We had a conversation today with a new client coming to us after a recent penalty. They’re in a relatively low competition niche, where a matter of a 150 links can take you to the top. And yet, thanks to the poor SEO practices of the freelancer they’d been using, their site has over a thousand poor quality links which are doing far more harm than good. Their best bet, as we suggested, is simply to start again, get a new site up quickly, (focus on our specialist Sussex SEO services), and over the period in which you’re doing that, they can take time to refine the site and prepare it for actual visitors. This is what we call putting the cart before the horse!
So they need to set up a new site quickly and easily. Here are the steps.
(1) Find a good hosting plan which allows for WordPress. Ensure you choose a site with good customer service and, our preference, phone support. Hostgator are pretty decent, we’ve never had any complaints and their phone support operators are always friendly and with a bit of that good old American optimism!
(2) Change Nameservers, Install your site, Add WordPress
(3) Add the responsive theme of your choice. These days, we are loving the X theme which is one of the slickest WP themes ever made and beautifully responsive. Otherwise, choose the theme of your preference but do make it responsive. These days, putting up a website which doesn’t factor in the mobile and tablet views is just plain crackers….
(4) Add content, including at least 5. x 500 word articles of original prose. – Give Google what they want, right! That means you need to write or commission five articles of insightful relevant content on your chosen subject.
(5) Add the Yoast SEO plugin
(6) Add Schema Markup, the Raven Tools plugin is an excellent start.
(7) Publish Site
(8) Set up Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools: Don’t forget to set your Geo-target in WMT, and the Analytics is going to be useful, of course, when you start ranking!
(9) Capture your brand real estate with a valuable service such as the one offered by the good people at Know ‘Em. $249 gets you 100 full social media profiles which is an absolute bargain and will secure you some nice links to get things rolling.
(10) Send a PR Web Premium Release – We use this a lot, it’s a fantastic, wide reaching press release which will get you coverage, instant indexing, and some solid links.
All of this, we figure, will take you approximately 5-10 hours, depending on how fast you are and will give you a solid, highly SEO friendly site which Google will love. For our client above, this is the first step to reclaiming rankings by realising that a penalised site rarely if ever recovers. By this method, the new site will be moving up the search engines in a matter of days. From there, the pace will slow a bit as you start to build the safest, cleanest 150 links you can, at a steady pace. This really is simplicity itself, so try it and let us know how you get on.