It’s widely known that the algorithms that decide which websites rank for search terms are complex and ever changing. However, it’s accepted that the age of website is a big factor. The longer a site is live, the more likely it is to be found by a search engine and affects how reliable it is perceived to be.

Unfortunately, new domains take a long time to rank. But the sooner they are live, the longer they stand a chance of ranking for keywords.

Just being live isn’t enough, these are the most useful tasks to help a new website rank

It will take time to get noticed, but this list will help speed it up:

1. Create an XML sitemap for pages you want to appear on Google

The Yoast plugin can create and automatically maintain your sitemap. It does lots more and gives granular control over what you want in your sitemap. The Yoast plugin will create your sitemap at: yoursite/sitemap_index.xml   This is actually an index of multiple xml files that contain links to every part of your site that you want live.

2. Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console

This skips the step of waiting for Google to find and crawl your site’s pages – you tell them where to find you! Go to Google Search Console and sitemaps. Here paste and submit the URL to your sitemap index generated by Yoast: yoursite/sitemap_index.xml  

3. Check you have browser friendly Markup

Have meaningful Titles. Make sure your most important heading is in H1, and subsequent headings are H2,H3 etc. This not only tells search engines where the important topic information is, it helps users and visually impaired users navigate the page.

4. Check you have meta data

Yoast will generate metadata based on your content automatically, but on key pages it’s worth reviewing the descriptions as this is what the user will first see when your page appears on Google search results.

5. Check your images

Unnecessarily large images will slow your site down, and damage your chance at ranking. After reviewing this with a tool like Google Insights make sure your images also have meaningful filenames and alt tags. This might not seem like much, but they are keywords going to the search engine that could make the difference in determining if your site has the content relevant to a search. Also, alt tags help visually impaired users navigate the page as they should describe your content.

6. Get your website on Google My business and Maps

About 90% search traffic goes through Google, so take control of the way Google shows your business. This doesn’t mean you need to list your address online, you can use a service area to improve your business local search results.

7. Monitor the success of your content with Google Analytics

It’s easy to add Google Analytics tags to your site without a plugin using Elementor. From there you can track users and how they find and engage with your site. Although at the beginning traffic will be low, it’s important to find meaningful trends as this changes with time to see what’s working.