How to Rank Your New Site with Less than 30 Minutes a Day!

If you're building a new website for your company or project, you've likely experienced how frustrating Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be by now. It takes at least 3 months to rank on the first page, you might have heard from others, or You will have to dedicate hours of time on SEO in order to rank your website on Google. Seriously, the list could go on forever.

But what if I told you that's not the whole truth? In fact, there are quite a few basic steps that you can follow when starting your own website or optimizing your current site for search engines.

Yes, it really is true. Check out these search engine optimization techniques that you can start implementing today in 30 minutes or less! 

Step 1: Make Sure Your Site is Indexed Properly

If your website is not indexed with the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.), your SEO efforts won't be of much use, unfortunately. When a site is indexed, it just simply means that Google - for example - knows that your site is there and what it's about. 

So how can you check to see if your site is indexed? For Google, all you have to do is search "site:example.com" and the results will show you all of the pages that Google has indexed. 

For Yahoo, the process is the same, or you can try another method specified in this article.

What if my site isn't indexed?

If your site isn't indexed by Google or Yahoo yet, don't panic. It could take time for bots to reach your site, or you could try speeding up the process by submitting your website URL to as many directories as possible. As a starting point, try submitting your URL to the Open Directory Project, a free and reputable web directory that many search engines use as reference.

 

Step 2: Optimize On Page Elements

Your site will need to be optimized to the best of your abilities if you want it to rank high on search engine result pages (SERPs). You don't necessarily need to have the latest and greatest technological advances embedded on your site to achieve this, but you will need to do a little bit of work here. 

Here is a short list of things you can do with just a few minutes each day to make sure your pages are optimized:

1. Make sure that each important webpage contains at least 300 words of relevant content.
2. Place your target keywords within the first 100 words of your webpage.
3. Focus on improving your site loading speed using tools such as GTMetrix.
4. Optimize your website for mobile users as well.

For more On-Page SEO information, check out our post on best practices and our SEO Crash Course eBook.

 

Step 3: Comment Your Links on Relevant Blogs

Be careful during this step, as many blog owners have caught on to spammy tactics used by SEO "professionals" in recent years. However, if you find a blog post that is relevant to a post or page you just created and you find it useful, you should definitely comment on it and share what was useful about it. 

I follow this technique and leave links with information to support my comment. 9/10 times, the response is very positive and when I comment consistently on other blogs, this often leads to future guest posting opportunities.

 

Step 4: Rank 5 Low Competition Keywords at a Time

I cannot even tell you the amount of times I have received inquiries from webmasters trying to rank for extremely competitive keywords such as "best lawyers" or "real estate agent" without first ranking for sub-keywords that are much less competitive. If you want to start bringing in more traffic to your site, you must focus on keywords that will get your site on the first page.

For example, if I was trying to get a site about "lawyers" ranked, I would first perform a search for related keywords and identify any that are closely related with under 5,000 monthly searches. I would make a list of 5 keywords around that level that I can focus on ranking for, and only afterwards will I move up the ladder. 

Trust me, you don't want to waste time trying to beat companies with thousands or millions of dollars to shell out on SEO.

 

Step 5: Share New Content on EVERY Social Media Platform with Relevant Hashtags

Social Media is a wonderful tool for sharing content, and it can help boost your SEO rankings as well. The best way to use your various accounts is to share your content at times where your followers are most active, and to follow the same hashtag process as we did for keywords. 

You should identify at least 25 hashtags that are relevant to your content and have between 25,000 - 50,000 posts or followers. These hashtags will be the easiest to break into. Create two lists of optimized hashtags that you can cycle between in order to avoid being "shadowbanned."

 

Step 6: Repeat and Build Backlinks

At this point in the process, you should focus on repeating the cycle and building backlinks as much as possible. This is a huge area to cover, but you can get started by following these basic steps:

1. Use your connections from Step 3 to ask for guest-writing opportunities by reaching out to other blog owners via email.
2. Find pages that don't exist anymore but can be replicated to replace "broken links."
3. Encourage your customers or visitors to leave reviews whenever possible, but keep it human!
4. If you notice some helpful tips that are hypothesized within your industry but don't have much supporting data, create that data and publish it yourself! You can use this to reach out to those who post about the "tips" in order to have them link to your data.

Backlink building can be a long process. For more information, check out this post on backlinks and PageRank.