Keyword Based Design | Basic Website SEO

OK, so with a good SEO friendly structure in mind what are the important things to keep an eye out for as you build pages and content throughout the site.

Relevancy

This is a word you should always have in mind as you build your website and in all your activities to promote it. Relevancy of your pages in relation to what people are looking for is what will make your site found in search engines, relevant forums, directories, social networks, etc. On-site optimisation is mostly about search engines and helping them to index your site and its content correctly and thereby ranking you well for your relevant industry search terms.

Search Engines are all about relevancy and there's a number of ways that websites such as Google, Bing and others use to decide how relevant the web pages of your site are for a search term input by a user. Best rule here is to research what people are looking for BEFORE you start building your website. But also its possible to restructure and write new content for an existing site if you already have one built.

Research

Fortunately you can find out what people are searching for to find services, products or information that you might want to present on your website. One of my favorite tools for researching is Googles Keyword Tool. This allows you to put in general keywords that would form the main theme for your website. For my franchise websites for instance I can type in simply 'franchise' and the Keyword Tool will give me plenty of more focused keywords related to franchise along with helpful information on traffic volume and advertiser competition. I also use this as a rule of thumb for the amount of competition there is likely to be in natural listings also. The higher interest there is in Adwords competition, the likely hood there is that people will be focusing their efforts on ranking well in the natural listings also.

So with relevancy in mind what factors are important on the pages. Although search engines are extremely complex using many different factors to assess relevancy, the principles are mostly common sense. If you were to look in a library for a book... what would be the main indicators that the book is relevant to the subject you are looking for? Certainly the title of the book would be of utmost importance... then you might look for a more relevant chapter which is closer to the exact question or point of interest for you. Finally, you will expect to find highly relevant content within the chapter which will be as close as possible to the subject you were looking to find.

Search engines do alot of the hard work for us by indexing down to individual words on a page so that we don't have to look for the book and chapter first. But when building a website this should also give you a good indicator on how you should approach building your content in a way that it will help search engines to correctly index it, and ultimately potential visitors to find your website pages.

Title Tags
The title tag appears in the header of the page and appears in the title bar of the window (not actually on the web page itself.) Continuing the book analogy, a good construction for titles I have found currently is to use: 'Main keywords of this page | Main subject of website'
Remember to title individual pages to ensure they are all relevant for whatever that page is about and to use good english statements here... not just a string of keywords. The worst case of titling I have seen is every single page of the site being titled just by the website name. This will not help search engines to index the site properly.

Meta Tags
These are actually hidden tags in the header of the page which don't appear visable on the page itself. I hear all the time that these are now irrelevant and whilst I agree their use is much diminished... I have found evidence in my own SEO experience that shows its better to have them there than not. In particular the description and keywords tags are worth putting in, not least that some search engines use this description under your title link in their search engine results.

H Tags
The heading tags, especially H1 and H2 are important to have on your page. Use your keywords for the page here again but make the headings meaningful so they also help to lead visitors to relevant sections for them.

Image ALT tags
The ALT tags is effectively hidden text behind images designed to give a description of the image if the image has not loaded for some reason. It also appears when a visitor hovers their mouse over the image in Internet Explorer. You can use this tag to put in keywords again.

Body Content
The most underrated part of your page! And one I see neglected time and time again. If you have many images on your page... add some text! Even if its 200-300 words. Create good relevant content that is proper english, is unique and relevant to the keywords for that web page and will interest visitors. If you stick to these principles then the search engines spiders will love it too. Remember that search engines spiders read text... not pictures... if your page is full of images and they will find nothing to feed on. Content is food for search engine spiders... give them what they want!

URL
If possible you should be building your site on a domain which has your main keywords in the domain name itself. In the case of my Number Ones site.... you will notice the domain name itself is number-ones.co.uk. This helps to increase relevancy of the domain which is a small factor in ranking. Additionaly, its helpful if the directory structure and filenames also reflect the keyword focus for each individual page. If you already have a website where the domain is already established but doesn't contain keywords... you may do better to stick with what you have, as age of domain also plays a part, and concentrate on producing good filenames for your pages.

Finally, don't spam!
Remember that all SEO is, is effectively making it as easy as possible for search engines to see what your copy is about by providing relevant information in all the right places. Don't stuff in lots of keywords over and over again in the same places... because the search engines will penalise your pages for doing so. Mention them once or twice in each place (except meta keyword field... just once for each keyword in there) but keep it good english so it reads correctly.