An Incomplete Guide to SEO : Planning your site

Planning your site

Why do you want traffic?

Before you go anywhere you need to answer this question. You can break it down into:

* What is your web site about?
* Who will visit it?
* What will they gain?
* What will you gain?

Write the answers on a piece of paper… no really!
Now you have thought some what about who is going to visit your site, we can talk about the how.

Keywords..
Keywords..
Keywords..

Imagine you are a potential visitor to your site. What keywords will you type in to find it? Take a blank piece of paper. Now, on your piece of paper, write down as many words or phrases as you can that you as a potential visitor would search for to find a site like yours in a search engine. Try to write 20 to 30 keywords or phrases on your piece of paper. If you’re having trouble coming up with keywords, ask your partner, friends or family members which keywords they would use to find your site. At this point you should have a list of no less than 20 keywords or phrases at your disposal.

You need this tool below:

http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/

I use it almost on a daily basis. It allows you to find out which keywords people are using in their searches, which as I’m sure you will agree is very valuable information!

Another useful way of doing this is a beta Google tool:

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

Start at the top of your keyword list that you wrote earlier and enter each one into the text box. As you can see, the term suggestion tool returns a list of keywords and how many times they were searched for. As you type each of your keywords into the text box and see the number of searches, write that number down next to your keyword on the page.

You should now have a list of keywords with the number of searches for that keyword from last month on your page. To get the 5 most popular keywords, simply take the 5 keywords with the highest number of searches. Flip your paper over and write them down in order of most to least popular. You should now have your list of 5 popular keywords, maybe something like this:

* Marketing: 1,406
* Advertising: 704
* Web Site Promotion: 442
* Marketing Online: 56
* Branding: 5

These keywords are going to form the basis for all of your site optimization strategies. Keep your keyword list with you as you read through the rest of these articles.

The first way to use these keywords

Engines use your domain name as a factor in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Now there is a lot of debate here, some think that branding for the viewers is more important than having a keyword in the URL (remember the URL of my lead example?). But, if you can combine both, then great! Notice my domain is www.compassdesigns.net. This will get me a little boost if someone searches for “web design”.

Anyway, you can’t easily change your domain after you have made your site, so this is why we are thinking about SEO before we have even started on the site design. If we can use a keyword in the domain, go for it.
Part 2 Summary:

* Ask yourself who will visit your site, why and what will you get out of it.
* Research your keywords.
* Domain name; branding or keyword?