Last Updated on January 13, 2025 by Nathan Bowen
How Can I Build My Website Presence and Rank First?
Building a strong online presence and getting a high rank organically on search engines can be challenging, especially because of the advancing of SEO algorithms. Below is a checklist with 5 key items that will help you get started in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website in 2025:
Ensure Your Website Is Fast
First and foremost, you should ensure that your site has a fast loading time for higher rankings. You can ensure this by:
- Using modern technologies and frameworks to build your website, like Angular, ReactJS, and VueJS.
- Using a technology that supports the minification of CSS and JavaScript files to reduce resource load times.
- Formatting your images, to either use .webp or .svg formats to make them have smaller sizes.
Structure Your Content Properly
How can you achieve a good structure of your content for SEO? You can achieve this by:
Proper content structuring helps both users and search engines understand your site:
- Using clear heading tags (H1, H2, H3) with relevant keywords in your content.
- Using human-friendly, engaging, and unique content that resonates with your audience.
- Avoiding word stuffing and duplication to prevent thin content penalties. Try to be as original as possible, without using AI.
- Implementing proper meta titles, meta descriptions, and alt tags for images. This also includes setting up the open graph meta for your website socials.
Get the SEO Basics Right
You need to ensure that you have:
- Created and uploaded an XML sitemap to an open path(URL) for easier crawling by search engines.
- Used a
robots.txt
file to guide crawlers on what to index or ignore. - Adding suitable schema markup to provide rich snippets for your content that will improve click-through rates. This resource helps: https://technicalseo.com
- Implemented
hreflang
tags to handle multilingual content and avoid duplication.
Conduct Regular SEO Audits
To conduct your SEO Audits, you need to have a checklist that includes using tools like:
- Google Search Console and Google Analytics for data insights.
- SEO extensions like Detailed SEO Extension
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider for more technical SEO audits.
Build High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinks from reputable sites are critical for boosting domain authority organically:
- Actively engage on social media platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok. Share valuable content to drive traffic and establish credibility.
- Include your social media handles and links in your website schema.
- Cross-reference your site URL on all active social media channels to boost visibility Example: Like in the comments section of YouTube, or any socials.
- Consider guest blogging or partnerships to earn quality backlinks from the host sites.
Summary
Once your website is optimized, allow search engines like Google and Bing to crawl your site. To maintain and improve your rankings:
- Proper planning before starting to build and optimize your website.
- Regularly update your content by adding new blog posts or articles.
- Set up an automated process to generate and submit updated sitemaps for new URLs.
- Monitor your performance and stay ahead of algorithm updates.
Remember, while these strategies improve your chances of ranking organically, search engines ultimately have the final say in determining your website’s position.