rss feed of brown bear media marketing articlesSetting up a website for SEO success

Consider getting to the top of the search engines before you start to build your website

No matter, how, cool, funky, groovy or beautiful a new website looks, if it isn't at the top of the search engines (Google in the UK)nobody will see it and it will be a waste of your money

Search engines simply don't care about colourful graphics and Flash animations. They don't care whether page transitions look great or whether you have invented a cutting edge navigation system.

Search Engines do care about words. Written content is the key to getting to the top of the search engines. The words on the page are what entices the search engines and ultimately your customers.

Therefore it is important to include plenty of keywords and phrases that your potential customers will search on.

How do I find my keywords?

Some companies may try to sell you automated tools, but a great start is simply to sit down with a sheet of paper and write down as many key words as you can that relate to your business

Since my business is websites, my initial list would look something like this:

Now choose between 5 and 8 main keyphrases from your list that cover most areas. Then arrange the others beneath them so you now have between 5 and 8 shorter lists. For each short list, look at the words and see what other related terms you can think of to extend the list.

What do I do with all these keywords?

There is no simple answer to this and many strategies work (although some do not.) Here is a basic template.

Once you have between 5 and 8 lists, each with 10-20 keywords on it, you are in a good position to start creating your site's content. As far as possible each keyphrase should have its own dedicated page on the site.

Now remember to include the keyphrase in the content itself, and also include your keyphrase in the page title and description. The page can be any length, but research has shown that more than 200 words is always good and more than 1000 words is probably wasted effort. If you end up writing 1000 words for a page, that page can probably be split into two each with their own key phrase.

Can't I just keep repeating my keyphrase?

No, you need to write good english sentences. The benefit of this is that as you write you create new key phrases that you don't even know about. For example, although this site is only optimised for about 50 phrases, because of all the variations of phrases used, over the past year google has sent me traffic from closer to 1000 phrases.

In addition, Google looks at pages and if it notices that you have been overstuffing your content with repetitions of keywords that serve no purpose other than to trick search engines, you may find yourself much lower on the results than you expect, or even may find your website has been excluded from google altogether. This blacklisting is a business disaster for many sites that attempt to beat the system through dodgy practices. However, if you play fair you will find that on the whole the search engines will play fair with you.

Repeat this for each keyphrase and magically, you will have created a website of about 100 pages.

Now hand the content over to a web designer who knows about SEO so that when they make the site look great, they don't ruin all your effort to make the new site search engine friendly.

Make sure you get a few links from other related websites as soon as you can. These will help search engines find your content and they will then start to send you visitors.

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