In my previous article, I have explained what SEO is and how it works. I have also explained why SEO is so important for your business and brand. If you are not familiar with key SEO terms, I would strongly recommend you to go through the SEO glossary once (download Free PDF here) and familiarize yourself with key SEO terms and concepts.

Right, now that you are getting ready to do SEO for your website, blog or brand, there are a few things you should know before you even put the first step. There are prerequisites which need to be taken care of because if you don’t do the necessary preparation and execute without a plan, the results may not come and if at all it comes, it will not come as you had expected.

Hence, there are some necessary homework which you need to do and there are lots of other things which you need to know before starting to do the SEO of your website or blog.

10 Things to Know Before Starting the SEO For Your Website

Given below are 8 important things to know before you start to do the SEO for your website.

You can call it – proven principles which nobody can break. These are the realities of the concept and if you are not aware of these realities, you might either feel dejected, frustrated or may feel that you are heading the wrong direction.

Hence, it is important to know these truths and key facts without which your efforts might not work as you had expected.

  1. SEO Takes Time and Cannot be done overnight.
  2. Nobody can promise you rankings on the first page of Google.
  3. There are a lot of fake SEO agencies out there who want your money.
  4. There are a whole lot of spammers and potential frauds out there who want your money.
  5. SEO is not just about backlinks and quality Content. It is also about user experience, brand loyalty and “Value”, which cannot be gained overnight.
  6. Search Engines values consistent Experience over a Sudden change. If you provide “Average experience” for 5 years, that is better than “Super good experience” for 3 weeks. Search engines want to see a common pattern or theme of user experience on your website until it has learned more about your website and the users who interact with your website on a regular basis.
  7. Search Engines have low trust scores for New websites. Earning Trust takes time, years, if not decades.
  8. You cannot earn trust With Money. Thinking that you are going to invest a huge amount of money to earn trust and jumpstart your SEO in the right direction to achieve it quickly is generally a bad idea. What takes time, takes time. You can try to accelerate things with money but it is generally not worth it. The best way to go about it is to stay as natural and as genuine as possible and try not to game the system with money.
  9. Nobody knows how Search Engines Work and nobody will know how it works. So there are people claiming that they know how Google works and can help you achieve your digital marketing goals without any problems. These people are mostly lying and they just want your money. Be careful!

Things to Do Before Starting the SEO of your Website

Now that you know important things to know before starting to do the SEO of your website, there are some things you need to do before you kick-start your SEO campaign. It’s like doing the necessary preparation before climbing a mountain, without that preparation, your expedition is going to fail.

Given below are 8 important things to know before you start to do the SEO of your website.

  1. Do a background check on the domain name. 

    See past history, see past content, see who the owner of the website was, see whether this domain name was penalized by Google in the past or not.

  2. Do a background check on your web hosting company. 

    See if it is a reputed web hosting company or if it just some reseller who sold you an overpriced hosting package. Also, do a thorough check whether you have access to all the important information and access to your website’s control panel.

  3. Do a background check whether you have control of the domain name or not. 

    Sometimes people build websites only to find that the domain name is registered with someone else. That is a horrible mistake and you may end up losing all your hard work to a thief or spammer.

  4. See credentials of your SEO agency.If you have already hired an SEO agency or an SEO freelancer to help you out, it helps to see their credentials before you let them tinker with your site. What experience they have? Are they aware of the basic SEO concepts? Print out this SEO Glossary and ask them questions on random items to test their knowledge. You can also take a serious interview to assess their knowledge and implementation skills. I have prepared a pretty exhaustive Interview Questions and Answers to Ask an SEO Candidate. It is a job interview questionnaire but you can apply this to your SEO freelancer as well as SEO agency as well.
  5. Make a list of all your enemies on a paper. 

    Do a background check to assess who among your enemies may try to harm your online business. It is necessary, sometimes people do mischievous things to harm your website so it is better safe than be sorry.

  6. Do an SEO Audit from a reputed SEO agency or firm. 

    This is necessary because you need to know where you are starting from to re-assess your progress after a year or so. The SEO Audit report provided by the agency will act as a great document for future reference, so you will exactly know what things were fixed as part of optimising your website. If you do not have an SEO audit checklist, you can download a sample SEO Audit Checklist here. Once you have downloaded it, print it and then write everything down before you start doing anything on the site.

Be Sure to read our SEO Guide which contains useful information about SEO and we have discussed in detail key SEO Concepts with examples.