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With SEO becoming an essential aspect of your overall online marketing strategies, what would be the first three steps a newbie could take before launching their website?

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3 Answers

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This is what I find are helpful:

  1. Review and update your meta tags to be relevant and informative
  2. Update your site titles along with a leading title/header on each page of your site
  3. Find a good balance between number of internal pages to the number of inbound links that you would be able to generate via blog, promotions, etc.

This is a start and one should at least cover these.

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 Could you explain point number 3 in a little more details. Thanks – Usman Sheikh Nov 28 at 18:54
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 I phrased it "balance" as it is difficult to have/build content. If your business does not call for many internal pages (or in other words it is a simple brochure site) then you would have to build some content using blogs or other written material. The inbound links happen if there is interesting content on your site. I used the balance as you need to find out how much content you would have as part of the business offering (in other words your site map structure) vs the regular articles that could write. You may use websitegrader.com. Also, host blog on your own site (as a subdomain). – NENM Nov 29 at 14:14
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URLs are also very important and easy to fix. If for example you're selling used books, make sure that your product overview page is "www.yoursite.com/used-books/" and not something like "www.yoursite.com/products/" or even worse "www.yoursite.com/default.aspx?catid=233"

Most importantly, if you still haven't launched the site and you don't already have a company name in the offline world, pick a domain name with the most important keyword in it though this may be hard to accomplish. I'm sure you can't get www.usedbooks.com nowadays.

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I would go in this order:

1) Determine which keywords you are trying to optimize for. Find the balance between relevancy, search volume and difficulty. Don't pick words that have really high volume, but that difficulty is so high that you'd never rank.

2) Start developing content that is useful to your users and that incorporates your keywords. Basically, you are looking to draw in links naturally from as many credible sources as you can.

3) Make sure you have analytics tracking on your site before you go live. This way, you can measure how traffic is doing and you can start determining which keywords your customers are using to find you.

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