Hey everyone,
So as you can tell, things have been quite quiet in the land of Kickstart. This is because we have been helping out a friend with their website! We touched on this in our last post about the Flipping Book Plugin (which we still love by the way
Kickstarts friend approaches Kickstart and says “hey, you know a bit about the internet and things and we want a website that looks professional, reads well and ranks for the term “builders in harrogate”.
So…Kickstart said “hey, no problem…we’ll see what we can do!” *Kickstart quivers on the inside as they have little idea of where to start*
However, Kickstart has risen to the challenge and three weeks ago embarked on the mammoth task of our first ever website creation (apart from our beautiful Kickstart obvi!)
One thing Kickstart has learnt from past SEO experience is the key is to have EVERYTHING in place before you even think about aesthetics of a site and PLAN PLAN PLAN! You MUST have a solid plan for your site in place, know what you want to say and what you want people to read! As obvious as that sounds you would be suprised at how many people Kickstart has come across who don’t do this!
Here are a few hints and tips from Kickstart on creating a successful website:
URL – Brand name or exact match…If you’re going for something local there’s no harm in picking exact match
Page Plan – Plan what pages you are going to have and where. Can you nest sub categories within main categories to make it look neater?
Navigation – You want your users to enjoy using your site so make sure it’s easy to use! Don’t scare them away by not laying things out logically
Pre – Write your content and OPTIMISE IT – Kickstart finds it so much easier to concentrate on one thing at once. Tuck yourself away with your laptop and a cold beer and get those creative juices flowing. Start with your homepage and then crack on with all your initial pages. Try and use the keywords you want to optimise towards around 3-5% of the time but dont sacrifice the readability of the content for the sake of optimisation
Pre Write Meta Data – Get your title tags and meta descriptions done EARLY. These are boring and labourious to write but man are they important! Remember they are front weighted so what ever you want to rank for put it at the front!
CALL TO ACTION!! – Again, this sounds SO obvious but make sure that you have a header created for your site that has a clear call to action. Users eyes are naturally drawn to the top right hand corner of your homepage so fill it with useful stuff! A phone number, a “special offers” advert if you’re ecommerce or anything that will convert a user into a consumer!!!
Link build to your holding pages – There’s nothing stopping you link building and creating that solid link portfolio even before you are ready to go live. This gives your website a great start in life and more chance of ranking for what you want it to!
Once you have all of this in place get on WordPress, pick a theme and play around! (Obviously WordPress is not the only avenue to go down but Kickstart likes it!) Once you have your content ready, all you have to do is drop it in! Faff around with Plugins, have a look at some of the ones we have recommended and get creative!
We only set our friends site up three weeks ago and we’re already ranking on page 2 for “builders in Harrogate”!! High FIVE!
Kickstart are not claiming to be the guru of web design or SEO but what we want to say is, if we can do it…YOU can! Have a look at the site we created for our friends down at Black & White Property Solutions. We would love to hear your thoughts on it…go easy on us though as it is our first time
Anyway, that’s enough for today folks! We hope you find some of our info useful and if not, hey ho…dont use it!
Have a good one Kickstarters and keep checking in on us and our friends site as we will constantly be updating until we verge on perfection!!
Ciao for now,
Kickstart x
COMMENTS ( 1 )
posted on 13 July at 16:51
Great article, short, sweet and to the point.
There was a wealth of short tips, but I was a little surprised that all the tips were for on site, or on domain SEO. That's refreshingly unusal, most similar articles are all about off page SEO, but they almost always neglect what you do first on your own site.
Great stuff! It's amazing what a little bit of boring old planning and a little effort can create!