Starting Fresh? SEO Tips for New Websites

Here is a brief summary of the key points from the transcript: - The transcript covers tips for setting up and optimizing a new website for SEO. - It first covers choosing a domain name, registering it and setting up web hosting. It recommends using WordPress and installing the RankMath SEO plugin. - It then covers doing keyword research to identify low competition keywords to target initially. It recommends using tools like RankBot and Google Keyword Planner. - For site structure, it recommends starting with a simple silo structure to group related content. - For creating content, it suggests using AI tools like RankMath's Content Wizard to generate an initial draft, then refining it with your own expertise. - For on-page optimization, it covers optimizing titles, meta descriptions, using focus keywords, adding schema markup, internal links, etc. - For user experience, it recommends choosing fast, mobile-friendly themes, limiting plugins and monitoring site speed. - For backlinks, it suggests focusing on content first, then doing outreach later once the site is more established. - It recommends monitoring rankings in RankMath and identifying outdated content to update in order to boost rankings.

Speaker A: As a new site owner, you might be wondering, how do I even begin to make my site visible on the search engines? Don't worry, you are not alone. Every successful site you see today started from scratch and the good news is there are concrete steps you can take.

Speaker B: To set your website up for SEO.

Speaker A: Success from day one. In this video, we're going to break it all down for you from the foundational elements you need to set up to the advanced tactics that will help you climb up the search engine rankings quicker than you might think.

Speaker B: Let's go. Hey, it's Jack from rank Math, the.

Speaker A: One tool that brings you easy to use SEO and AI tools. And this channel provides you with tips, tricks and tutorials to grow your search traffic.

Speaker B: So if you're new to us, subscribe. I'll break this video down into two parts. The first part is meant for you. If you are still in the planning phase, you haven't bought your domain and you do not have a website up and running, I'll show you what to.

Speaker A: Do and if you already have a website, you want to use the timestamps in the description to skip to the next part.

Speaker B: We will discuss all the necessary elements like setting up your website for SEO, site structure, keyword research on page SEO, user experience and more. So let's strap up and let's go.

Speaker A: Alright, if you haven't decided on your domain name yet, let me share with you some tools that will help you brainstorm some ideas.

Speaker B: We recommend going to namelix.com to generate some domain name ideas. Simply enter some keywords related to your business. For example, if we want to set up a BBQ block, we can add BBQ here. Maybe we can add flame as well since it is relevant and let's go to the next step. You can choose whatever name style you want. I will choose auto and hit next. The higher option will generate more varied results so if you are more adventurous, feel free to choose this option. But for me I would choose the medium option. Feel free to play around with this. Let's click next and then you can add your business description here. If you don't have any yet, you can just leave it empty and hit generate. Give it a while and here are your domain name ideas. Now if you see this green text, it means that a.com name is available. So you want to go through this list and if you find any domain name you like, we will proceed to the next step.

Speaker A: Here are some tips to select your domain name. It should have an idea of what.

Speaker B: Your business is about in other words.

Speaker A: It should have descriptive words that describe your business. It should be brandable. For example, if you run a pet blog, you could have domain names like Bugbuddy or Paw palace. Keep your domain name as short as possible, so best to keep it below 15 characters because the longer your domain name is, the harder it is to remember. Do not use hyphen, special characters or numbers. Opt to have a.com if possible and try to limit the number of syllables to four. Like rank math has two syllables. Everything paused has four syllables. The more syllables you have in your.

Speaker B: Domain name, the harder it is to remember.

Speaker A: So these are the tips and once you have selected your domain name, let's move on to the next step.

Speaker B: It's time to register your domain name and web host. To get your site updated and running, we recommend going to one.com to get everything done. Click on start now and here you will search for your domain. Let's say that we are interested in sparkygrill.com. let's search for it and the domain is available. Let's add it to cart and hit continue now at this time you need to decide on a content management system to run on your website. There are many options like Joomla Drupal, but we recommend using WordPress because it is one of the easiest to use without any coding knowledge. So if you decide to use WordPress, we recommend adding the manage WordPress option as it will provide an update manager, added security and you can have priority support. Let's hit continue, fill up the details, and once done, the process afterwards to.

Speaker A: Set up your website is rather straightforward and once you hit the WordPress dashboard, here's what you need to do.

Speaker B: So the rank math plugin will automatically be added for you if you host your website with one.com. but if you don't see rank math in your installed plugin list, you want to click on add new plugin and from here search for rank math you want to install and activate the plugin. And then most importantly, whether you have a rank math account or you don't have a rank math account, don't worry, just click on connect your account now. If you don't have an account, you want to click on Register now to get a free account. This free account will provide you with a lot of benefits, such as 750 AI credits every month for free. But if you have an account, you want to log in here. So let me log into my account and connect your website to the rank math account. Once done, you'll be led to the setup wizard now there are a few options here, but we recommend that you select the advanced mode so that all the features in rank math will be customizable. Let's click on Start. Reason if you run this website under a business, you want to select either on a business website, small business sites, a webshop or whatever. But if you run this website in your personal capacity, then it will be personal blog, personal portfolio or other personal website. Let's say that this is a small business site and this will be the schema added to your site. If you can clearly define your business type by going through this long list of businesses, feel free to do so. But if you can't find a business you're operating in, just keep it to organization. Now you'll fill up the rest of the information to the best of your knowledge, upload your logo and proceed to the next step. Then this step is important because by going through this step, your website will be connected to your Google search console automatically without you even verifying it, and it will also automatically submit a sitemap for you. So let's connect your website to a Google account. Hit continue if you see several services here, you want to check them all so that rank math can do its job. Hit continue and give it a while and your website is now connected to your Google search console. Next, let's save and continue for the sitemaps. If you want to include images in your sitemap, feel free to do so and keep all this checked as well. Let's save and continue. These are set based on best SEO practice, so if you are just starting out, we don't recommend changing any of these settings. Let's save and continue and you are basically done for the basic options. You can explore this if you want to, but let's return to the dashboard now. Once you are done with the setup wizard, there are a couple more things you need to look out for. I recommend hovering over titles and meta. Go to post and you want to make sure that the default schema type is set to article so that whenever you start a new blog post, an article schema will be added for you. And then you want to scroll down to the post robots meta and toggle this on. Make sure that this is set to index so that all your posts and articles will be set to index by default. Now it is totally fine if you toggle this off, that is, if your global meta is set to index. When the post robots meta is toggled off, the default settings will follow the global meta, but I recommend to keep it on so that you can customize the setting when needed. Then you want to save changes. Then you want to go to rank math's dashboard and if the image SEO module is not turned on, you want to turn it on. Then either click on the settings here or go to general settings and click on images. You want to toggle this, add missing alt attributes on and keep the variable as it is so that whenever an image is added to your site, the file name of the uploaded image will be added as the alt text. You will learn more about alt text later on in this video. Next, let me run you through a couple of things outside of rank math. On the left panel you want to hover over settings and general. Here is where you can change the site title and tagline if you wish and then you want to click on media. And here's the thing, whenever you upload an image to your site, WordPress will automatically add three additional versions of your image with these dimensions. So every image you add, there will be a total of four images hosted on your web server and each image carries its own file size. And imagine this, as your site grows and more images are added, 100 images added will now become 400 and then thousands, and this will slow down your site dramatically. So what you want to do is to turn all these numbers into zero so that no additional image versions will be added. Simple as that. Let's save changes and lastly you want to go to permalinks. By default, for some reason the day and name option will be selected. This is a sample of your URL. If you select this option now there is no right or wrong, but I recommend having only the post name as the URL slug or the back of the URL for easier maintenance. And then once you've selected this, make sure that you save changes and that's basically it for the setup. Now let's go to part two of this video.

Speaker A: Now it doesn't matter if you are a new blogger or a business owner trying to transit your business online. The key to starting a successful website and attracting SEO traffic boils down to understanding the industry or niche you are in and how successful other sites are in the same space. Now that you have your website up and running and you have set up the basic SEO configurations, let's start to work on your site. Now. The purpose of keyword research is to discover keywords that many people are searching for on a search engines and they are not that competitive that your content couldn't rank. If your site is completely new and you're targeting keywords that high authority sites and government sites are ranking at the top ten positions, there is literally no chance for your content to rank.

Speaker B: So there are two phases of keyword research. The first phase is for you to figure out keywords that have an adequate search volume and are not too competitive so that new sites can rank. And once the website is rather established and the search engines know what your site is about, then it's time to work on more competitive keywords. And your goal at this stage is to achieve topical authority in your niche or industry.

Speaker A: In other words, becoming a website that others can trust. An authority figure in your niche or industry. To start, you have to figure out a list of potential keywords related to your niche or industry. And the thing is you dont need to start brainstorming keywords from scratch nowadays.

Speaker B: You can ask for example rankbot to first provide you with a topical map of keywords related to the BBQ niche and rankbot will return with potential block categories that you may wish to target. Give it a while for it to complete and we are done. And from here let's say that I am interested in number five BBQ techniques. I will respond with provide me with a list of long tail keywords that people are searching for related to number five. Long tail keywords are specific search terms that consist of three or more words. Conversational search terms are usually long tail keywords as well. So as I hit enter and it will provide you with a list of potential long tail keywords, you are not limited to rankbot.

Speaker A: There are other tools as well, Chat, GPT, Google Gemini, finding keywords from competitors, Sitemap, Google Auto suggest and many others.

Speaker B: And once you have a list of keywords, run them through tools like Google Keyword planner to discover if there is search volume for those keywords. Not all keywords will have search volume so you have to be mindful of that. And for those that have search volume, you want to do actual search on Google with Chrome extensions like ubersuggest to discover the domain authority of those sites ranking at the top. If the top ten positions are filled with high authority sites, which means domain authority of 50 and above, then you will want to shelve that keyword for the topical authority phase. But if the results come with a mix of low authority sites of below 30, for example this case, then you will want to target those keywords when your site is new.

Speaker A: As you can see, Keyword research is a huge topic on its own and we have discussed this in detail. Feel free to check out this video if you want to become an expert in keyword research?

Speaker B: The link is in the description as well.

Speaker A: Just like any sturdy building that can stand the test of time, a website needs to have a clear blueprint to succeed. Just like what I've shown you earlier about topical map, you need to group those keywords into proper categories. There are many different types of content structures like the hubs and spokes model, content library topic, gateway, silo structure, glossary model, and many others. But honestly, don't overwhelm yourself for new sites. We recommend to just work with the silo structure for the start, and as you progress, the site structure can evolve.

Speaker B: The premise of a silo structure is to group content into different categories and in each main category there could be two to three subcategories within the contents of a main category. Pages will have relevant internal links with each other and this helps build topical authority for the main category. And can you see that this looks like a silo? Now the key here is that you would try to restrict linking content from different categories unless there is a really strong relevance between the content.

Speaker A: That's the gist of creating a silo structure for your website. And again, we have discussed this in detail. If you are interested to find out.

Speaker B: More, check out this video right here.

Speaker A: All right, we have talked about keyword research site structure and now it's time.

Speaker B: To do actual work.

Speaker A: I know there are many AI tools that will write the first draft of your content for you, like rank math has the block wizard tool that will generate long form content for you, but I highly recommend that you still do the research before asking these AI tools to write the content for you.

Speaker B: If you have decided to write an article on the topic, best wood for smoking meat, you would search for the keyword on Google. Visit the top pages and understand what is the main search intent? Meaning why is people searching for this keyword? Is it for knowledge, product information? Or does the person searching for the keyword have the intention to buy something? Once you have figured out the search intent, you want to see what topics are covered and take pointers from there. After which you can visit rank math's content AI and utilize the blog wizard two to write the first draft of the content for you. There are three steps here, but since you have already decided on a topic, you can skip the first step. This step is for you if you have no idea what to write about, so we will skip it. So on the second step, we will add the topic here and we will add our research here. If you have troubles coming up with the main points and ideas. You can always click on this and ideas will be provided for you. But for me I will add my research pointers. With each pointer separated with a comma. Then I will select an audience add your focus keyword. I would say it is the same keyword as a topic you are covering so I'll paste a keyword here. If you have more keywords you want to optimize, feel free to add them here. Next, set your tone. This really depends on the context of your niche and topic. And since this is a BBQ topic, it will be informal, friendly and casual. And for the style, I think this topic calls for a list because people want to know a list of woods that are best for smoking meats. Select your language. There are over 28 to choose from. For me it will be Us English and let's hit generate. In a couple of seconds you will have a blog post outline. If you're not happy with this, feel free to change this and regenerate it again. But if you want to give the responsibility to content AI to generate a blog post outline at their wheel, you would remove everything here and hit regenerate. And here we go. I think this is what we are looking for so let's hit write post in a couple of seconds. Give it a while and you will have an awesome first draft. You see it has generated over 1800 words. What you want to do next is to click on create new post and a new blog post will be created with the content. Now this is the time to take out your research notes and analyze what has been generated. Does it align with your notes? Does any of the content need to be fact checked? Is the generator content factually correct? Can you add your knowledge and experience to the content? And if there is, you can either amend the content manually or rely on the other tools here. Like improve where it will improve the selected paragraph like so you can ask it to write more summarize and if a paragraph is too complex to understand, you can ask it to write an analogy. Otherwise you can write a custom command. You can say to improve this paragraph to include your expertise and experience. Now I'm not a BBQ expert so don't hold me to this. And once your command is done in the same block, you can click on this and run as command and a new and improved paragraph will be generated. This will make your content more reliable as it is based on your knowledge and experience and not blindly generated by an AI.

Speaker A: Now optimizing your content for SEO or on page SEO should be done after you have written your content, here's what you need to do.

Speaker B: The first and the most important on page optimization is the meta title and description. But before that you want to click on Rank maths tab and add your focus keyword here. Since you're trying to rank for the keyword best wood for smoking meat, you want to add that here and the moment you do that you will see some checks here turning green. This is the on page SEO checklist that will make sure your content is SEO friendly. You just need to have a score of above 80 and your content is considered good for SEO. So the first thing you want to do is to optimize your meta title and description. And to do that you need to click on edit Snippet. By default, rank math will add a meta title and description for you, but if you wish to customize it, feel free to do so. And if you have troubles with this, click on generate with AI and it will write an appropriate meta title and description for you. If you are happy with this, click on insert and they will be added to the field. Now another thing you should do is to ensure that the keyword is in the URL, which in this case it is. So you just have to make sure that this keyword you are trying to rank for appears in the meta title description URL in the beginning of your content. So in this case we have to optimize this. Let's say that we remove this. Choosing the best wood for smoking meat can elevate the flavors to a whole new level. And this is the keyword we are trying to optimize. And once this is in, you will see that these two other checks will turn green. Now for the additional SEO checks, the important ones are having alt text for your images. For example, if I add an image here, when I click on the image and visit the image settings, you should have text here to describe what your image is about. Don't leave this field empty again. If you have troubles coming up with an alt text, click on this and it will be generated for you anyway. You want to make sure that your URL is not longer than 75 characters, but this is subjective to the length of your domain. You want to place internal and external links to your post. Let's say that you find an opportunity to add an internal link to this anchor text. Let's say to this and now you have passed this check and let's say that you want to add an external link to this anchor text. You can add the link and you will pass the check and that's basically it. The focus keyword in your subheadings and keyword density are good to have and it's good if you pass them, but you shouldn't spend too much time on them and then for the rest they are kind of self explanatory. For example, adding a number to the SEO title and adding a table of content. I won't go through every single one of them. Otherwise this video will become extremely long.

Speaker A: So when the time comes for you to optimize your content, feel free to check out this video right here.

Speaker B: Now back to the optimization. You want to do a couple of checks on the rank maths tab. You want to click on the advanced tab and make sure that the robots meta is set to index. Since you have already set the defaults earlier, you shouldn't worry much about this, but you just have to make sure that it is on index. Then you also want to check if the article schema is added to your post. This should be automated as well since we have set it right from the start. However, if your post is a product review, you will want to click on Schema generator to add additional schema markups. For example, if you are writing a course review, you will use the course schema markup. If it is a software review like a rank math review, you would use the software schema. Now rank math pro users can add as many schema markups as they want, but for free users you are limited to only one. I just want to make this clear so adding the appropriate schema is rather straightforward. Just fill up all the information to the best of your ability and if.

Speaker A: You have any schema questions at all, I'm pretty sure we've answered them in these videos, so check them out if you need them.

Speaker B: The links are in the description and then finally you want to optimize your content for social media in case someone would share your content on these two platforms. Fill up those fields here, add an appropriate image, check if it is looking good and you are done.

Speaker A: And one more thing, if you want to further optimize your content for SEO and making sure your content will perform better than those that are currently ranking.

Speaker B: You want to leverage on our content AI research feature by clicking on this under the research feature, you want to add your focus keyword. Choose a location if your content is meant for a local audience, but otherwise you will keep it as worldwide and hit research. At this time, content AI will now scrap the contents of those ranking at the top of the keyword, analyze them, and provide you with smart suggestions like the number of words your content should have. There is no direct correlation between contents, length and ranking, but know that this is a gauge to tell you if your content should be super in depth or not. Then it will recommend you should have this number of internal and external links, the number of headings, images and videos, the keywords you should have in the content, in the headings, the questions you should answer, and most importantly, credible sites that you should link to. For some topics like this, you may not get external link suggestions. Try to optimize to the best of your ability and there is a high chance your content will perform better than the rest.

Speaker A: So that's how you create content and optimize them for SEO. Here are some tips to improve the.

Speaker B: User experience of your website.

Speaker A: Especially for a WordPress site, the look and feel depends on a theme you choose. You should prioritize themes that are mobile friendly by default, provide you with lots of customization options. They are compatible with other plugins and most importantly they prioritize speed and performance. If you have trouble finding a suitable theme, then these are the themes we find that fit the criteria. Feel free to check them out. The next thing you should keep in mind is that you should try to avoid installing many plugins because the more plugins you add, the slower your site gets and there is no fixed limit to how many plugins you can install. So just keep it to the features you need for your website and try to avoid installing single use plugins.

Speaker B: For example, plugins that only provide you with the redirection feature and nothing else. These are what we call single use. Instead, you should try to install plugins that provide many different features and yet they don't affect your site speed. Like Rank Math, it provides you with features from 404, monitor analytics, instant indexing, local SEO redirections, schema, sitemap and many others.

Speaker A: Now, it is unavoidable that as your site grows, the page speed might be affected and when the time comes, we recommend that you check out this video right here to learn how to improve it.

Speaker B: The link is in the description as well.

Speaker A: Now, you may have heard people saying that you should try to get as many backlinks as possible to your site because if many sites are placing links back to your site, it gives a vote of confidence that your site is reputable. You will try to reach out to as many sites as possible to maybe write a guest post or whatever. Well, in my opinion, backlinks are important, but they should be the least of your content, especially when it comes to a new site because no credible or reputable sites will bother responding to you, you will only be attracting low quality or spammy sites. And if lots of those low quality sites are linking back to you, what does it say about your website? Your site is low quality, right? So especially for a news site, you should be focusing on building up your content and doing internal linking. And it doesn't hurt to set up social media profiles like Facebook, Instagram x, Pinterest or whatever to share your content at an early stage. And if your site belongs to a local business, you want to set up your Google Business profile and get citations from local business directory or listing sites like Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing, places for business, etcetera. Because it can help improve local SEO, build credibility and attract potential customers. So for acquiring backlinks, it is until your site is established and you have started to attract organic backlinks, that's when you should start reaching out to quality sites to acquire backlinks. If you need a guide on how to do link building, feel free to check out this video right here. I've explained everything in detail in that video. Now, over time your site will have lots of content and it will be attracting traffic. So you want to monitor your sites performance and update content that are underperforming.

Speaker B: As a rank math Pro user, other than the many features available to you, you will be able to track 500 to 1000 keywords depending on where you purchase the plan and to utilize the rank tracker. You want to hover over Rank math SEO and click on analytics. Then you want to click on Rank Tracker. If you haven't used this feature before, we recommend that you click on this auto add focus keywords button and enable the auto import. You want to select the post types where most of your rankable content lives. For us, it is the post and if you want to track your pages as well, feel free to do so. Now what this will do is rank math will add the main focus keyword. You have added to this focus keyword field. The one with the star is the main focus keyword and those other keywords in the field are secondary keywords.

Speaker A: And if you want to track these.

Speaker B: Secondary keywords automatically then you will want to check this include secondary keywords let's save settings and the information will be populated immediately. Now what you want to do next is to expand the date range to the maximum and figure out which posts have gotten traffic in the past but have lost traffic recently. For example this it was ranking on a fourth position and now it is ranking on a 13 and you want to make sure that this post, where the keyword belongs, is posted more than twelve months ago. That gives you a clear indicator that you should update this page. Of course, you're not limited to rank math's analytics. You can utilize your Google Search console to do this check as well. Anyway, to update the page you want to visit the post and check out its content, have the content advice, tips, or whatever outdated. Are there any new developments that are not covered in this post? And try to figure out why search engines prefer these pages that are ranking at the top right now but not yours.

Speaker A: Search engines love to see contents that.

Speaker B: Are updated, so by working to their.

Speaker A: Favor, your site will eventually be favored. We have detailed all the steps you need to identify and update your content to boost rankings and traffic on this video right here. So when it's time to update your content, probably twelve months after you have set up your website, feel free to check out that video. We have placed a link in the description, so with this I hope you'll be able to grow your new website and get a ton of quality traffic. If you have any questions at all, feel free to leave them in the comments down below. And don't forget to smash that thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed to us, do so because we are all about helping you grow your search traffic. This is Jack from rank math. I'll see you in the next video.