Whenever a website is built, the planning stage should take into account two important factors, design and content. Starting with design, this is more important for the user of the site. This is the visual presentation of the website, not how it has been built from a coding point of view and needs to be built to address the needs of the target audience. What we are interested in this case however is how a search engine sees your site and so we need to focus on the content of the website.

Before we start to build the website we need to have a clear picture of what people are typing into the search engines to find your website. Time spent on this task is time well spent. There are many places online that can give you this information, but it is what you do with the resulting information that is important. The figures that are produced by these online keyword suggestion tools are often quite dubious. Mainly due to the fact that people are often checking their own search engine position very regularly in the search engines. What we can determine though, is the popularity compared with each other of these keyword phrases which will give us a good list with which to work with. At this point we have to reasonable. If the most popular keyword suggestion you have chosen has tens of thousands of searches a day it may be too difficult to gain any worthwhile search engine position for it. We need to target keyword phrases that we know are achievable but will bring in traffic. Again there are online tools for this, a popular one being a KEI analysis.

Once we have our list and this keyword suggestion list is put in order of popularity, we build a sitemap based on which keyword phrases we will use for each page of our website. The home page being the most popular keyword we would anticipate targeting and subsequent pages being the less popular keywords. There are a few main areas that we need to see these keyword phrases, or variation of them.

The title

The title of the page is what appears in the Internet browser in the top left above the forward and back buttons. This is prime real estate for keywords and what will appear in the search engine listings as the clickable title.

Make sure that the meta description of the webpage is enticing for someone to click on your link. This only needs to be one or two short sentences so make sure that it helps drive people into your web page.

Headings

These are ordered as you go down the page. Heading one being the primary heading, heading two the secondary heading and so on. Whilst the title of the page should match what your keyword phrase is, often a heading can look confusing based on what people search as it is often unordered. Make the heading very relevant to your keyword phrase, ideally consisting of the wording which makes up the keyword phrase you have chosen for that page.

Links

The text within a link is a guide to the search engine what the linked page is about. Search engines have a few problems making sense of what images or flash content are so text is best. Using CSS can aide in the presentation of links. It is this text in the link, known as the anchor text which helps the search engine finding relevant content. The links do not have to be just in the menu, in-content links are links within the text itself which take the user to a page which should be relevant to the topic of that page.

Paragraphs

This is the meat on the bones of the webpage and a place where you can use your less popular keyword phrases within the text. Make use of simple techniques such as highlighting with emphasis certain keywords within your paragraphs.

Images

Using the alt tag is pretty much essential to keep your webpage accessible and here you can explain what the image is about whilst also using the keyword phrases for this in the explanation.

Beware

This is just a guide on where to position words on your website. If the resulting page makes no sense, and has no interest to a user then it is a wasted exercise. But, by concentrating on using the words that people are actually typing into the search engines to find your kind of service or products, you will have a lot better chance of achieving increased traffic from the search engines.