Best SEO Strategy for a New Site

When you search Google or Yahoo for a competitive term you will see that the search engines have already indexed millions of results containing the information related to the word or phrase you used in your search. This may be a bit discouraging for newcomers who want to get their content displayed at the top of the search result list.

Search engine optimization requires a great deal of strategic planning if you want to compete for a spot on SERPs (search engine result pages). We have divided our strategy plans into two main categories SEO Strategy for New sites and SEO Strategy for Established Sites. You will understand why it was done this way as you proceed with reading the following explanations.

SEO Strategy for a New Site

When a new site shows up online it may take a while until search engines start treating it seriously, especially if the content is charged with keywords that are very competitive. Meaning that these keywords show up in millions of web pages. Search engines will take time to learn more about the nature of a new site, the frequency of updates, perhaps even the rate with which your pages generate backlinks, etc. 

This process has been associated with a the theoretical concept of “sandbox effect“. Although there is no official confirmation that such thing as “sandbox” exists, it actually makes sense and its effect can be observed as one adds new content to a site. 

One thing we are sure about is that even if a new site is indexed relatively fast, you should not expect to get anywhere close to the top of search results, especially, there’s a need to repeat this, if you are targeting competitive keywords. So, what can we do to start attracting organic traffic on search engines and breathe a little life into our site?

1. Target Less-Competitive Keywords and Long-Tail Phrases

When it comes to blogging one thing you will find very convenient is separating static pages (or Pages in WordPress) and chronological posts (or Posts in WordPress). You may choose to create static pages for the “heavy” keywords, keywords that potentially can bring you a lot of traffic if your site gets ranked high for these terms. Then write posts that will target long-tail keywords or short, but less competitive keywords. Why would you do that?

Static pages will usually contain general information that will be relevant to most of the posts in your blog. The posts may branch out into such adverse topics that will be hard to connect with each other (that’s why we have categories). It will make more sense to place links to your static pages on the sidebar, header or footer since they will be contextually valuable for your visitors. 

If you are familiar with SEO basics, then you know that the more links lead to a page the more important it becomes in the eyes of search engines. So, optimize your pages for the most competitive keywords you are targeting and give them all the internal link juice you can. Then proceed to your posts.

Blog posts do not have to be long assays on a particular subject. Your posts can be spontaneous notes or short updates. They can include a great variety of information and keywords. They are quick and easy to write. So it makes sense to use them for generating textual content with a vast variation of key phrases. Basically, with a little effort and relatively little time consumption you will try this and that keyword, twisting and spinning phrases with your terms, improving your chance to be indexed for unique long-tail phrases.

A comparative parallel can be drawn here to help you understand how pages and posts work together. Imagine that you are going fishing for a seabeast (or heavy traffic). You set large hooks (your pages) with meaty bait and wait until something bites. But while you are waiting you also drop in a bunch of small hooks (posts) with various baits that may attract some smaller catches. But if you catch enough of small fish (traffic) you will manage to feed yourself and survive until you catch something greater.

How do you pick less-competitive keywords?

Open Google external keyword tool and use a competitive keyword to lookup some ideas. Pay attention to the Competition column. If it shows little or now competition among advertisers, then this keyword doesn’t have a great demand. There’s a great chance that the search result count in Google will be low if you search this term. Go to Google web search and check it out. We can’t give you a set number that will define the quality of a non-competitive keyword, but if Google has indexed less than 1 million pages for this term and the global monthly searches (see keyword tool) exceed a few thousand, that will be a good start.

2. Improve Search Engine Saturation

The term “Search Engine Saturation” usually refers to the number of pages from your domain indexed by a search engine. This definition could also be extended with another dimension, namely the variation of keywords assigned to the pages. Since each separate term will bring you a separate stream of traffic.

But if you talk about the search engine saturation on a business level, rather than in terms of a single website, then we will notice that the idea bends away from its original definition. It wouldn’t matter if you get your business referrals from a single site or a number of different sites, blogs, ads and banners placed on other websites. The more leads or traffic you get online the better it is for your business. So, let’s talk about visibility of your business, rather than visibility of your site / blog.

We know that incoming links improve ranking of our sites

We know that keyword-rich domain names may get better placement on SERPs

We may have more time on our hands than extra money to spend on promotion

So, why don’t we put these facts and assumptions together and workout a strategy to improve our business (and perhaps site) online saturation.

There’s a great number of website builders that will host basic websites for free (webs.com, weebly.com, yola.com just to name a few). They will also let you have your own sub-domain or a custom domain name. Quite often you will be able to pick a nice sub-domain with keywords you want. When you create links on the pages of these free websites they will be do-follow (meaning that they will not contain rel=”nofollow” attributes) and will pass some link juice to your main site.

The main pages of these website builders will usually have great PageRanks. That is the reflection of their importance in the eyes of Google and others (check their PR on Google Toolbar). These sites will have their own unique IP addresses, as well. A few of them, such as blogspot.com and WordPress.org, will have internal links from tag pages or site maps, profile pages, etc. Which will pass some of their PR juice down to your pages and help them to get indexed.

If we want to take advantage of the above-mentioned things, we should create as many free sites as we find manageable. Use as many different free-site services as possible. This will keep your content and links on different IP addresses.

Use sub-domains that are related to the subject of our main website, but don’t optimize it for your main keywords. Use some of the long tail or less popular keywords.

Example… if your main site is devoted to SEO strategies and optimized for the terms “seo strategy”, “seo strategies”, “search engine optimization strategies”, then the subdomains that you create for your free sites could be something like “seo-planning”, “seo-strategy-for-bloggers”, etc.

Make sure your free sites contain links to your main site. Use the right anchor texts and titles to improve the keyword count for your main site.

!!! Don’t forget to get some incoming links to your free sites, to make sure they get found and indexed by search engines. Social bookmarking, Twitting and what not will do.

If everything is done well, you will end up with a nice set of incoming links from subject-related pages. And if these free sites get indexed well, you may also get some traffic for your business. Another advice would be to write your content (for free sites) in such a way that it will make people want to go to your main site. Offer additional information or a complete article. You can also place banners that will improve the visual appeal of your information and increase the click-through rate for your links. If post business related information, place your contact info, FaceBook links, etc. to make sure visits transform into leads.

3. Links

We will not get into the subject of getting incoming links for your site. We will just stress their importance for successful SEO. Make sure you use webmaster tools provided by search engines to monitor the progress of indexing for your sites. As soon as you notice that a page shoots up in ranking, concentrate on it and give it more attention. Pull them up one by one, but try not to forget about the rest of them. As you post new content give it a push by linking it from your own pages as well as from external pages.

If you want to learn more about linking strategies, refer to our link building tutorial.

SEO Strategy for an Existing Site

Everything that you find above may and should be applied to established sites, as well. However, one very important thing that we want to highlight here is optimizing the structure of your site. If a new site can be optimized at once, as it gets build, things are a bit more complicated when it comes to aged sites.

1. Avoid Drastic Changes

If your site is indexed well and you get some traffic that your business depends on, try avoiding drastic changes. A quick, site-wide makeover may create unwanted consequences, especially if it changes the way your old content is presented throughout the pages.

If it is possible to divide your site into segments, implement new formatting over a period of time going from one segment to another. Observe how these changes effect a little portion of your site, rather than testing them on all of your pages.

Pay attention to how the ranking of your re-constructed pages changes. If you don’t see any changes, it may mean that the search engines have not re-indexed them just yet. Take a look at the cached version of your pages. If you see changes there, you may need to wait a bit more.

If you see improvements in organic placements, you may proceed further and update your whole site. If you see negative changes, such as drops in organic placements or loss of some terms you used to be indexed for, don’t panic and don’t roll back to your old version of the site. Give it some time. Perhaps the change was a bit unexpected for the search engines and they want to see where it all is going.

2. Link Rate

With a new website the rate with which you can safely get external incoming links will differ, depending on the amount of initial content it has. Each page can bear it’s own link weight without alerting search engines with the suspicious, unexplainable “popularity”. As your site grows and you add more and more pages the rate with which your site can start generating links also increases. If you disperse external linking efforts evenly throughout your pages, rather than dropping all the external links on your home page, you can safely increase the rate of linking proportionally to your content growth.

Learn more about linking rate in our link building tutorial.

3. Content Optimization

Content optimization for an established website is merely incorporating targeted keywords within the existing texts, rather than rewriting them completely. Reserve to minimal changes. If you introduce new content to a page, keep at least 80% of your old content. Give it some time to get re-indexed. Analyze the effect these changes have on search placements.

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