with the design. Maybe I am only giving it a six out ten in terms of beauty, but an eight out of ten in terms of usability. I understand the content on this site. It is easy for me to find things and they flow. There is really no point in ranking unless you are nailing these two, because you are not going to get many more customers. People are just going to be frustrated by the website. There are a few tools you can use on the Web to test these out. Five Second Test, Feedback Army, Silverback App, all of these are potentially useful for checking the usability user experience of the site.
Social account setup. Because social and SEO are coming together like never before, Google is showing plus ones and things that people share by default in the search engine rankings. Bing is showing all the stuff that has been shared on Facebook, and they are putting it above the rest of the content. It really, really pays to be in social, and social signals help search engines better rank things as well as having a nice second order effect on user and usage data, on branding, on the impact of people seeing those sites through social sharing and potentially linking to them. So social account setup, at the very least, you probably want to have these four: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Google+ is only about 25 million, but it is growing very fast. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook are all over 150 million users right now. I think Twitter is at 200 million. Facebook is at 750 million. So at least have your pages set up for those. Make sure the account experience is the same across them, using the same photos, same branding, same description, so people get a good sense when they see you in the social world. You probably want to start setting something up to be monitoring and tracking these. You might want to sign up for something like a Bitly. I used to really recommend PostRank, but unfortunately they don't track Facebook, since Google bought them, anymore. So it is a little more frustrating. The SEOmoz Web App will start to track these for you pretty soon. Once you've got those social accounts set up, you can feel good about sharing the content that you are producing through those social accounts, finding connections, building up in that world, and spending the appropriate amount of time there depending on the value you are feeling back from that.
Next up, link building. This is where I know a lot of people get sort of off to the wrong start, and it is incredibly hard to recover. I actually just got an email in my inbox before we started doing Whiteboard Friday from someone who had started a new website and he is like, "I got these 300 links, and now I am not ranking anymore. I was doing great last week. For the first six weeks after I launched, I was ranking great." I sort of did just a quick look at the back links, and I went, "Oh, oh no." I think this person really went down the route of I am going to get a bunch of low quality, easy to acquire links, and for a new site in particular, it is so dangerous, because Google is just really on top of throwing people out of the index or penalizing them very heavily when their link profile looks really scummy. When you don't have any trustworthy quality signals to boost you up, that's when low quality links can hurt the most.
So, good things to do. Start with your business contacts and your customers. They are great places to get links from. Your customers are willing to link to you. Awesome. Get them to link to you. If the contacts that you have in the business world are willing to say, hey, my friend Rand just launched a new website, boom, that's a great way of doing it. All your email contacts, your LinkedIn contacts, the people that you know personally and professionally, if you can ask them, hey, would you support me by throwing a link to me on your About page or your blog roll or your list of customers or your list of vendors, whatever it is.
Guest posts and content. This is a great way to do good content positive content production and earning links back for that. Finding trustworthy sites that have lots of RSS subscribers and are well renowned and can give you visibility in front of your audience and give you a nice link back if you can contribute positively to those. I also like high quality resource lists. So, this would be things like the Better Business Bureau maybe, that sort of falls a little in the directory world, but something like a CrunchBase. If you are a startup in the technology world, you definitely need to have a CrunchBase listing. You might want to be on some Wikipedia lists. Granted those are no-follow, but that's still okay. That is probably a good place to get some visibility. There might be industry specific lists that are like these are heavy machine production facilities in the United States. Great, okay, I should be on that list. That's what I do. News media and blogs. Getting the press to cover you. Getting blogs in your sphere to cover you. Finding those, emailing the editors, letting them know that you are launching this new website, that's a great time to say, "Hey this business is transforming. We're launching a new site. We're changing our branding," whatever it is. That is sort of a press worthy message and you can get someone to look at you. Review sites, review blogs are great for this too. They'll sort of say, oh, you've got a new application, you've got a new mobile service, maybe we'll link to you. That could be interesting.
Relevant social industry and app account links. If I contribute something to the Google Chrome store, if I contribute something to the Apple store, if I am contributing something to a design portal or design gallery, all of those kinds of industry stuff and accounts that you can get are likely worth getting your website listed on.
Social media link acquisitions. This is obvious stuff where you spend time on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, Google+ connecting with people and over time building those relationships that will get you the links possibly through one of these other forms or just through the friendliness of them noticing and liking, and enjoying your content. That's what content marketing is all about as well.
These are great ways to start. Very safe ways to do link building. They are not short-term wins. These, almost all of them, require at least some effort, some investment of your time and energy, some creativity, some good content, some authenticity in your marketing versus a lot of the stuff that tempts people very early on. They're like, oh, sweet, you know, I have a new website. I need to get like 500 links as soon as possible, so I am going to try things like reciprocal link pages. I am just going to put up a list of reciprocal link partners, and I am going to contact a bunch of other firms. They'll all link to me and we'll all link to each other. It will be a happy marriage of links. No, it's not. It's not a wonderland.
Low quality directories. You search for SEO friendly directory, if it shows up on that list, chances are . . . even in Google. Google is showing you a bunch of bad stuff. Someone was asking me recently on email, they said, "Hey, I really need some examples of sites that have done manipulative link building." I was like, "Oh, it's so easy. Search for SEO friendly directory and look at who has paid to be listed in those directories." They almost all have spammy manipulative link profiles, and it is funny because you go to those, and I don't know why people don't do this, but try searching for the brand names that come up in those lists. None of them rank for their own brand name. Why is that? Clearly, they are killing themselves with these terrible, terrible links. So, low quality directories, really avoid them.
Article marketing or article spinning, I talked about that a few weeks ago on Whiteboard Friday, also a practice I would strongly recommend you avoid, especially, I know it can work, I know there are people for whom it does work, but especially early on, it can just kill you. It really can get you banned or penalized out of the engines, and you just won't rank anywhere if your link profile starts out spammy. Paid links is another obvious one.
Forums, open forums, spam kind of going across the Web. Oh, here's a guest book that's open and forgot to put no-follow. I am going to leave a link there. Oh, here look, it's a forum that accepts registration, and they forgot to close their no-follow off, anyone can leave a link. Even things like do-follow blogs, do-follow blog comments, man, it's really risky because they are linking to bad places a lot of the time and it is usually manipulative people who have no intent to create something of value for the search engines. They are merely trying to manipulate their rankings. Whenever you have a tactic like that it attracts people who have nasty websites, and then Google looks at those and goes, okay, they're linking to a bunch of nasty sites. Well, I don't want to count those links, or maybe I am even going to penalize some of the people that they are linking to. That really sucks. Then link farms, which is essentially setting up all these different systems of links that point to each other across tons of domains that are completely artificial or link for no human reason, or no discernable human reason, and are merely meant to manipulate the engines.
This type of stuff is very, very dangerous when you are early on. If you have already built up a good collection of these types of links, you are much safer. You do have some risk in those first three, six, nine months after you have launched a new site around doing wrong things on the link building front and getting yourself into a situation where you are penalized. We see a ton of that through SEOmoz Q&A. I get it in email. You see it on the Web all the time. So, be cautious around that.
Hopefully, this checklist will help you get your site to a nice established place and you can keep doing some great marketing and eventually win the Internet. I wish you good luck with your new website. Thanks so much. Thanks for watching. See you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Hi Rand,
really nice WBF and helpful. Especially I like how you remark the importance that to have your new site ranking is needed dedication. Sometimes we get more passionate about the travel (creating the website) than the destination (making the site visited).
I'd like to share with you all some great resources that can complement what this WBF already says.
Ok, that's all folks. Hope this can help you making your new website a soon famous and succesful web marketing case history to study.
thank you for sharing these links. Your comment definetely complete rand's vidéo
Awesome comment! Thanks so much, Gianluca.
Great list of resources, many thanks to you Gianluca.
Here is a PDF for download of the checklist.
Nice reminder of a checklist I used and loved... Still useful and suggested, even though it should need an actualization, as Danny Dover (he did that checklist if I am not wrong) told once too when still working at SEOmoz.
Very Good stuff Thanks for that mate!
You're welcome guys.
Great WBF for startups.
Probably setting up robots.txt, xml sitemaps, rel=canonical ... are helpful, too.
Yes, excellent point! That should certainly go in the accessibility section. I also didn't mention setting up analytics (post on that here: https://www.seomoz.orgwww.seomoz.org/blog/launching-a-new-website-18-steps). I should probably have titled this "some portion of a checklist for new websites" and not portrayed it as comprehensive.
Also - Aaron - you need to tell me when I look like I've just woken up from a nap :-) Preferrably before the filming.
Haha, no, no. Makes the whole production seem more raw and visceral this way. It's that vérité style we've been meaning to bring to WBF for years!
Nouvelle SEO Vague?
It's authentic and personable :)
Hi,Randfish.
If possible,you can share with us one excel worksheet for this checklist.
I think most of us can donwload it and check our sites by each one.
Great Video. Thank you!
@ algogmbh_petra : Is there an article on that toppic, that you could recommend? I am just working on setting up my sitemaps
Thanks for any help.
I don't have special articles about that in my mind.
Perhaps those sources will help you:
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/xml-sitemaps-guidelines-on-their-use
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic
https://www.geositemapgenerator.com/
https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472
Thank you!!
Hey Rand,
I'd like to download an actual checklist, give it to my employees, and have them literally check things off. I'm sure these other readers would like the same.
Eitherway, thanks for the good info.
OK cool. I'll work on that. Glad to hear it's of interest!
I'd also make use of an actual checklist -- I speak to MBA's in a marketing class every fall here at Univ of CO at Boulder. They don't seem to get much info like this in class and would love to know more.
Please let me know when/if you put one together: [email protected]
Deb Ward
Owner, iMedia Buzz, Inc.
I second that. It's always nice to have a physical checklist in front of me when setting up a new site or when showing a client all the things that need to be done.
We also have a few older posts with this type of information in a checklist view, though they're skewed towards other niches at times:
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-beginners-checklist-for-small-business-seo
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-beginners-checklist-for-learning-seo
Hope that helps!
Danny Dover did a great WBF a while back about making an internal SEO checklist. Great info! Rand's was great too, of course, haha.. just not as details as Danny's.
Great idea - I have a checklist that we go through for any new site but it'd be interesting to compare it with Rand's :)
Paid links don't work? Really tell that to the 1000's of sites whose top trankings are built on paid links.
I'm not advocating this but I'm also not going to be a hypochrite and act like I have never gone down the link buying route. Most (if not all) SEO's have resorted to this practice at one time or another.
We like to act like we're Whiter than White but, go on be honest, we're all at least a little bit grey!
Hats are out of fashion for SEO.
Try to explain this with lightsabers. :]
Ivan that was a great share! Thanks!
Really nice checklist. I would like to add one very very important point here. Start your checklist by identifying the purpose of the website. What is the purpose of this website? What the website is trying to accomplish? This question is the very foundation of your SEO strategy. If you are not crystal clear about the purpose then you have a bumpy ride ahead. Once you have clearly defined purpose then you should check whether the content strategy, keywords selection, social media strategies, link building and target audience align/will align with that purpose. To get optimum results from your SEO campaign you should aim to achieve a perfect or nearly perfect alignment. IMO optimising this alignment is SEO.
Amazing video!
It should also be mentioned that a nice analytics tool helps to make sure that all is well and traffic is being measured properly. Usability and other factors can't be improved if they aren't measured :)
Fantastic Rand!!
I'd just like to recommend, for some sites, it would REALLY make sense to secure their YouTube page as well.
Also, if you really want to go nuts, you can use Knowem to check availability of your brand across hundreds of social media sites.
-Dan
Great site - been looking for something like that for ages - thanks! :)
Wow! Ask and Ye shall deliver... Within a week!!
Great WBF Rand, this is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind when I asked. It's good to get a refresh on the starting up basics and this has made the whole process a lot clearer in my mind again.
I'd love to see expansion around some of these topics if the post proves popular, especially around social followings and content. Perhaps from the perspective of starting out from a blank social canvas and how to get your twitter/facebook accounts noticed and off the ground so you can promote new content (Might fit in nicely with the new social beta tool :), which I'm looking forward to)
Great WBF video!
Yes a checklist for download would be great! After I read the Beginners Guide to SEO I found this checklist on The Daiily Blog https://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-beginners-checklist-for-small-business-seo. I put it into Word format and have been using it. It would be great to see one from you though Rand.
Hi everyone, Hi Rand.
Thanks for the video. I have a quick question if anyone can find a few minutes to enlighten me that'd be great. I've been writing a lot of guest blog posts for my business and I always re-publish those guest-posts on my business blog (with a link back to where the article was first published). I do that because the content I write can help many of my cutomers and I want them to find it all in one place.
Is republishing guest posts on my own blog detrimental to my rankings?
Chris
I work primiarly is local marketing and focus on local SEO. Claiming a Google Places listing is obvisouly very important. What are your thoughts regarding some of submitting to some of the many local directories such as yelp, superpages, manta, etc.. Do you classify those as different from the "seo friendly" directories?
I can tell you my opinion... When it comes to local search, we all know how citations are essential as Google Pages ranking factor. Therefore local listings or general listings (as Yelp) should be used.
But there's also another reason why it's better to claim your listings in those kind of sites: control the content, especially the description of the place. On a social side, it is the same with FourSquare: claim your site and start do marketing actions with it.
Great advice on using your own resources to start a link building outreach.
(From Rand on accidental edit):
I removed your comment somehow Kumail! Very sorry. Instead of posting the answer to your query below, I somehow edited your comment. However, you asked about targeting multiple keywords; here's what I meant to reply:
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/tactical-seo-how-many-termsphrases-should-i-target-on-a-single-page might be helpful/useful to answer that (and https://www.seomoz.org/blog/targeting-multiple-keywords-vs-singular-keyword-focus, too).
Sorry about that!
Too much Pisco, Rand? ;)
lol
It's really owesome. I got all most all the solutions for my SEO clients. It's not easy to explain all the things to our new clients but now i am just going to share this link with them & done... Thanks
Awesome information and explained brilliantly. Nice one Rand!
Dear Sir,
Its a very nice Explanation about all the New SEO tactics, Very nice work.Thanks
Looking forward to it.......!!!
I'd just like to make mention that the jury is still out in the discussion of "thin content".
Last week I was searching some information about a dental service and my search was "Can you clean Invisalign" and the first result on my end was:
.dentistry-explained.blogspot.com/2008/12/how-do-you-clean-invisalign-clear.html
You'll notice there's very little content on the page and even now real 'decent' anchor text in the body copy.
I've found, over the years and I'm sure many of you have that sometimes pages with very minimal content can and does rank pretty high in the search results.
An excellent video. Loved it. I do have an off-beat comment. THe screenshot of Aaron when first visiting the page is awesome. I know Seomoz did it, like he's talking about a juicy something he got a hold of last night. Sorry, had to comment on that part :)
I think one mistake that could be added to white board Friday is paying people huge bucks to SEO your site for you without having an understanding of what type of work they will be doing. As a Realtor in Washington State I have learned that 90 percent of home sales start with an online search for key words that are related to Real Estate and Homes for Sale. These are good size commision that come in if you rank well withing google. The problem is that I have noticed that every time you pay for advertising that you attract more people that are interested in helping you grow your buisness. The problem is learning who is trustworthy and who is trying to get you to pay them upfron so they can move onto their next contact.
Can someone please answer this question?
If it is true that by building spammy links out the gate for a new site that it can get banned then can you please answer the question of...
What if a competitor with a huge markteing budget has other campaigns they set up where they just build low quality spam links, and paid links in the thousands in a real short period of time???
I think Google would be at a big risk banning a site for links they may be unaware of.
Would really appreciate an answer if anyone has one. Thank you.
Thanks for the brief explanarion. It's reallt awsome.
I did a search for "seo friendly directory" and there was an SEOmoz ad on the SERP. What does it meeaan?
Amazing stuff but unable to stream video, if you could increase speed that would good.
SEO for an old website is different than SEO done for a brand new website, and there should be a checklist before making any new action for the SEO of any Newly made website with everything newly set up, hence I found this checklist much much helpful as a client point of view as well as an SEO Analyst. Thanks..
Great Whiteboard Friday Rand... Great comprehensive list that every new site should go through.
Hi,
This post is really help me , now i have a question :-
how much social bookmarking help new site , is this right thing to do with new site?
Thanks
You had mentioned that soon enough, the SEOMoz web app will start tracking Social Metrics, how soon can we expect this?
Thanks,
-Chris
Thanks for the share. You make it free here.
Thanks for this WBF. I like the linkbuilding part. Thanks for this info. It's true that "quick" link building is something tempting but how much of a no no route to go...
Hi I would like to ask if this checklist (especially social media account set-up) could apply to B2B companies as well. Also, how safe is it to have links from many social media sites? I would like to have your expertise view on this. thanks
Nice and refreshing, it is so funny how unless you write all these things down in a checklist you overlook or tend to forget some always.
Really good tips Rand. Thanks!!
Awesome checklist for SEO beginner. It would be great if you could provide advance checklist for SEO.
Great tutorial Rand. I wish I saw this six months ago!
Excellent information for anyone building a website.
Oh man - I've been doing a lot of things wrong :-( Great post - time to rethink my link building plan!
You guys should check out www.Formvote.com if you're into checking out newer websites. It's a new social network and it's actually pretty awesome.
This is an extremely useful list. Since this list applies to new sites, what differences would be implemented for an older, non-seo-optimized site?
As they always say, quality over quantity. Social Media interaction plays a vital role especially with new websites. Getting more interaction around your 'community' gives you more visibility. Great video and very helpful for new site owners.
Thanks for sharing! The check list is a great tool
Hi, I'm looking for some handy SEO checklist for creating new websites. This seems to be pretty old content as google has changed some minor and major algos in last year. If you have a link for some new content, please share me the link.
P.S: Many of the tips given here are stable ones which will not be affected by google. But I mostly require the modified rules :)
Whilst I agree with most of this I think you are overplaying the importance of link quality. If Google banned sites for having loads of poor incoming links there would be a massive demand for spam tools just for getting sites banned. Link diversity and consistency are still what counts.
This is a very interesting article. Off course there was some important stuff left out but the majority of the things was covered.
Nice vids, always usefull thanks
Hey Aaron another great WBF and I love these vids. Just happened a few days agon when I launched my new site there are so much to do in the start apart from building links/getting the word out. HUHH!!
I would like to ask that start slowly, don't stress yourself doing all of these in 1 day, give some time to it.
Nice
Thank You
Great point about accessibility Ran! Thanks for the post.
Interesting video. All 'green' sites owners needs to know this.
Great post here Rand. Very encouraging as I launched a new site about 6 months ago and have been working hard at building a natural profile from the get go. Thanks!
Hey Rand,
Another NICE WBF! A great checklist of the basics of SEO for a brand new site! We need to stress that QUALITY links are so important! Those easy to acquire, low quality links are crap for new websites.
You gave some great examples of places to begin gathering links, even nofollows are still picked up by crawlers and I think will help compared to those quick, low quality links and directories.
~"I'm so happy i'm going to stick my tongue out!" :P
Hey Rand, great post as per usual, but quick question - when was the last time you actually reviewed the performance of businesses using directories and other crappy tactics. While I don't recommend these tactics for their risky nature, I also think people might be surprised how well many of them do.
For instance, taking your advise, searching for "search engine friendly directory" and going in and finding a few sites that listed there - of the 5 I tried, all were ranking on the first page for their targetted keyword. Granted, most are local businesses, but could it be that these tactics are still quite effective in smaller markets? I see it all the time.
Again, I'm not advocating these tactics - but I see them succeeding in several situations.
I see this too all the time, but the point is that its only a matter of time before these low quality tactics stop working and all those sites start to drop
When though?! I feel like we might all be putting a little too much faith in the Google here. I've been told for years that this stuff is going to stop working.. but it's still being used and it's still working. I can give multiple examples of sustained successes with using this stuff.
Hey nice to read it. I'll try it.
Awesome entry! My wife and I will put this to the test with our new blog launch soon :)
Fridays are never quite complete without a Whiteboard Friday from Rand!
This topic couldn't have been addressed at a more perfect time for me. My company is in the midst of launching a few new websites and this checklist seems to cover all grounds. We've recently had an issue with a site that had semi-poor content and design quality. It just wasn't keeping people on the site! From now on, we will surely make it a point to address these problems more effectively.
Thanks for the tips!
I have an old website that was up for years but was never optimized. How do you know when you should just start over? Can you resurrect an old site even if you started out wrong? Waste of time?
If the site was indexed and has some links then it might be worth resurrecting it rather than completely starting from scratch. This is assuming the domain name is appropriate to the goals you have for the new site.
Our main links are from FB, Twitter, and a sister site of ours that brings in a lot of traffic. We do have probably 3 scammy inbound links that have been worrying me (I don't even know where they came from. I didn't ask for them). But that's about all the links we have at the moment. The site is indexed and doesn't have any problems with it but we're about to do a complete makeover and one of the ideas was to launch it under a new domain but we don't want to loose any page rank or authority. Our page authority is 18 and domain authority is 13. Is that too little to worry about loosing? I'm just getting started and not sure how much work it is to get up to that rank but I'd really like to get rid of these scammy links. Is 3 scammy links a cause for worry?
If three questionable links were enough to ruin a site, tons of businesses would be buying such links on behalf of their competitors. Build on what you have, keep the social media links coming in and focus on creating a site that's worth linking to.
Great tips for new sites. It's so important that new sites get all their ducks in a row before they start worrying about off-site SEO. It doesn't matter how great your link building is if your site isn't properly optimized and ready to convert.
Wonderful check list! The best advice I like for new websites is not just start adding your website link to the list of directories… and this is going to help your link builder a lot and also…your website will seems to be clean in eye of search engine.
I think the best approach of getting high quality links is to just to forget about grabbing links and start building your brand and (I bet) you will automatically gonna get great links…
But yes above all great and unique content is important!
Hey Rand
And if your new site is getting like 100 follow link from directories does it sound suspicious to google??you said yes but can you get penalized for this?or filtered from google top spots??And You said low directories and if you write in google "website directories" And You get links from there from lets say 10 first pages are they really so low you can get filtered?And if you get those links and you get filtered and then you make 301 and for about gew days you get also filtered does it say that those links are bad or something on your site??
Best Regards
Not sure I completley followed your comment, but the point I was trying to make (perhaps not well) is that getting lots of links from non-editorial, low quality sources very early in your site's launch phase can be quite dangerous. Not every site that engages in this will get penalized, banned or filtered, but those first few months of life and marketing are even more risky for low quality links than later in a site's life, at least when it comes to how Google tends to treat them.
first i have to say i love whiteboard friday and second thx for replay :)
I have made few new sites and started do getting links from directories and making article marketing. For example the site is shoes.com so i get links for shoes from directories and then articles "new shoes" "super shoes" and stuff like that that people might search, of course the articles was only on my site and if i get links from directories i made new descryption every time :)(as to your article marketing whiteboard friday :)). And i was getting from like 20th place in google to like 4th place for shoes but site was online for a 3 weeks and it did get filtered( i get about 100th follow link from directories). Almost all my sites made like that got filtered. Before Panda when i was making sites like that i get 1st place and still am. So you can call it a test- but if your new site will get only follow links and only from directories you will get filtered for sure!!When im reading google webmaster forum every day the same history happens to others.And more to say when i made 301 to a new webiste-this new website was like 5days on top spots and then also get filtered. No i have funny situation because im on 250th position and directories are on 9th,10th,11th and so on.Do You think that Panda "cuts" power from directories to a new site when it gets only link from them?From this article https://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-link-based-spam-analysis-techniques and my "tests" i'm assuming it can happen. What do You think ??
I think you have to learn a lot about SEO and ranking factors in 2011.
If you put all the eggs in one basket (in your case directories) sooner or later, all your sites will be soooo down on SERPs.
Don't try to game Google, you will fail, sooner or later. :]
Hi Rand,
Excellent WBF. It'll no doubt prove useful to me over the next few months.
One thought which I had on the keyword targeting was regarding link prioritisation. I agree that there should be a focus on less competitive keywords, but when setting up the site, should you also bear in mind long-term keyword targets when determining the hierarchy of the site? So you may use the keyword with the highest search volume (which you want to rank for in the long-term) in a sitewide link, rather than a variation of that keyword which may be less competitive.
Thanks
My answer is: Semantic and Keyword Combination.
If you optimise a page for - i.e. - "Cheap travel opportunities", you can work around at least 4 different set of keywords:
And work with these different variations also in link building... and remember that actually partial matchng archor texts seems correlating better to rankings.
This is a great Whiteboard Friday. Thank you for this authentic and well structured checklist. I really enjoy your way of doing SEO. Keep up this good work!
Wonderful WBF again by Rand, SEO Checklists are mandatory for new website. At initial level we have to know that what we should do and what we shoudn't. These way we can do the some great internet marketing for our website.
I agree with gfiorelli1 that partial keyword matching anchor text are seems vital factor in serp rankings and we have to make the Semantic and Keyword Combination as he said. Thanks for this suggestion.
Thank you Rand for this WBF...!
I've recently created a blog site. I'll promote my blog on forums that are very relevant to my site by means of helping out people with common problems and referring them to an article about that problem and its solution. Will this negatively influence my SEO?
No... that is a correct use of forum/comment marketing. Always if you refer also to other sources of interest than your own and if your "self-citations" are more than justified. That way you can become a trusted source yourself and do not incurr in the community wrath, and this will surely help you outreaching people/bloggers/sites for promoting your content (via social or links or both).
Allright, thanks for the info! :-)
Web design, development and SEO (or at least the initial implementation of SEO and keyword research) should go hand-in-hand. Yet there are still basic, or even 'Gold,' 'Platinum' and my new favourite 'Titanium' web-build packages that do not even touch on SEO. The agency response is usually, "they don't really need SEO." If they don't need SEO then they probably don't need a website, afterall, what's the point of a website if people can't find it?
Great post Aaron.
Good information on SEO for new websites. I would add just one more link building activity that new website owners should do at the launch of a new website and that would be (what I mentioned in my Facebook share not long ago) submit a press release.
I really love this WBF. Thanks for the awesome post! I am excited for your next one - and curious what it will be about. Definately looking forward to more from you :)
A SEO launch checklist is a great planning tool. I build mine in MS Project, assign time and responsibilities, and make it part of an overall site launch schedule.
At a more strategic level, I find that developing scheduling documents such as website roadmaps and a content/social media calendars also helpful. The website roadmap is especially useful when one must postpone various SEO-related tasks due to time or budget constraints.
Very useful indeed. I think these are great tips for SEO startups, rather focusing on quality than quantity is key.
Liked the article, great job of breaking down white hat vs. black hat techniques from the start of an SEO campaign. I would suggest adding headers and bullit points to make the article a bit easier to read next time.
Very useful, has inspired me to write a couple of blogs posts, for a few of my clients sites, Organic SEO checklist and a more general online marketing checklist incorporating PPC as well.
With regards to link building, your link sources are good advice, however have been doing tests on my site and due to big flaws, in particular with Googles search algorithm, many of the low quality and exact match link texts still work very well, even for relatively new sites.
I'm afraid only when Google sorts out the algorithm and sites no longer rank using these methods, will people stop using them, as very, very easy way of aquiring links in the meantime.
Great list, thanks for this. Nice to hear that I've got it all covered!
A print/savable checklist would be helpful, as others have mentions.
Great WBF, with doing other people's websites and then advising them on the way forward, this can provide a very useful structure to show what needs to be done and what should not be done, to help them to get ranking. So thanks!
So, what's to stop me buying up big on dodgy backlinks for all my competitors? I could easily buy really cheap auto submitted blog comments and forum posts to dodgy sites (they're about $9 for a thousand!) and then bomb all my competitors with them and get them all de-indexed? It doesn't make sense that google would put you in time out for having backlinks that anyone could buy.
Thank you so much. That is greatly beneficial. It would be nice to have a literal checklist to pass around.
very interesting and valuable post. Thanks!
I just posted a list as well on my site: https://www.seoinspection.com/11-free-seo-tips.html
I think for a new site, link building is a double edged sword. If a new site does it too well, Google will look at that as unnatural and if they do it poorly, then they will not move in rankings.
I see most new sites having too many moving parts. They adjust one side and then forget to change something else, or they allow their CMS to do whatever it wants and it kills their link juice and ignores best practices.
Realistically, it will take plenty of time and I think a PPC campaign is money better spent than buying links.
But when I see a site that is just an average ecommerce site (not Target or Walmart) with 20,000+ inbound links, I know that buying links is a fact of life.
Thanks for review..
I really enjoyed this WBF. Especially the part when you say that good tactics are not short-term wins.Although my customers start getting some grasp of SEO and what's behind in terms of getting visitors and potential customers and the time it takes to do things the proper way they are still hard to convince that using bad tactics when a site is just published could hurt them. Because they want immediate results.I really find that part of our job as SEO difficult. I am still trying the good answer to their "I want to be on first page right away". Maybe some of you has found the right answer to use.
nice post man i appreciate ur post.
Hi Rand,
Thanks again for a Gr8 WBF,
The stuff you shown in this session will really help us to get something real for our websites rather than doing the same thing which others are doing from last 5-10 years. People are still busy in doing artcile submission, article spinning, spammy blog commenting, fake profile building on fourm sites, linking to spammy websites and they are not thninking about the quality of that link which they are getting out of it. I am really thankful to that you are always pushing us to find out something real that would really help your website.
Amardeep Singh
Rand,
That gets the thumbs up from me.
I actually have to commend you because I noticed that towards the end of the video, your body language and the "vibes" that you were giving off seemed to be edging towards the fact that you just wanted to blast the hell out of some of the negative linking factors however you knew that again, a debate would appear as to where the community would say that Article Marketing DOES work etc and I give you credit for actually mentioning that it works and I'm sure that took you some guts because I know how much you hate it. I really do hate Article Marketing/Spinning etc as I think it's a very bad tactic.
I notice also how you summed up Paid Links in about 4 words however I'm going to say again and I think that the majority of open-minded users of this community, who work in difficult industries or have sense will agree that Paid Links do work and are needed and are not dangerous if done correctly.
Paying somebody for a link is the same as using Twitter to get one or doing a guest blog post but it' just quicker as mentioned before in previous posts and lots of people will disagree with this but if a company has money or don't have the time or the industry is just so difficult such as gambling then you can't naturally achieve links.
In Gambling for example, Webmasters are aware that link buying happens and they know what their links are worth so they don't give them away for free at all where as everybody on SEOmoz promote natural ways, I agree totally but certain industries, it's so difficult Rand.
Lots of companies buy links and most won't admit it but the rule of the roost is that, if you don't, your competitors probably are and they will always outrank you, if you can't beat them then join them.
This will cause a heated debate but I'm willing to take the flack as I know I'm right.
I just wish that you, Rand, would accept that paid links do work and many other people although my theory is that they do actually buy links but they just won't admit it...
Thanks.
Nice!
Perfect for my marketing research class where students just started Tumblr websites.
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Looks like your Link Building Strategy needs improving!!!
Usablilty and conversions rates are equally as important as Keywords and Visitors. You can get loads of visitors but if they can't use the site there is not point to all the visitors...
Tumblr also a great community and let me sure that is it latest penguin safe!!!?
Rashad