Top factors that helped the site kick off fast and grow steadily

Top factors that helped the site kick off fast and grow steadily – Once you sort out the content part, the next step is to start thinking of ways to increase your blog traffic and preferably your organic traffic which is the most valuable type of traffic.

1. Before the go live 

Before start publishing content on a new blog, I always prefer to have 2-3 posts ready in advance in draft mode and then publish them one per day to get the ball rolling. There is no real SEO advantage or benefit from doing this, it’s just my way to start a new website.

 It’s good to give an indication to the search engine bots from the beginning that the site will be updated frequently but other than that there is not much to it.

2) Keeping a schedule

What is important after you go live is to keep a constant publishing schedule. I made sure that once the blog was live, it was updated 4 times per week with good quality and unique content.

3) Webmaster tools, Analytics and Rankings

As soon as I published the first posts, I have registered the site with Google and Bing webmaster tools, submitted the sitemap and added analytics. This helped me a lot in monitoring the performance of the blog, improvement in rankings and increase in traffic.

Don’t Think, Just Start Now!

1. Don’t start a website in a niche you don’t know well – before even starting, get to know as much as you can about the niche. Find out the leaders, do your keyword research, take note of what kind of content they publish, how often etc.
2. Make sure that you can provide good content for the topics you choose – if you are not an expert, either become one of hire people that are experts.
3. Be prepared to spend some money on the site – Maybe you have to hire writers, do some adwords or Facebook, buy a theme or plugins; consider this as the initial investment that will pay off later.
4. Respect your users and give them incentives – Don’t create a website full of ads or affiliate links. You not only risk in getting penalised by Google but you also drive repeating visitors away. Try to find some free tools or books to give them and keep them coming back.
5. Don’t forget the newsletter – Email marketing still works and one of your main objectives is to grow your email list.
6. Look for other promotion methods besides SEO – SEO is a must but other methods work good and they indirectly help SEO.
7. Go Social early – Social media promotion is the best way these days to get more visits and attention until organic traffic flows in. Use it wisely avoiding spammy techniques and practices.
8. Never violate or think of violating any Google Guidelines – You may read promising posts from people making tests on how to get top positions or stuff like that – stay away from anything that may be considered as a rule violation. Stick to the guidelines and aim for long term success than a short term burst and then failure.
9. Mobile is a must – Make sure that your website is mobile friendly from day one and that if you use ads on the mobile friendly version these are not violating any guidelines (for example you are not allowed to have a 300×250 ad above the main content on a mobile page).
10. Go slow on building links or don’t do it at all – It may be ok to build a couple of links in the beginning but do it only from trusted websites and only if the links matter. Avoid creating links from low quality websites. It’s not a matter of quantity any more but quality.
11. Be patient – It takes time for SEO to work, don’t get disappointed if you don’t get any results in the first months, keep doing your work and results will come.
12. Be consistent – Try to keep to a publishing schedule. This is good for SEO but also for direct visits.
13. Engage with your readers – Reply to comments but don’t publish comments that don’t make sense or look spammy.
14. Don’t spend too much time on the design – Do create a nice, simple, fast and functional website but no need to spend much money on that.

I hope you found this post interesting and informational, if you have any questions let me know in the comments and will do my best to answer them. Don’t forget to share this post if it was something that you liked.