ElaineGardiner
Affiliate Program Representative
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- Jun 30, 2010
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If you want to get ahead of the competition, you’ll need to start doing your SEO as soon as possible and that means even before you launch your site. Here are our top 10 tips for starting your SEO before you even launch your site:
Start your keyword analysis
The first thing you’ll need to decide is what niche you’ll be targeting, once you’ve that out the way you can start doing some keyword analysis. This will help you pick a domain and help when writing content as well as setting a roadmap, what is the low hanging fruit in the long tail, what are the end game head terms?
Have a SEO friendly domain
The next thing you’ll need to do is purchase a domain name for your new site. Pick a URL that has your keywords in it, the order of the keywords doesn’t matter to search engines(SE), just so long as they are there. This will help you get noticed by SE’s.
Prepare content for site launch
Before you launch your site, it’s a good idea to have some content prepared, this will ensure visitors will have something to read and navigate around your site when it’s launched. We’d recommend starting with 10 articles or posts. Remember to make these SEO optimised - you can put your keyword analysis to good use, this will help with your initial ranking.
Optimize your site before hand
If you plan on acquiring traffic via organic search you should test your site for indexing, are you using Yoast? Do you accidentally have your Wordpress set to no-index? (it happens!) do you have analytics running site wide? Is your webmaster tools verified? You can do this quickly and simply within the Yoast plugin, also be sure to test your sitemap in webmaster tools.
Set up Google analytics
It’s pretty simple stuff on all platforms these days, but make sure you have google analytics site wide.
TIP: once deployed on your site go to google analytics.
1)Select “Real Time”
2) Select “overview”
3) Go back to your site and have a little browse around
4) Switch back to analytics
You should be able to see yourself, your geo location and the page you are on, we can safely assume that google analytics is installed correctly.
Have a ‘Coming Soon’ page
The older the domain the better, so as soon as you’ve bought your domain put up a ‘Coming Soon’ page. You should include basic information such as contact email address, links to social media and even an email capture so you can notify people when your site is live, and this will get you started on building an email list (if you plan to do so)
Set up your Social Media Profiles
Set up your social media beforehand, make sure they are professional looking and link them all to your Coming Soon page. This is an easy way to help your SEO before you launch.
Share content with your e-mail subscribers or Social Media followers
Once you have your social media following, and a handful of email subscribers – share some interesting content with them before site launch – photos, infographics, interesting articles and a sneak peek at what is to come. If you’re lucky your site people will pick up on this and give you some extra links.
Do guest blog posts
Another great way to get a boost is by offering to do guest posts on other sites related to your niche. This will help you build up links before your site launches.
Provide testimonials to affiliate programs
Some affiliate programs – like CherryAffiliates offers links in return for testimonials. So if this is your second site and you already have a relationship with the program, drop your affiliate manager a testimonial and request a link to your new site.
More #CherryTips can be found on the CherryAffiliates Blog
Start your keyword analysis
The first thing you’ll need to decide is what niche you’ll be targeting, once you’ve that out the way you can start doing some keyword analysis. This will help you pick a domain and help when writing content as well as setting a roadmap, what is the low hanging fruit in the long tail, what are the end game head terms?
Have a SEO friendly domain
The next thing you’ll need to do is purchase a domain name for your new site. Pick a URL that has your keywords in it, the order of the keywords doesn’t matter to search engines(SE), just so long as they are there. This will help you get noticed by SE’s.
Prepare content for site launch
Before you launch your site, it’s a good idea to have some content prepared, this will ensure visitors will have something to read and navigate around your site when it’s launched. We’d recommend starting with 10 articles or posts. Remember to make these SEO optimised - you can put your keyword analysis to good use, this will help with your initial ranking.
Optimize your site before hand
If you plan on acquiring traffic via organic search you should test your site for indexing, are you using Yoast? Do you accidentally have your Wordpress set to no-index? (it happens!) do you have analytics running site wide? Is your webmaster tools verified? You can do this quickly and simply within the Yoast plugin, also be sure to test your sitemap in webmaster tools.
Set up Google analytics
It’s pretty simple stuff on all platforms these days, but make sure you have google analytics site wide.
TIP: once deployed on your site go to google analytics.
1)Select “Real Time”
2) Select “overview”
3) Go back to your site and have a little browse around
4) Switch back to analytics
You should be able to see yourself, your geo location and the page you are on, we can safely assume that google analytics is installed correctly.
Have a ‘Coming Soon’ page
The older the domain the better, so as soon as you’ve bought your domain put up a ‘Coming Soon’ page. You should include basic information such as contact email address, links to social media and even an email capture so you can notify people when your site is live, and this will get you started on building an email list (if you plan to do so)
Set up your Social Media Profiles
Set up your social media beforehand, make sure they are professional looking and link them all to your Coming Soon page. This is an easy way to help your SEO before you launch.
Share content with your e-mail subscribers or Social Media followers
Once you have your social media following, and a handful of email subscribers – share some interesting content with them before site launch – photos, infographics, interesting articles and a sneak peek at what is to come. If you’re lucky your site people will pick up on this and give you some extra links.
Do guest blog posts
Another great way to get a boost is by offering to do guest posts on other sites related to your niche. This will help you build up links before your site launches.
Provide testimonials to affiliate programs
Some affiliate programs – like CherryAffiliates offers links in return for testimonials. So if this is your second site and you already have a relationship with the program, drop your affiliate manager a testimonial and request a link to your new site.
More #CherryTips can be found on the CherryAffiliates Blog
