Site Design: Search Engine Optimization fuels your Website Development

After you have clear objectives for your website and understand who your site is being designed for, keywords and search engine optimization (SEO) need to be considered.

This article looks at SEO web development. Search engines are a powerful tool for bringing visitors to your site. So if visitors matter to you, SEO web development matters as well.

It assumes you have already decided on the objectives of your website, who you want it to address, and the actions you want to encourage. It also makes some assumptions about Wordpress (the platform we use), but you can easily adapt these ideas if you aren’t using Wordpress.

Keyword research and content themes

Keyword research is a fast and effective market research tool that helps you understand what people are thinking. Keyword research lets you decide those areas of interest that will lead visitors to your site and help you get their attention in the right frame of mind.

When researching keywords, you should identify several themes for your website. Each theme should correspond to an important keyword family. Using good keywords means you align your website with the way the world is (not how you might guess it is).

To explain the concepts of Themes and Keywords in this article I will use the example of Hope Valley Wines.

Here are some predicted daily search volumes for some keywords relevant to Hope Valley Wines (this list is slimmed right down to illustrate a point - normally you research many more keywords than this):

• wine 2,643
• wines 708
• red wine 424
• shiraz 173
• riesling 167
• cellar door 70
• shiraz wine 33
• riesling wine 32
• best shiraz 11
• hope valley 10

After analysing your keywords, you decide that your website will focus on four themes:

• Hope Valley - people interested in Hope Valley could well be interested in your wines (a geographic theme). Even though low in search volume, Hope Valley searches are highly relevant to you. And you simply can’t write about a winery without including geographic factors, so you may as well put the content to work.
• Shiraz - ’shiraz’ is far less popular than ‘wine’. Indeed ‘wine’ is too popular - too generic, and a lot of competitors (who have a lot more wine than you) will be competing furiously on this mega keyword. Hope Valley Shiraz is of a particularly high standard. You know a lot about Shiraz, and have something to offer people interested in it. The family of keywords associated with Shiraz include ‘best shiraz’ which is very popular in its own right, but you expect to see a healthy long tail of niche phrases in this keyword family. Focussing more precisely on the lower volume (but still popular) Shiraz should yield better results than trying to compete on a mega keyword like ‘wine’.
• Riesling - like Shiraz, your Riesling is exceptional. And for similar reasons, Riesling is a good theme for your website.
• Cellar Door - the objective of your website is to encourage sales at your online Cellar Door. As a popular keyword in its own right it is a logical choice as a theme for your website - it will be part of your website, so why not put it to work with the search engines in its own right.

Keywords or key phrases?

Most searches involve four words (and when we refer to a keyword, we are referring to a word OR phrase). By choosing a content theme based on a strong keyword, you will be investing in the family of keywords that surround it. So in choosing a theme based on ’shiraz’, you will be mostly be attracting visits based on the keyword family, such as ‘best shiraz’, ‘fine shiraz’, ‘what is a good shiraz’, ’shiraz from hope valley’ and so on.

This is important to remember if you are operating a small business. In many cases identifying ’shiraz’ as a popular keyword also identifies that there will be a family of niche keywords surrounding it. A bit like an iceberg, ’shiraz’ sticks out above the water, but a far greater set of niche keywords lie beneath. A content rich theme in a website inevitably attracts more visitors from the niche keywords than the core keyword. So in this case even if you never get to page one of search results on ’shiraz’ (or ‘best shiraz’ even), if the keyword family is strong you may still attract relevant visits in worthwhile quantities.

If you are a mega business, then you have the funds (and reasons) to invest in mega keywords. But smaller businesses should invest in more precisely targetted keyword familiies that will deliver niche keyword results.

Optimizing your site around themes

The major themes for your website have to make sense for visitors and search engines. SEO web development means you optimize your content for search engines as well as your visitors.

When optimizing your site for your keywords (associated with your themes), you need to make decisions that balance a lot of factors. Here are the factors that I put most importance on:

• Clarity: people find it easier to understand your message when it is well structured and clear. Search engines also find structure and clarity beneficial. Search engines are constantly comparing one web page against another web page. So for those themes you want to optimize for search engines, you need to make sure there is clarity about the one page that is most important for a particular term.
• Page Rank: by structuring your site around themes, you can optimize the way that Page Rank flows within your site. Better structure should mean the most important pages of your website are also seen as the most important pages by Google.
• External Links: when you structure your site properly, you have a clear focus to the pages you want to try and develop back links for (and the keywords you would like to see included in anchor text)
• Page Optimization: themes help you make decisions on how to optimize your web pages.

SEO Web Development

Enough of the concepts, lets look at how to structure your website!

This diagram sketches out the Hope Valley Wines website structure from an SEO web development perspective. It is not the final website structure. It focuses on the content that needs to be understandable by both human visitors and search engines. For just about every business website, this is the most critical information you will be presenting.

A small note: a reference to a Page means either a Wordpress Page or Post - they work in essentially the same way for search engines.

The diagram shows a number of Theme Pages. A Theme Page is the main page for a theme (and its keyword family) on your website. The themes for Hope Valley wines are: Shiraz, Riesling, Cellar Door and Hope Valley. We can see a Theme Page for each of them.

The URL for each Theme Page should include the keyword. Each Theme Page should link back to the home page if you want to it to help focus Page Rank in your website.

The Domain Theme Page is a Theme Page like the others, but it has one very important difference. Its keyword is in the domain name itself, so you can use the site home page as the Theme Page (hopevalleywines.com/ is the theme page for Hope Valley). A keyword in the domain name for a website is a big clue for the search engines that the site is primarily about that keyword, and will help you rank on that keyword.

If your website domain doesn’t include one of your primary keywords, consider whether it is worth changing. This is a card that can only be played once for each site, so play it wisely. There are many constraints. Shorter domains are better than longer (and less available). Domains tell a story in their own right, so hopevalleywines.com is viable where hopevalleyshiraz just isn’t. Nevertheless, consider your important keywords and consider your domain, and use a keyword if you can.

While your Theme Pages are the apex of each theme, you will have a lot more content related to that theme in other Content Pages. A Content Page could be a short blog post or a detailed article. For example, your blog post with the title ‘2008: Our Best Shiraz Ever?’ is a Content Page related to the Shiraz theme.

Each content page should link back to the Theme Page it relates to. This will help focus the Page Rank within your site, as well as being useful to visitors.

Note that a Content Page may itself be optimized for a keyword. For example, the ‘2008: Our Best Shiraz Ever?’ article may be optimized for ‘best shiraz’.

Your website will also contain other General or Administration Pages that are unrelated to a content theme you want to rank with search engines on. For example, Contact Us, About, Terms and Conditions. These pages should link back to your Home page, but otherwise from a search engine perspective are not important.

Internal Links (shown as solid arrows) are links to a page in your web site from within your website. External Links (or Back Links, shown as dashed arrows) link to a page in your web site from an external web site.

Search engines notice the words used in the anchor text for links (the anchor text are the words highlighted - usually in blue - for a visitor to click on). If the link comes from an image (such as a button), the search engines pay attention to the words used in the Alt text for the image. If your keywords naturally appear in the anchor text or Alt text for a link, that should improve your search rankings. Note I use the word ‘naturally’. If regimented armies of links appear for sites with identical (highly optimized) anchor text, search engines get suspicious. Nobody gets natural links with exactly the same anchor text over and over again.

Optimizing Your Pages for Keywords

When you understand the keyword focus for a page, you can take certain steps to help optimize it. Don’t do anything that makes the page look strange or read poorly for a visitor. But if your website has good themes and you think about it, it isn’t too hard to write content that includes keywords in a natural way.

Here are the things to do to optimize pages:

• Visitors: Write content for your visitors and search engines. It has to read well for visitors first and foremost.
• Title: Include the keyword in the the Title (at or towards the beginning is best). By default with Wordpress your Title is the same as your Page Title. With the All In One SEO Pack plugin installed, you can use the Title field to set this. The Title appears at the top of the browser page, and is possibly the single most important factor used by search engines to figure out what your page is about.
• Page URL: Include the keyword in the Page URL. Using permalinks with Wordpress, set the Page Slug to control the page URL. Remove stop words (short words such as ‘the’ or ‘at’).
• Page Title: Include the keyword in the Page Title (at or towards the beginning is best). This is the title that will appear at the top of the actual page content, embedded in an H1 tag.
• Content: Include the keyword in a natural way in the page content. Structure your page content using H2, H3 and H4 tags, and where approrpriate use your keyword in those heading tags. If the keyword has a plural form, it helps to include these here.
• Images: If you include images that are related to the keyword, include the keyword in the Alt tag.
• Description: Include a unique Description for each page (set using the All in One SEO Pack Description field). This field will not influence search engine rankings as such, but since it is often displayed on the search engine result page as the text snippet (along with the Title), it can play a big role in converting a potential visitor ifrom reading your listing to clicking through to your page.

In your Dashboard, Settings, use the configuration panel for All In One SEO Pack to make sure that the Page Title for posts and pages only includes the page title (not the title of your site). Also use this panel to set the Title of your home page.

Summary

By including keywords and content themes early on in your planning, you can speed through your SEO web development phase.