If you’re looking to create a website for a seo tool, this article can help. We’ll show you how to create a basic website for your seo tool and then how to customize it for your needs.
Table of Contents
How To Create Seo Tools Website
SEO tool is a broad definition, and there are many niches you can get into, each with its pros and cons, this article will outline the most typical niches, and summarize what how to build your own SEO tool:
- Backlinks explorer tool.
- Keyword explorer tool.
- Rank checker tool.
- On-page SEO Audit tool.
- Brand mentions tool.
How does an SEO tools work?
Before going into the details of how to create your SEO tool, it’s crucial to understand how SEO tools work, the tools (any SEO tool), has multiple stages:
- Acquire the data from various sources: Public internet data, clickstream, 3rd party data, SERP.
- Store it on a database: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redshift, custom database.
- Process the data using specific algorithms to get insights from the data: Domain rank, which keywords a site is ranking for.
- Show the results to the end-user via GUI or provide the results via SEO tools API.
How to create backlinks explorer tool
In this section, we will go over what does a backlinks explorer tool does, what are the parts needed to develop such a tool, and how to develop each part.
What is a backlink explorer tool?
Backlinks explorer is a tool that allows the end-user to:
- Learn who links to his site, and how
- Discover where the competitors are getting links from
- Learn where sites link out to
- Help in the process of domain vetting for:
- Purchasing live domains
- Purchasing expired domains
- Deciding where to do guest posting
To summarize all the options, the goal of a backlink explorer tool is to help with link building and/or help with link disavowing.
How the backlink explorer tool works?
Three parts make the backlinks explorer tool:
Crawler
A crawler is a software that retrieves the content of public web sites, the crawler can be small, for small projects and low amount of webpages, or enterprise-grade to crawl the entire Internet, just like Google’s crawler, which is the largest that exists.
The goal of the crawler is to scrape the data on the web page. Once it has the data, the crawler or another component can parse the backlinks.
Database
Once the crawler got the links, it will store the links in a database. The database allows for fast retrieval of the data. The size and type of the database are dependent on the amount of data crawled, for a small project a single server can do. Still, for Internet-wide crawls, there’s a need for a distributed database, most likely with in house customizations.
GUI
For backlinks explorer tool, the product is mostly SAAS (Software As A Service), which means the GUI is web-based. The GUI should be intuitive as there’s many data point and the end-user should understand rather fast how to access the data he’s looking for.
How to create backlinks explorer tool
How to create backlinks crawler
There are numbers of open-source crawlers available, written in different languages. When we started with our crawler, we had two programmers build a Python-based crawler, and it was able to crawl ten pages per second on a VPS with one core, taking 100% CPU.
We had someone build a C based crawler, and it was able to crawl 100 pages per second on one core, taking 1-3% CPU.
So, choosing the right language of the crawler would impact the hardware selection, it’s a tradeoff between an expensive programmer and expensive hardware.
The essential traits of a crawler are:
- Fast and light, use as little CPU as possible per downloadable page.
- Honours robots.txt, to avoid abuse reports.
- Able to parse sitemaps to get new data.
- If it’s enterprise-grade, then it should be distributable.
Building a crawler with Python
Python is an easy to learn language, with a rich ecosystem and libraries; it cost us 100$ to have a freelancer build a basic crawler with Python and Scrapy. Also, Python has many libraries to parse the DOM and get only the essential elements like Page title, Page description, links.
The development would be fast and not too expensive; the downside is the need for more hardware.
You can download the scrapers/crawlers that was built for us: Python scraper 1, Python scraper 2
Building a crawler with Libcurl
Libcurl is the leading development library for HTTP/S communications, it also supports asynchronous connections, for single HTTP/S requests it’s straightforward and easy. Still, to write a crawler, that’s more complex but doable.
A preferred language would be C or C++, and you will also need some libraries to parse the HTML to extract the links and other information from the page.
You can download the scraper/crawler that was built for us using C and Libcurl: c scraper
Build it all yourself
Our experience shows that for core technologies that need to be highly customized and built for speed, it’s better to write it yourself, we assume you have a very experienced programmer up to the task, just like we have in house.
We developed our own crawler, written in C with BSD sockets and OpenSSL, our own HTTP and HTML parsers. Writing your own crawler allows for the best performance, but the cost was extra development time.
Bandwidth consideration
Bandwidth cost is also an essential factor; some hosts like OVH provides unmetered bandwidth based on the port speed (100MB, 1GB).
Some hosts like Amazon charge for the actual bandwidth, and you may end up paying more for the bandwidth than the hardware.
The bandwidth criteria mean you might need to use a host that requires more knowledge and expertise but gives cheap bandwidth over using an easy to use as Amazon.
How to build a database for backlinks
Once you have the data, it’s time to store it. How much data do you plan to have? Ten billion backlinks would take 4-5 Terabyte of database storage, for comparison the competitors (Ahrefs, Semrush) offer a database of over 1 Trillion backlinks.
The issues with open source databases (MySQL, for example) is that after 50GB in storage, the insert speed degrades exponentially. For backlinks database, there’s a need for sustained insert speed, for our needs it was about 50,000 inserts per second, and after 50GB of storage the speed started to go down, at 200GB of storage it was so slow, it was unusable.
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift database can be scaled easily to have a large storage, and shouldn’t have the same problem the open-source solution has, but 10 Terabyte of space would cost 30,000$ monthly on SSD storage.
Clustered database
Some hosting providers offer clustered MySQL or PostgreSQL out of the box. A clustered solution can get around the insertion speed issue if each node is limited to 200GB storage.
The problem is that the clustered solution costs 10,000-20,000$ per month for ten Terabyte of storage, depending on the hosting provider.
Commercial database
There are commercial databases that can handle this load, like Oracle database, we don’t know what the price is, Oracle database is an enterprise product, it may not be suitable for startups.
Percona MySQL database
Percona is a company that specializes in database optimizations, and they have a custom version for MySQL, MongoDB and PostgreSQL. We wrote a long article in Quora about the database ordeal, and someone asked if we tried their Tuko engine, I didn’t. So it might help, we never tested it.
Custom database solution
We decided that paying 10,000-20,000$ per month for a database is too much. Besides we haven’t made a single dime yet, is not the way to go, we don’t have VC money, and that amount puts great pressure on finances.
We decided to develop a custom database that can handle the insert and select load. We can host it for 350$ monthly, but it took us two years to build it, so we traded time for money.
You can read our article about which database we use (hint: we built it), it covers in more detail about the limitations of current databases and how we solved it.
Integration and GUI for backlinks tools
Now that you got the database and crawler, it’s time to integrate and make sure you build a friendly GUI so people can see their link building efforts.
For web SAAS, there are several languages people use: PHP, NodeJS. We use PHP and a custom HTML theme; we cover more about GUI development later in this article.
Our backlinks API
Our API allows to get all the backlinks information regarding a site: Backlinks, Outlinks, Top pages, Referring domains, Referring classification, Top anchors and more.
Our API can be used for building:
- Free SEO tools as lead magnets.
- Commercial SEO tools.
- Internal research tools for link building.
- Other Internet marketing tools.
Check out our Backlinks API details.
How to create keywords explorer tool?
What is a keywords explorer tool?
A keywords explorer tool allows the end-user to gather keyword ranking information about his website, and the competitors, this allows you to know:
- Which keywords does his site ranks on, and which position?
- Which keywords do the competitors rank on?
- Keywords opportunities and ranking difficulty.
- Keywords search volume.
- Keywords PPC costs.
- Long-tail keywords.
- Similar keywords.
A keyword explorer tool also helps with keyword research. Keyword research is crucial to any content marketing campaign. For example, we wrote a few blog posts without doing any keyword research (Like this one), we just wrote what came to mind, but since the post didn’t focus on anything the user searches, it gets about one hit per month.
BTW we wrote this paragraph in Nov 2020, and we will revise all of our content with proper keyword research, trying to salvage the content.
Why should someone use a keywords explorer tool?
A keyword explorer tool is used mostly for SEO and PPC:
- Research which keywords to focus on, when writing articles.
- Discover easy to rank keywords.
- Discover cheap PPC keywords.
- Keyword search volume tool.
How does a keywords tool work?
Keywords explorer tool has several components:
Keywords explorer scraper
The scraper is the component that gets the data from the search engines (mostly Google, but some products supports more engines), parses it and make it ready for storage.
Keywords’ search volume data
Keyword search volume data is static data that is displayed next to the keywords, and it might also contain keyword ranking trends.
Keywords’ PPC data
Keyword PPC data is static data that is displayed next to the keywords, and it shows the average cost for Google AdWords PPC.
Keywords explorer database
The database stores the data in the previous sections:
- SERP results.
- Keywords’ search volume data and trends.
- Keywords’ PPC data.
GUI for keywords explorer
The answer is almost the same as for backlinks explorer tool the exception is that keywords explorer is only SAAS and not a local software. So with SAAS, the GUI is web-based.
How to create keywords explorer tool
How to write a scraper
Type of IPs
A scraper gets the search engine results. Google and the other search engines don’t like it, so they employ Recaptcha to stop the scraping. Even if someone is using anti Recaptcha methods, eventually Google will block that IP anyways.
There are various methods to scrape Google successfully:
Datacenter IP
Datacenter IPs are easy to come by, you can spawn a VPS starting from 2$ on low-cost providers, to 5$ on a leading provider.
The problem is – Google knows that too; it will display the captcha after about 100 requests.
There can be several solutions to this problem:
- Replace the IP every time the IP is blocked, and most VPS providers have an API to do so, check the provider TOS before doing that, see that this is allowed.
- Make a request every x seconds, depending on the results you ask for, the more results, the bigger the x. The problem here that you must maintain a large number of proxies.
Using residential IP
Since Google knows the IP came from a residential IP, it will not block the requests as long as you wait a few seconds, the problem is, how to get such IP?
If you live in the place, you plan to scrape the results from, and then you can install several connections and use them, the problem is, for an extensive keyword database, this will not scale well.
Another solution is to use a residential IP provider like Luminati, and the problem is the price, the charge per bandwidth, which makes the operation very expensive.
Which language to develop the scraper?
Unlike the backlinks crawler, the scraper doesn’t have to be very efficient, so Python or even PHP can be the right choice.
If there’s a need to render JS, then using headless Chrome or headless Firefox will be preferred.
Where to get search volume data?
Clickstream data
Clickstream data is collected from real users, and it contains every URL the users visited and every search phrase they searched.
The search volume of every keyword can be deducted based on the number of panellists that are part of the clickstream data in a specific country.
This data allows us to get an estimate of the search volume because it’s only a part of the actual users searching. Also, the way this data was collected affects the results.
When an Antivirus provides the clickstream data (like it was with Avast), it means the data represents the way that end-users that installed Avast behaves, it may be different from other types of end users that wouldn’t install Avast.
If the budget allows, purchasing clickstream data from multiple sources will allow for better estimation of search volume.
Search volume from API
Some companies such as ours are selling search volume metrics with an API, and there are two types of commercial API usage:
Internal API usage
When the data is used internally, which means it’s not displayed publicly, it can be used for the company’s internal needs, or to show private reports to SEO clients.
This usage should be cheaper than white label usage.
Whitelabel API usage
Is used when developing a public app or SAAS and you want to show 3rd party data, the best example would be Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest, he publicly revealed his monthly spending on the tool. Part of the expenditure is for development and role for the data.
Obviously, this data is more expensive, and most companies will perform due diligence before providing such API functionality.
Google API
Google offers an API that provides PPC prices information, search volume data. It’s all the data that is available via their Keyword planner tool. They provide the API after a vetting process, and the API can only be used for specific goals.
Where to get extra keywords
Google says that 15% of all searches are new, which means that even if you get clickstream data, it will not include all possible keywords (you can read more about it here).
On this blog we have some articles that ranked on keywords that our tool and other tools show no searches. When doing keyword research, keywords with “zero” searches may have enough search volume never the less.
Luckily we can get most of this data from Google itself (also from Bing and Yahoo), which you are already doing with a scraper.
Related search
In the bottom of each search results page, there are a list of keyword suggestions related to our searched keywords.
People also search.
Some pages show another pane with people also searches, which gives even more keyword options.
Google Trends
In Google Trends, there are two options:
- Related topics – Shows related topics to our keyword, for example, related topics for “keyword research” are Niche market, content, Affiliate marketing.
- Related queries – Shows what other people were searching for in relation to the keyword. It’s another data endpoint to the related searches in Google web search.
Google autocomplete
Google autocomplete suggestions helps the searcher do a search based on the previous searches, for example, let’s say a user enters “keyword research”, Google will add options based on past searches, for example, tool, Google, for SEO. It will not add keywords; however, without any meaning for the search like a cat, not that you can’t search: “keyword research cat”, it just that it has less meaning.
Google Search Console
Some products like ahrefs and Ubbersuggest request access to the Google Search Console, they then use the keyword data provided by Google to show improved keywords data.
One thing to consider is that for low search volume keywords the bots can skew the data, as you can see in the graph for one of the keywords we are ranking for, one the same day of the week a bot searches Google for this keyword.
Database for keyword explorer
Unlike the backlinks explorer, the data is not too big, and the insert speed requirement is low. One or two instances of MySQL would be enough; the challenge here is the sorting based on search volume, searching for similar keywords, and searching for similar phrases. For example:
How to sort big data
A site like eBay is ranked for millions of keywords in the SERP. When showing eBay’s result (or any other results), they are sorted by the search volume.
It doesn’t matter if the applications display five results, or a hundred results, the database will have to fetch all the results (millions) and sort the result before providing an answer.
The speed will depend on the database’s hosting computer performance, and number of jobs the database is currently doing, but even on an idle server, this will take at least a few seconds which can make the site look slow.
The way we solved it is to precompute the sorting. We developed a multithreaded C++ program to precalculate sorted results, which means we have a table that holds all the keywords for the sites, and the search volume is already sorted.
Using this method – fetching the results is almost instantaneous.
How to sort similar keywords
Similar keywords are keywords that contain a seed keyword, for example, for the keyword “seo services”, has the following similar list of keywords: professional seo services, affordable seo services, white label seo services reviews.
We have 270 million keywords just in our primary database, doing a similar search even with full-text indexes can be time and resource consuming.
The way we solved it, we used a C++ program (again) with Aho-corasik algorithm to precalculate those keywords lists, and then we store it in a table.
Aho-corasik is an algorithm that allows doing a fast search on a string; in one pass, it finds all the keywords in our dictionary.
Even with that algorithm in place, it takes the program up to 48 hours to go over all the keywords, think how long it would take to do it in the database level.
The Aho-Corasick version we developed and use can be downloaded for free: Open source Aho-Corasick.
How to sort similar phrases
Similar phrases are phrases that contain the seed word, just not in the same order, for example, the seed keyword: “free mac pdf editor”, has the following similar phrase list:free pdf editor for mac without watermark, adobe pdf editor mac free, free pdf editor mac download, pdf editor mac free online software.
I’m not sure it’s even possible to design a database query to fetch such a list, the way we have done it, is use the same program from before, but this time we take each keyword and build all the permutations, and then we search those permutations.
When we first ran the program, it was “stuck”, when looking deeper we found the problem, a phrase with 12 keywords, generates 479,001,600 options, which will take two days just to search.
We had to limit the phrase building to 9 keywords, which generates “only” 362,880 results, we put this on a 40 logical thread server, it takes a month to go over all the keywords.
Keyword difficulty tool
Part of a keyword explorer is to gage the keyword difficulty, and each company has its own way to calculate this score, at the end all the numbers are estimates.
The data that can be used to calculate the keyword difficulty is:
- Website Page rank (also referred to as domain authority)
- Number of links (unique or total) to each link in the result
- On-page factors
The way we calculate it is by creating the average of the page rank of each site in the results; in the future, we plan to look at this again.
Integration and GUI for backlinks tools
The GUI is always the same for all tools; later in the article, we provide a detailed explanation on how to write GUI.
Our Keyword API
Our API allows to get all the keyword information for specific geographies: Keyword search volume, similar keywords, related keywords, also ranking for keywords, and more.
You can use our API to build:
- Keyword research tool
- Augment on page content creation tool with keyword data
- And more
Check out our Keywords API details.
How to create a keyword position rank tracker
What is a keyword position rank tracker?
A rank tracker is a tool that tracks a site rankings and keyword position in the search engines. It will:
- Track keywords across different geographies.
- Track keywords in specific cities which is needed for local SEO.
How does a keyword position rank tracker work?
Rank trackers are search engine scrapers that use proxies or other means to use different IPs to scrape the SERP in a specific geography or cities.
How to build a keyword position rank tracker?
The rank tracker should be the easiest tool to create, that’s why there’s so many out there, the entry barrier is low.
Because there’s little data, any database will do, you can go with MySQL.
Since you need to track keywords position across various geographies, using a residential IP proxy provider makes sense since the number of tracked keywords is tied to the number of subscriptions, the cost of the IP provider should scale well with revenue.
The “crawler” section on similar keywords tool in this article covers how to write a SERP scraper which has the same applicability to the rank tracker scraper.
How to create a on-page site audit tool?
What is a site audit tool?
Site audit tools are used to detect on-page SEO issues like:
- Find Broken links.
- Check for missing or incorrect robots.txt.
- Discover missing or incorrect sitemap.
- Check for internal linking issues.
- Detect missing meta description tag.
- Find incorrect usage of header tags (for example, H1).
- Discover duplicate content.
- Generate a sitemap.
- Check for missing hreflang.
- Technical SEO issues.
- And more.
How does a site audit tool work?
A site audit tool works by crawling the site it audits and analyzing the link structure and meta information on each page. Once it has all the data, it processes it to show the auditor the relevant information to fix.
How to build a site audit tool?
The core component of such tool is the crawler, the first decision would be whether that crawler is based on SAAS (the crawler is hosted at your servers) or the crawler is a downloadable software.
Crawler as a SAAS
Unlike the crawler for backlinks tool, this crawler usually needs to crawl less data, which means you can get away with Python-based crawlers, which will speed up development time.
Once you have your crawler in place, you’ll need to analyze all the factors mentioned, and Python has many libraries to do so, so a fair Python programmer should do the job rather easy.
All the data would go to a database since there’s not a lot of data, a single MySQL instance would do the job.
On Code Canyon there are several scripts to do SEO audit, they can be used as a base for the final SAAS software and save development time.
Script language or C++
When developing the backend for the on-page audit tool, the selection of the development language should fit the market size.
If the amount of web pages scanned is small, a scripting language like Python or PHP would be a good selection.
If you plan to have many users and many sites scanned, the technical SEO analysis and other on-page analysis will tax your servers, and this means you might need extra servers.
In this case, the tradeoff is between development speed and hardware cost; there’s no right and wrong answer.
Crawler as a download
The main decision, in this case, is which OS to support, if the plan is to support multiple OSs, you should use a development language that is not OS depended like: Python, Java, NodeJS. The drawback is the need to install the development language runtime locally, which on some computer can fail for various reasons.
If the software is meant for a single OS, it can be written in C/C++, with minimal dependencies, this will allow for a higher success rate when installing the software. Also, a good programmer can write C/C++ code that will port easily to Linux/Mac if it’s known upfront.
For a local database, you can use SQLite, which is the gold standard for local databases (I wouldn’t try to install MySQL locally, that would lower installation success rates)
Javascript rendering
Some sites are using Javascript to render their content, which means that if you scrape them with a regular scraper, it will take some or all of their elements.
The solution is to use Headless Chrome, which can be invoked from the command line or controlled via a package called puppeteer.
One thing though, Headless Chrome mentions it’s headless, it does so in the user agent, on our main site we block headless browsers.
Using a script to create a Site Audit tool
Sometimes you need to have a site audit as a lead generation, and it doesn’t need to have all the bells and whistles.
You can find ready-made scripts that do basic site audits on sites like Code Canyon, and you can search for PHP SEO. You’ll find many SEO related scripts.
Keep in mind that we don’t endorse any script, and you should do your due diligence before using any script.
How to make an SEO tool website (small SEO tools)
There is numerous type of sites that provide many small utilities for SEO, like:
• Image conversion
• Image editing
• Various keyword tools
• Various backlinks tools
• Plagiarism Checker
• Article Rewriter
• Grammar Check
• Word Counter
• And more
The site smallseotools.com has an Alexa rank of 2000 (Checked May 2021), which means it gets a lot of traffic from SEO-oriented users.
Creating and promoting such site or adding such features to an existing site can add valuable traffic to any SEO venture.
The easiest way to achieve this is, like we mentioned before, to go to a site like Code Canyon and search for PHP SEO. They have many scripts that allow you to deploy a site similar to smallseotools relatively fast. (remember we don’t endorse any script, and you should do your due diligence)
Some of those sites are also affiliates to the SEO big sites (for example, Semrush). That’s why they can show data such as Backlinks data and Keywords data. If you want to show such data, you could develop your own, use an API, and be an affiliate in exchange for data.
Other tools
Other SEO tools are not mainstream. Obviously, we can’t cover how to create every SEO tool, for example, our SAAS has built-in URL Classification, it allows for better domain vetting, we integrated our URL Classification SAAS with the SEO SAAS.
I could theorize for most products the core principles shown here for the other tools:
- If the tool needs fast data additions, it needs a distributed database solution which is expensive, or a custom solution which is costly to develop.
- If the tool uses AI, you can use a premade dataset from GPT-2, or use a library by Huggingface.
Which hosting provider to use
When developing this kind of tool, you must have an experienced sysadmin, so the answer is written with that assumption in mind, besides for a project at that scale, you must have someone that experienced, or you’ll end up paying a premium for mistakes.
Database hosting provider
We host our custom database at Hetzner, from our experience Hetzner is the best-dedicated server hosting company we worked with. We had a hard drive replaced within 5 minutes; the entire motherboard replaced within 30 minutes.
In general, a dedicated server will be cheaper and faster than any cloud VPS, for example, we use a server with 12 logical threads and 256GB that costs 80$ per month, getting an equivalent in the cloud costs around 1000$ per month.
If you plan to use a distributed database, you can go with a provider that has a built-in option to deploy such a database, like DigitalOcean. You can also use Amazon Redshift, keep in mind it may be more expensive than going with the distributed database.
If you feel that your team is highly technical and able to deploy a distributed database by yourselves, you can save by using a cheap dedicated server host like Kimsufi.
VPS for proxies
For VPS, you can go with the big players: DigitalOcean, Linode, their smallest VPS costs 5$. Amazon LightSail smallest VPS costs 3.5$ and we’ve found some good providers that you can get an IP for 1.75$.
There are smaller players which offer 2-4$ VPS, the more technical your team is, the more leeway you have with picking up the providers.
Buy complete IP ranges for your proxies
Some hosting providers offer to buy or lease an IP range. For example, OVH sells a class C (256 Ips) for a one-time price of 756$.
But, most of those ranges come from countries that sold their IP pools because of the IP4 shortage.
For example, you could buy a range claimed to be in USA, but in reality, the IP4 range belonged to Pakistan before and not all of the IP geo providers changed it to the USA.
Furthermore, it’s possible that all the IP GEO providers changed the detection of the IP to the USA, but Google didn’t.
It means you’ll need to check with each GEO IP provider and even with the vendor how the IPs are identified. We refunded a few deals just because the IP wasn’t identified correctly.
Front end hosting
Unlike our recommendation to use dedicated servers, with the front end a VPS might be a better pick, the reason is, it’s easy to backup, deploy more instances on the go, and usually, at the start, there’s no demand for high performing hardware.
In later stages, when the traffic is high, you can go with a dedicated server and various CDN solutions like Cloudflare, that will help with the high traffic.
It’s essential to make sure your website loads fast from the geography of your end-users; you can use a tool like Pingdom to benchmark your site.
Which development language to use for the frontend?
Here at SEO Explorer, we love PHP. It’s very similar to C/C++, which is the language we use for our backend.
At the beginning we thought if we should use a framework, we read the reviews, and decided against it, the tipping point was that the inventor of PHP – Rasmus Lerdorf was against it, as written here.
Some people will swear by PHP frameworks. It’s a matter of opinion, and there’s no right or wrong answer.
For the design itself, we use a theme called Metronic, which saved us a lot of time since the theme is responsive and automatically supports desktop and mobile browsers, we paid about 80$ for it. Still, the saving in development costs was crazy.
The good thing about HTML themes is that you can add any development language to it, PHP or others, which gives excellent flexibility.
There are many other good themes you can purchase at Themeforest for a low price.
Which framework to use for your blog?
For our blog (the one you read now), it was a no brainer, and we use WordPress, it’s the most supported blogging ecosystem, you can’t go wrong with it.
One dilemma we had, for SEO, should we use our domain as a standalone subdomain or as part of the domain, we decided it should be part of our domain for higher domain ranking.
Should you build your own SEO tool?
If you reached this point, you should have a high level of understanding of what is required for every tool.
Some tools will be cheaper to develop, some tools require many servers and programmers, and you should research the tipping point between using 3rd party SEO API and development of SEO tools.
Building your own SEO Tools is never free, and the time spent on SEO tool development is a time you are not reaching the market.
In our case, our business is selling SEO tools, so it made perfect sense to develop it, but if we were an SEO agency, we would use existing tools or data.
how to build a website for seo
When you build a website, search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for ranking a website. If you make a website without considering SEO, it takes more time and energy to rank in google. Since maximum users can solve their query by visiting the first page of Google, it is vital to get a higher ranking, and a higher website ranking means more visitors.
A well-designed website that is technically sound is vital for SEO.
Read some of SEO Expert, Ray Martinez’s, top tips for small business SEO. This post will help you learn How To Build Your Website For SEO?
How To Build A Website With SEO In Mind?
Some of the main factors considered while building a site with SEO in mind are keywords, content, backlinks, usability, and technical best practices. If you already have a website, these suggestions will help you with ranking. So these are SEO considerations while building a website.
SEO Web Hosting
Why does web hosting matter? Website hosting is a service that you purchase for your website. It provides a space on the server (your own little corner of the web) and certain tools, such as an FTP client for uploading content to your site, and email software etc.
Website loading speed is critical. A slow website makes visitors unhappy. Most of the users left the website if it takes time to load. Good hosting companies have the ability o host your site on servers proximal to your target audience. If you use WordPress, make sure you choose managed WordPress hosting.
SEO Website Design
Web designing plays an important role in search engine optimization. If your website is not well designed, it will be difficult to rank the website in search engines. There are several guidelines that you need to consider when building a website, and if any of them is missing then your site may not
Website appearance is another crucial factor. If you use CMS like WordPress or Wix, choose an SEO-friendly theme. Wisely use fonts and use good colors for text and background. Make sure you use navigation so users can easily find related content.
If you use WordPress, use the schema plugin because it makes a good appearance in search engines. Avoid using text in images because the search engine cannot read what’s inside the image.
Perform SEO Focused Keyword Research for Your Site
Before putting content on the website, you need to do proper keyword research to find your audience. For keywords, researching uses different tools like Aherfs, SemRush, etc. if your website is new, try to find long-tail keywords because these keywords rank quickly.
Keyword research provides the foundation for everything you do. Pay special attention to keywords because it gives a good traffic source.
Don’t try to target your homepage for SEO. Target individual pages and content for maximum impact. To optimize your homepage, make sure that the primary keyword tags are on each page of the website. This is the foundation for great on-page optimizations.
Create Relevant Content for Your Users
High-quality content that satisfies user intent can achieve top ranking. Make sure your content is unique. Duplicate content can’t rank in google. Content means anything you publish on your website that provides information and attracts customers. Content is website content, blogpost, videos, brochures, FAQs, etc.
Make sure your content is unique, engaging and provides pertinent information to your visitors. Search engines crawl your content to understand your particular intent. Your content’s context allows them to understand which query to associate with your content.
When writing content for a website us the following techniques:
- Write catchy titles that attract visitors so that people can click on your website.
- Find relevant keywords that have search volume.
- Ensure your content length is above 500 words but make sure your content should be long enough to answer visitors’ queries.
- Make sure you update on a regular content basis.
Site Structure & Search Engine Usability
Website structure is vital for SEO. Use proper menus, directories/categories. Develop a sitemap that highlights all the pages on your site. Wireframe every page template type. Create clean and straightforward navigation that allows users to access desired content with a minimal number of clicks.
“Hub & Spoke” and “Content Silos” are different site architectures that can considerably impact search rankings. Structuring your site can impact the way Google crawls your site by putting related content close to each other (Hub & Spoke) or by separating content in such a way it would take users deep into your site before getting the required piece.
If you can’t decide what architecture suits you best, try analyzing existing sites of similar categories. Identify the structure they are using and ask yourself if it’s applicable to yours.
How To Build Your Website For Technical SEO Website Setup
Configure Google Analytics
Website analytics can help you to find your website performance. With analytics tools, you can see user experience, bounce rate, audience retention. Adjust strategy according to real-world data and results. Google Analytics is the best tool for analyzing the performance of your website. In google analytics, there are a lot of options where you can measure your website performance.
Google analytics provides a benchmark to see how you are performing against other websites. With an analysis of your user behavior, you can make your website more friendly to users and search engines as well.
Google Analytics shows real-time data for site visitor details including both desktop and mobile views. The visitor trends can be determined from the graph in Google Analytics showing a history of traffic. It also helps you understand the users landing on site.
Setup Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
These webmaster tools by Google and Bing provide data from bots that crawl your website and available index information on your website. These webmaster tools are sending visitors to your website. If your website has any issues, you can quickly resolve that.
Google Search Console delivers insight into how Google views your website. It’s a great tool that helps you discover how to improve your ranking in the search results by examining site structure, identifying crawl errors, and discovering additional content we may not yet have found. Take full advantage of this free service to increase visibility for your business with improved search rankings.
SEO plugin
If you use WordPress, you can find a lot of plugins that help with SEO. One of the popular tools is the Yoast plugin. It is free as well a paid version is available. Yoast is a powerful tool for SEO optimization. After installing Yoast or All-in-One SEO, you can see SEO recommendations and make changes according to that.
These plugins cover a variety of SEO needs such as title optimization, making sure the post hasn’t been duplicated elsewhere on your site, descriptions, and so much more. It’s definitely better to use a plugin instead of doing it yourself because you can never be too sure about what will Google consider spam or not.
According to the industry experts, all these plugins are very easy to use and take minimal setup time. They also dynamically inject schema markup into your website so that the elements you want to appear higher in search results will be seen by Google and other search engine crawlers.
Most of these plugins are free but make sure to do your research before committing to one in order to get the most out of it for the time you’ll use it.
Robot.txt & XML Sitemap
Robot.txt file contains instructions for search engines as to which pages of your website ignore during the crawling process. It suggests a search engine that which pages search crawl. Make sure search engines index your website.
The robots.txt offers important directives or hints to search engines about which areas of your website they can index. The robots.txt file gives you the ability to create a set of rules for how to handle crawling in your site.
A good Robots.txt file includes a link to your XML sitemap.
Sitemaps are created by hand or with the help of tools and submitted via XML. These sitemaps help search engines crawl and index pages on your website by prioritizing fresh content and particular content types.
A sitemap is a file that lets search engines know about the various pages contained in your website. This file consists of a list of all the pages available for crawling and helps to improve the ranking of your web page. Sitemaps are particularly useful for sites with large link structures or dynamic content
How To Build Your Website For Off-Page SEO Considerations?
Earn links
Links are significant in SEO, as links create a positive impression on search engines and are a great indicator of what is relevant. However, it is not Important to create hundreds of links. Make sure you build quality links.
Some link-building strategies include article marketing, creating backlinks, blog commenting, and guest blogging.
Another way to generate links is to create a social media presence. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites are excellent tools to drive traffic to your website. Social media is an excellent way to attract links. Increase your followers on all the major social networking sites to bring in traffic from these popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, etc.
People will pay attention if you have a large following on these sites. If people recognize that others like your page, they will likely follow it as well. And links from third-party sources seem more authoritative than those coming from your own company or website.
What is Backlinking? There are Two Types of Link Building
Link Building is the act of obtaining links to your website. In other words, it is the art and science of getting someone else to link to your websites or blog posts. Link building in itself multiple types: – Natural Backlinks – Indirect Links – Sponsored Links
Natural backlinks are those that occur when a user writes content on. It may be slow, however, it creates great quality traffic and builds authority for your site.
Indirect links are those that occur when you exchange links with another site. You may use this method to go faster, but the authority is probably not as good.
Sponsored links are the ones that are the most obvious. You pay for this type of link and usually get them really fast. Not all backlinks are created equal. There is a definite difference between natural links and indirect/sponsored links. The former is more valuable than the latter.
If you want to get a good rank in search engines then you need backlinks that are relevant to your content. Therefore, if you are a business website then you should obtain links from business websites that talk about your
Use Social Media to Promote Your Content
Social media is very effective in promoting your content. You can create different profiles on multiple social media platforms and generate views. Social views can impact your ranking if your content is genuine and solve the query of users.
Best CMS for Small Business SEO
The CMS is easy to use and handles compare to the customer’s website. Here are some of the best CMS for small business SEO
WordPress
WordPress is one of the most popular CMS solutions. Most of the small business are prefers WordPress. The main reason for WordPress popularity is you can easily make a website without technical knowledge. There are a lot of plugins/ themes are available in WordPress. WordPress is very cost-effective. You can hire WordPress designers easily on freelancing platforms.
The benefits of WordPress for SEO are as follows:
- You can use the WordPress free version. You can also upgrade to the premium plan for additional features.
- WordPress is Customization Friendly
- If you are not satisfied with a theme, then you can customize your website based on your needs.
- WordPress has More Plugins/Themes Availability
The SEO disadvantages behind WordPress are:
- You can’t have full control over the theme if you take the free version. There is a feature of premium WordPress (paid) that gives complete access to customize your website according to your desires.
- WordPress promotes spam comments from time to time that affects SEO negatively.
SEO Considerations When Building A Website
Some of the main factors considered while building a site with SEO in mind are keywords, content, backlinks, usability, and technical best practices. If you already have a website, these suggestions will help you with ranking. So these are SEO considerations while building a website.
SEO Web Hosting
Why does web hosting matter? Website hosting is a service that you purchase for your website. It provides a space on the server (your own little corner of the web) and certain tools, such as an FTP client for uploading content to your site, and email software etc.
Website loading speed is critical. A slow website makes visitors unhappy. Most of the users left the website if it takes time to load. Good hosting companies have the ability o host your site on servers proximal to your target audience. If you use WordPress, make sure you choose managed WordPress hosting.
SEO Website Design
Web designing plays an important role in search engine optimization. If your website is not well designed, it will be difficult to rank the website in search engines. There are several guidelines that you need to consider when building a website, and if any of them is missing then your site may not
Website appearance is another crucial factor. If you use CMS like WordPress or Wix, choose an SEO-friendly theme. Wisely use fonts and use good colors for text and background. Make sure you use navigation so users can easily find related content.
If you use WordPress, use the schema plugin because it makes a good appearance in search engines. Avoid using text in images because the search engine cannot read what’s inside the image.
Perform SEO Focused Keyword Research for Your Site
Before putting content on the website, you need to do proper keyword research to find your audience. For keywords, researching uses different tools like Aherfs, SemRush, etc. if your website is new, try to find long-tail keywords because these keywords rank quickly.
Keyword research provides the foundation for everything you do. Pay special attention to keywords because it gives a good traffic source.
Don’t try to target your homepage for SEO. Target individual pages and content for maximum impact. To optimize your homepage, make sure that the primary keyword tags are on each page of the website. This is the foundation for great on-page optimizations.
Create Relevant Content for Your Users
High-quality content that satisfies user intent can achieve top ranking. Make sure your content is unique. Duplicate content can’t rank in google. Content means anything you publish on your website that provides information and attracts customers. Content is website content, blogpost, videos, brochures, FAQs, etc.
Make sure your content is unique, engaging and provides pertinent information to your visitors. Search engines crawl your content to understand your particular intent. Your content’s context allows them to understand which query to associate with your content.
When writing content for a website us the following techniques:
- Write catchy titles that attract visitors so that people can click on your website.
- Find relevant keywords that have search volume.
- Ensure your content length is above 500 words but make sure your content should be long enough to answer visitors’ queries.
- Make sure you update on a regular content basis.
Site Structure & Search Engine Usability
Website structure is vital for SEO. Use proper menus, directories/categories. Develop a sitemap that highlights all the pages on your site. Wireframe every page template type. Create clean and straightforward navigation that allows users to access desired content with a minimal number of clicks.
“Hub & Spoke” and “Content Silos” are different site architectures that can considerably impact search rankings. Structuring your site can impact the way Google crawls your site by putting related content close to each other (Hub & Spoke) or by separating content in such a way it would take users deep into your site before getting the required piece.
If you can’t decide what architecture suits you best, try analyzing existing sites of similar categories. Identify the structure they are using and ask yourself if it’s applicable to yours.
How To Build Your Website For Technical SEO Website Setup
Configure Google Analytics
Website analytics can help you to find your website performance. With analytics tools, you can see user experience, bounce rate, audience retention. Adjust strategy according to real-world data and results. Google Analytics is the best tool for analyzing the performance of your website. In google analytics, there are a lot of options where you can measure your website performance.
Google analytics provides a benchmark to see how you are performing against other websites. With an analysis of your user behavior, you can make your website more friendly to users and search engines as well.
Google Analytics shows real-time data for site visitor details including both desktop and mobile views. The visitor trends can be determined from the graph in Google Analytics showing a history of traffic. It also helps you understand the users landing on site.
Setup Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
These webmaster tools by Google and Bing provide data from bots that crawl your website and available index information on your website. These webmaster tools are sending visitors to your website. If your website has any issues, you can quickly resolve that.
Google Search Console delivers insight into how Google views your website. It’s a great tool that helps you discover how to improve your ranking in the search results by examining site structure, identifying crawl errors, and discovering additional content we may not yet have found. Take full advantage of this free service to increase visibility for your business with improved search rankings.
SEO plugin
If you use WordPress, you can find a lot of plugins that help with SEO. One of the popular tools is the Yoast plugin. It is free as well a paid version is available. Yoast is a powerful tool for SEO optimization. After installing Yoast or All-in-One SEO, you can see SEO recommendations and make changes according to that.
These plugins cover a variety of SEO needs such as title optimization, making sure the post hasn’t been duplicated elsewhere on your site, descriptions, and so much more. It’s definitely better to use a plugin instead of doing it yourself because you can never be too sure about what will Google consider spam or not.
According to the industry experts, all these plugins are very easy to use and take minimal setup time. They also dynamically inject schema markup into your website so that the elements you want to appear higher in search results will be seen by Google and other search engine crawlers.
Most of these plugins are free but make sure to do your research before committing to one in order to get the most out of it for the time you’ll use it.
Robot.txt & XML Sitemap
Robot.txt file contains instructions for search engines as to which pages of your website ignore during the crawling process. It suggests a search engine that which pages search crawl. Make sure search engines index your website.
The robots.txt offers important directives or hints to search engines about which areas of your website they can index. The robots.txt file gives you the ability to create a set of rules for how to handle crawling in your site.
A good Robots.txt file includes a link to your XML sitemap.
Sitemaps are created by hand or with the help of tools and submitted via XML. These sitemaps help search engines crawl and index pages on your website by prioritizing fresh content and particular content types.
A sitemap is a file that lets search engines know about the various pages contained in your website. This file consists of a list of all the pages available for crawling and helps to improve the ranking of your web page. Sitemaps are particularly useful for sites with large link structures or dynamic content
How To Build Your Website For Off-Page SEO Considerations?
Earn links
Links are significant in SEO, as links create a positive impression on search engines and are a great indicator of what is relevant. However, it is not Important to create hundreds of links. Make sure you build quality links.
Some link-building strategies include article marketing, creating backlinks, blog commenting, and guest blogging.
Another way to generate links is to create a social media presence. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites are excellent tools to drive traffic to your website. Social media is an excellent way to attract links. Increase your followers on all the major social networking sites to bring in traffic from these popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, etc.
People will pay attention if you have a large following on these sites. If people recognize that others like your page, they will likely follow it as well. And links from third-party sources seem more authoritative than those coming from your own company or website.
What is Backlinking? There are Two Types of Link Building
Link Building is the act of obtaining links to your website. In other words, it is the art and science of getting someone else to link to your websites or blog posts. Link building in itself multiple types: – Natural Backlinks – Indirect Links – Sponsored Links
Natural backlinks are those that occur when a user writes content on. It may be slow, however, it creates great quality traffic and builds authority for your site.
Indirect links are those that occur when you exchange links with another site. You may use this method to go faster, but the authority is probably not as good.
Sponsored links are the ones that are the most obvious. You pay for this type of link and usually get them really fast. Not all backlinks are created equal. There is a definite difference between natural links and indirect/sponsored links. The former is more valuable than the latter.
If you want to get a good rank in search engines then you need backlinks that are relevant to your content. Therefore, if you are a business website then you should obtain links from business websites that talk about your
Use Social Media to Promote Your Content
Social media is very effective in promoting your content. You can create different profiles on multiple social media platforms and generate views. Social views can impact your ranking if your content is genuine and solve the query of users.
Best CMS for Small Business SEO
The CMS is easy to use and handles compare to the customer’s website. Here are some of the best CMS for small business SEO
WordPress
WordPress is one of the most popular CMS solutions. Most of the small business are prefers WordPress. The main reason for WordPress popularity is you can easily make a website without technical knowledge. There are a lot of plugins/ themes are available in WordPress. WordPress is very cost-effective. You can hire WordPress designers easily on freelancing platforms.
The benefits of WordPress are as follows:
- You can use the WordPress free version. You can also upgrade to the premium plan for additional features.
- WordPress is Customization Friendly
- If you are not satisfied with a theme, then you can customize your website based on your needs.
- WordPress has More Plugins/Themes Availability
The disadvantages behind WordPress are:
- You can’t have full control over the theme if you take the free version. There is a feature of premium WordPress (paid) that gives complete access to customize your website according to your desires.
- WordPress promotes spam comments from time to time that affects SEO negatively.
Joomla
Joomla is a popular CMS platform. It is complicated than WordPress. Joomla is not beginner-friendly; you can find a lot of extensions; some are free. The best thing about Joomla it provides users a lot of freedom when it comes to design.
The Benefits of Joomla are as follows:
- You can find a lot of extensions
- It is powerful than WordPress
- Joomla templates are more professional than WordPress themes.
The Disadvantages of Joomla are as follows:
- It is complicated
- It takes more time to set up your site as compared to WordPress.
- There are a lot of templates but they might not be professional enough.
WIX
Wix is another popular CMS solution. In WIX, there are a lot of themes available that you can choose according to your business. A lot of customization options are available at decent pricing. You can easily hire a freelancer or Wix platform to provide freelancers that built your website.
The Benefits of Wix are:
It provides a wide range of templates that you can customize. The pricing is excellent compared to the features it provides and also for freelancers. The platform is user-friendly and easy to use. It supports almost all devices; users will be able to browse your website even on their smartphones or tablets.
The Cons of Wix are:
It does not support the customization of themes. If you are not tech-savvy then it is difficult for you to use this platform and requires a lot of patience.
Drupal
Drupal is another good CMS option. If your website contains many pages and articles, this is the perfect option for you. You get a high level of security on the drupal based website.
The SEO benefits of Drupal are:
1. You can extend your website with the help of hundreds of themes and templates available on the internet.
2. A good option for businesses that have many pages, components such as blog articles, and products.
3. You can hire a freelancer or use the Drupal platform for hiring a professional web developer to build your site.
The SEO disadvantages of Drupal are:
1. Although it is a good platform, if you are new to this CMS, then you will have to hire an experienced web developer for building and managing your website.
2. It takes more time in the development process as compared to other options available in the market today.
3. The interface of Drupal can be difficult for beginners who aren’t as technical as advanced users.
Conclusion: How To Build Your Website For SEO
When building your site for SEO, there are essential actions that need decisions before launch. Whether it’s SEO web hosting, site design, content strategy, technical seo, and off-page SEO, It’s essential to think about SEO at the forefront.
Do you need help building your site for SEO? It’s never too late to contact us today!
Conclusion
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