Beginning SEO for Young Websites

As websites age, they will naturally gain popularity. For the newly born websites, they are at a slight disadvantage. Fortunately, the SEO playing field is very fair amongst all competitors. Here are some things you can do to spice up the traffic and rankings.

Unique Content
Although I cannot promise anyone, it would make sense that this rule applies in the far future also. The quality of content will almost always have a decent if not huge impact on the ranking of your website. The amount of content matters, but even more so is the relevancy of the content on your website. For low cost ideas, try hiring ghost writers or college students. Some websites only have a message boards loaded with people using it to their advantage. These sites are very lucky to have other people generating content for them for free. Pages with only keywords and no real usable content will often get your website blacklisted. This doesn’t mean you have to be a master at writing to develop the content for your site. Not unless the search engines become so sophisticated later on.

Links
Having internal pages linked within your website is a good idea. Linking to other websites won’t help your ranking nearly as much as having other websites linking to yours. Some people try to build a community of sites, and have them linked to each other. Others submit their sites to online directories such as Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project. This helps your startup site a little bit but not nearly as well as it used to.

URL
Yes! The website address matters more than people think. I’m not talking about the domain name. The chunks of characters after the domain name often contain characters like “?” and “=” for dynamic pages. These characters are not supported by many major search engines and will create difficulty for spiders and bots to crawl through your website.

These are just a few tips to get most people started in marketing their site to the world. The work required is a never ending project since search engines keep updating with more complex search algorithms. When your site grows and surpasses your traffic and ranking expectations, remember, SEO takes more hard work than genius.