There are over 4 billion pages on the Internet. How will people find yours? This is a brief article on designing your website with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind to help searchers find what you are providing.
Chapter One:
There are two ways to search the Internet, using a directory or using a search engine. A directory such as Yahoo lists web sites using categories. Searchers must select the appropriate category and then "drill down" to find your site. Generally, you must submit your own site (and often pay a fee) to be listed in a directory.
Search engines such as Google employ robots (called bots or spiders), which constantly crawl the Internet looking for new information. Once that new information is found, it is evaluated and placed in the giant database used when a user enters a search term.
Your first task in designing your website with SEO in mind, therefore, is to determine what search terms your potential users will use to search for the products, information or service, on your site. What you call your products and what your potential customers call your products may be two different things. You need to optimize for the terms most often searched for by your prospects. These are your keywords. You will structure your website around those keywords.
How do you determine your keywords? The simplest way is to ask potential users how they would search for a site that offers the service or product. Asking friends and neighbors is good, but asking your existing customers is better. Focus group are better yet.
If you have an existing website, check your referrer logs. Click Tracks Web Analytics is a good log file analyzer. What search terms are used to find your site? If you presently sell products, add a line to your shopping cart asking people how they found the site. Another good way to determine what keywords to use is to research your competitors sites. What keywords do they use?
You need to determine every word used to describe your product and the frequency of those words. If your product or service is local, your location is a keyword you should be sure to include on every page. Need a jump-start? Overture, a pay-per-click service offers a free Search Term Suggestion Tool . For a fee, Word tracker will do much the same thing. You can check to see how your keywords rank in various search engines at FreeWebWare.com
Once you have established your keywords, you can begin the design of your website.