Expert SEO advice to get you started

Before setting out to work on your website it can be enormously helpful to seek out some expert SEO advice. You’ll give yourself an intuitive head start on what’s to come, gain a general familiarity with the subject, and allow yourself to plan ahead.

As a great general piece of advice that applies to absolutely any website is to check out the competition before you get started. Think about the type of content you’ll want on your website. If you already have a good idea of what your webpages will be about, or what you plan to sell, for example, then Google some relevant keywords and do some research on the pages that frequently appear very high in the search results.

These websites are your benchmark and they are invaluable in planning your own website. After making rough plans for your own website, see what the very best websites in your industry might have in common, and what makes them better than the competition. It should be your aim, at all stages in your sites development, to outdo those websites appearing on Google’s first page. Last of all, these sites will hold the key to finding the many mistakes you would have made in your first plan.

Once you’ve made your second draft for how you plan on organising your website, you can begin to think about the appearance. You should always focus your design on functionality and performance, and insofar as aesthetic is concerned, keep things simple and neutral. Bright colour schemes can be distracting and headache inducing; kittens raining across the screen, equally distracting.

An invaluable piece of advice before building your website is to use responsive design. Responsive design allows your website to cater to a range of different devices, including tablets and mobile phones. With so many now using mobile browsing for pretty much everything on a daily basis, you must build your site responsively from the beginning.

Our final tip, build a blog. When you first build your site you’ll be full of ideas and likely have extra content lying around. A blog has a number of valuable traits for SEO that will get your new site off to a flying start.