what's up guys julian goldie here and welcome to today's video in this video we're going to
take a look at how to build a website for seo in 2022 and the main aim of this video is to help
you figure out how you can build and basically set up a new website so that it will perform
well when it comes to seo now a lot of people that are new to seo just think you can throw up
any old site and then get great results with google i mean if only it were that easy right
i wouldn't have to make this video and you could probably be watching something on netflix but
sadly if you want to get amazing results with seo you need to make sure you can build up your site
the right way and that basically means that you need to focus on ticking off a few key boxes when
it comes to building your site and some of these things are kind of obvious but a few of them such
as tips in section number three might only make sense once you have a little bit of experience
when it comes to seo anyway you can't really drop the ball on anything we're going to mention
in this video as most of the things here are of equal importance i mean if you ignore one of these
things you're going to be limiting your ability to succeed with seo and in a world where you
already have to deal with tough seo competition why make things harder on yourself right so make
sure you watch to the end or else you probably won't have a good overview of all the things
you need to do and that could obviously hurt your ability to succeed with seo okay so that said
let's get started and dive straight in so section number one is about picking a domain so the first
thing we're going to be touching on here is how to choose your url now there's a lot of
different opinions in the seo community when it comes to picking a domain and to be honest
you don't really want to over complicate things here a lot of people think that if you pick an
exact match domain you will achieve much better rankings if you don't know what that is an exact
match domain is basically a domain that resembles a really valuable target keyword so if you're
selling phishing supplies an exact match domain might be something like buy fishingsupplies.com
the thinking here is that this domain signals relevance and this then helps you get better
rankings of google and to be fair there's some evidence this worked really well in the early
days of seo but when it comes to modern times well it doesn't really look like this approach
works anymore now if you're an experienced seo person with a different take here you might want
to challenge me on that and of course if you have some opinions on this let me know in the comment
section but generally many people in the seo community feel that a better approach nowadays
is to go for a branded domain so this is basically a domain that represents your brand and it doesn't
really need to have any relevance to the stuff that's on your site for example if we take the
fishing suppliers example from earlier a branded domain here could be something completely random
like redplasticbottle.com now that's a bit of a random example but hopefully it illustrates the
point i'm trying to make here and i should mention that one of the reasons branded domains work is
because google is really trying to identify and then push websites associated with brands
this is one of the ways they can tell spammy sites apart from genuine websites that represent real
businesses and credible sources of information so if you focus on picking a branded domain over
an exact match domain that looks as though it's trying to game the system you'll find that it's
probably easier to get good rankings on google now at this point you might be wondering if it's a
good idea to go with a com domain or a domain that represents a certain country generally i'd say
it's better to go over.com domain this is because you have a lot more freedom with a dot-com website
if you pick a domain associated with a certain country you can still achieve rankings in other
countries but it can be a little bit more difficult after all google wants to provide
people with relevant results and if your website is associated with a country that's different from
the country of the person performing the search you could argue that's not that relevant in fact
it's not just me saying this this is actually what google is saying themselves now with a
dot-com domain you don't really have this issue plus as mentioned in the graphic shown earlier
if you pick a dot-com domain you can actually go into the google search console and tell
google that you want to target a certain region this can then help you narrow down your audience
if you're trying to focus on a particular country of course if you change your mind later on
you can just tell google that you no longer want to focus on a specific country and this will then
help you reach a much broader audience by the way i just want to say if you can please take a second
to like this video and become a subscriber if you like my videos i can reach more people
and if you become a subscriber it's going to be much easier for you to find my future videos
and that's really going to improve your general experience when it comes to youtube
i mean don't you want to see my face every time you log into youtube right
anyway section number two is about picking a hosting provider once you've picked a domain
you then need to think about picking a hosting provider now there's many different hosting
providers to choose from and again this isn't really something you want to overcomplicate
especially if you're just starting with a small project that said if your website is going to
focus on a specific region you might want to go with a hosting provider that lets you pick where
your hosting servers are going to be located there's some evidence that this can help your
audience experience faster website speeds and it might also help signal to google that your
website is associated with a particular region this can then help you rank better especially if
your domain is a plain.com domain that isn't associated with a certain region next up you
have to make sure your domain has ssl once you've picked a domain and hosting provider you also want
to make sure your domain makes use of ssl we won't go into this massively here but ssl essentially
means that your website provides users with a https secure connection so to simplify if you want
a secure https connection you're going to need an ssl certificate now google really values this
and they tend to penalize websites that don't make sure of this in fact here's an official
blog post from 2014 where they talk about https being a ranking signal on google luckily setting
up ssl is kind of easy as you just need to buy an ssl certificate from your hosting provider
and these aren't expensive but if you're on a budget keep in mind that some hosting providers
provide free ssl certificates so you don't need to pay for them you might want to keep this in
mind if you're on a budget because to be honest an ssl certificate is kind of non-negotiable at
this point section number four you have to pick a content management system now once you've done all
of the things i've mentioned previously you then need to basically build out your site now when
it comes to seo i think the best approach here is to pick a simple content management
system like wordpress this is basically because wordpress makes things a lot easier when it comes
to optimizing your site for seo plus wordpress is really easy to use and customized and this
is really helpful if you lack technical skills when it comes to coding and things like that
personally i don't enjoy it and that's why i use wordpress now if you don't know how to install
wordpress just contact your hosting provider and they should be able to help you with this in under
24 hours next up you have to pick a theme for your wordpress site now once you've installed
wordpress you then need to focus on picking a damn good theme so what counts as a good theme well it
needs to look good it needs to be easy to use okay it needs to provide a good experience and it needs
to load quickly plus it should be mobile friendly and if you're on a budget you might just want to
go with a free theme that is relatively simple and easy on the eye or if you're happy to spend
a little bit of mula on a theme but not a lot you might want to check out theme forest i've included
a link to this site in the description but this site is basically just a marketplace for wordpress
themes if you check it out you should end up finding something that looks good performs well
and it's actually within your budget by the way if you have a favorite theme you swear by mention in
the comment section i'd love to check out number six it's time to start installing plugins so once
you've installed wordpress and you've picked a theme you then want to install some plugins so
that you can optimize the seo side of your site of course there's tons of seo plugins to choose
from and you're free to check them all out if you want to that said there are some things that
you'll really want to pay careful close attention to by the way if you want to check out these
plugins there's links to them in the description of this video but one really important plugin you
might want to use is called yoast seo this is a seo plugin that helps you optimize your content
web pages and just your overall site so you can achieve better rankings plus it's really easy
to use and there's a lot of documentation on this plugin which makes it easy to troubleshoot issues
you might also want to install the site kit plug-in from google and if you want to track your
seo results you'll need to use some tools from google such as analytics search console which is
actually something we're going to mention later on anyway if you use these tools you'll need to
install some code on your site and if you install this plugin it becomes really easy to install this
code because of this the plugin is definitely a must-have because it will save you a ton of
time another plug-in you might want to pay close attention to is the smush plug-in it has a funny
name but this is a plug-in that will compress the images on your site and this is so helpful
because it will help you speed up the loading times on your site which is really important if
you want to achieve good rankings there's a ton of other plugins you can experiment with here
and it's pretty much endless and you know honestly each seo person tends to have their own favorite
collection if you've got some favorite plugins let me know in the comment section i'd love to know
about your favorites too either way you should be able to get some good mileage from the ones
i've mentioned here so i wouldn't worry about adding loads more plus if you had too many
it can slow down your wordpress site and this is bad for the user experience side of things
section number seven is time to set up tools right so the next thing you want to do is actually set
up some important tools outside of your website this step is super important if you want to
gather helpful data that'll help you optimize your approach to seo now for the most part you
really just want to focus on google analytics and google search console here now google analytics
will help you track the visitors your site as well as how people are generally interacting
and using your site for example you can see the pages that are attracting the most traffic and
you can also see bounce rates now this tool also helps you see where your traffic is coming from
in terms of actual geographical locations but also in terms of online traffic sources too
so it will tell you if your visitors are coming from facebook or an email newsletter
and basically stuff like that now google search console will provide you with data in terms of
how people are interacting with your site in the google search listings for example if you use
this tool it will tell you about all the kinds of keywords that lead to your website appearing
on google search so yeah ones kind of focus on just general website traffic and the other is
focused more on the seo side of things if you want to use these tools you'll need to actually verify
that you own the site you're looking to track with them luckily if you installed the site kit plug-in
we mentioned earlier this isn't that hard to do by the way again i just want to say that there
are links to all of these tools in the description of this video section number eight it's time to
start submitting sitemaps at this point you want to submit your sitemaps to google now sitemaps
basically give google a good overview of your website and they can help google figure out what
your website is about all of which can help you rank better there are basically two steps you need
to focus on here so first off you need to create a site map if you're using the yoast seo plugin
you should be able to create a site map pretty easily that's because there's actually a section
in yoast dedicated to this now if you create a sitemap using yoast it will then provide
you with a url for the sitemap once you create your sitemap you actually then need to submit it
now if you want to do this you then need to go into the sitemap section of google search console
and provide the url associated with your sitemap once you've done this you should
then see a message telling you if the submission was a success now it's time to optimize urls and
page structure so the next step here is just to make sure your pages and urls are optimized
it's important to optimize urls because google can often work out what a certain page is about
by looking at the content of a url so if you stick with the default wordpress settings your
urls are just gonna like random collections of words and numbers of course this can hurt your
rankings because google can't understand what your urls are about because of this
you should change things so that your urls actually represent the content of a webpage
luckily you can adjust the url structure of your site by going into the perma link settings section
and you can find this section in the left hand sidebar in wordpress anyway if you go to this
section you can see that wordpress basically offers you a number of different options when it
comes to urls in most cases the post name option is the best one to go for if you're feeling brave
you can use the custom structure option but you need to make sure you know what you're doing here
note that you don't want to over optimize your urls and basically make things worse than the
default setting another thing i just want to touch on here is that you want to make sure you take a
lot of care when it comes to page structure so you want to make sure you're using the right h1
and h2 tags when creating your content again this will help google figure out what certain web pages
are about and this can also give google a sense of what your website is just generally about as well
all of which is going to help you rank better for keywords related to your niche section number 10
testing your site and in person feedback so lastly you might just want to get people to use your site
so that you can get some feedback from them this is really helpful and other people might pick up a
certain user experience or design issues that you totally missed now there are websites that offer
this as a service but most of the time you can just get the opinion of a friend if you just buy
them a few drinks next time you're out and i'm sure they won't mind helping you out with this
by the way if you're worried you might have dropped the ball on something here you might want
to book in a free consultation with me at julian juliangoldi.com while i tend to specialize in
link building often have to review client websites to make sure they cover some of the basic things
mentioned in this video after all if they didn't any of the links i built might not actually work
as well so if you'd like a second opinion consider booking a free consultation call and if you do
this we could even discuss how you can build backlinks your site as well okay so that's the
end of this video hopefully you now have a decent sense of how you should set up and build your site
for seo aside from the domain it's important to remember that you can pretty much adjust
everything we've mentioned here at any point in time so basically that means you don't have to do
everything we've covered all in the space in one day that might be a little bit too much of course
you definitely still need to make sure you do the stuff we've mentioned but if you want to do things
gradually over the course of a month or two step by step slowly that's perfectly fine anyhow thanks
for watching this video and please remember to like and subscribe if you like my video i'd really
appreciate it and for every subscriber i get i'm going to give away one free link okay not really
but if you become a subscriber i will release more videos on how to get backlinks
and in some ways that's basically the same right so thanks for watching and see you guys next time
you