Home Business Women - A SEO Agency's Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Tip For a New Website - Part 1

Normally because good advice in the SEO world gets old quickly, there's a huge amount of SEO information available online these days and if you end up following all the advice you'll find you are quickly contradicting yourself. We'll be explaining some of the key concepts behind Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for people who are developing a brand new website, in this guide.

Any of the topics covered here could have multiple articles written just focusing on them alone and often there is more than one 'right' answer, as anyone in the SEO industry could tell you. We want to focus on some of the most simple and far reaching changes and knowledge you need to understand the basics of ethical SEO, instead. We're not going to go to in depth - this is in no way a complete guide for every single strategy and method used in the SEO world. Hopefully this guide will be of some help.

As well, looking too obviously 'optimized' will impact on your users. Simply applying every single SEO tactic to every site you own won't be very effective and will be widely unnecessary. But it's not the only thing you need to consider when creating a website, sEO is a crucial part of making your website stand out online and find targeted traffic. It's important to establish a balance, when we think of making our site optimized for search engines.

And will also mean that what traffic you do get from your SEO work is actually useful and could lead to real sales, using this method will keep you safe from being punished by Google's strict rules on SEO. It means not trying to trick Google (or any search engine) into giving you higher rankings. Not just because you want the traffic, ethical SEO is an SEO method that relies on trying to help Google find your page because it is relevant to searches. This is why the term ethical SEO is an important one.

Thinking about your Domain Name

While others believe that keeping your domain name interesting and memorable works better, some companies believe that using your domain name to display keywords is the best route. It's a question that's open for debate in the SEO world. How much does a domain name actually affect your SEO?

It's also often more practical from a brand awareness viewpoint to have a catchy name and logo rather than calling yourself something like 'bestcheapholidaydealsandoffers' which is both generic and difficult for users to type and remember. A short and memorable domain name normally works best. The latter tends to be true, in most cases.

Avoid TLDs such as.info as these appear cheap to many users and give the impression you're not that bothered about your site. TLDs are incredibly cheap so there's no reason at all not to go for quality. These are the.com or.co.uk ends of your overall address. Top Level Domains (TLDs) are also important.

So try to avoid them if you're looking for international business and stick with a.com when possible, it can turn off users from other countries however. As they give the impression of a service more in touch with consumers from that country, local TLDs such as.co.uk can be useful if you are looking to target one market.

Planning Your Content

You'd be surprised how many times we've seen sites for restaurants that have every dish described in painstaking detail only to neglect to put opening times on the site. There's a fine balance between a site with not enough information or too much. You'll have a much better idea of the site as whole if you step back and look at exactly what pages your site will need to function. Planning your pages in advance rather than jumping straight into creating content is a very good idea.

000 word wall of text describing your entire business, individual pages with a healthy amount of content are much better for SEO than one incredibly long services page with a 1. For each of your services plan out a separate page that can explain them in greater detail. Try to keep your pages relevant but split up your content as much as possible.

Such as a contact page and privacy statement page, be sure to plan for the usual 'standard' pages as well as those relevant to your business.

Decide and Plan Keywords

You should also think about which terms are likely to bring the most relevant traffic. So you want to start thinking about your own content and business and what you would search for if you were looking for your site, keywords are what people search for in Google. Because these are what underpin your whole effort, keywords are by the far the most important element of SEO.

If you run a holiday site you'll want to focus on terms like 'cheap holidays in Spain' rather than a single word like 'holiday' or 'vacation', for example. These are often used as multiple words, it's important to remember that despite the use of the word 'keywords'.

Though many sites (and some search engines) still use them, using meta tags used to be a prime method of SEO but in recent years they have become far less important. Which should give a big list of what they think are good keywords, you can also check what keywords your competitors are using by checking out their HTML source code and looking for their 'meta' tag.

But if you spend some time doing research into your market you should eventually find some sites that have already decided on relevant keywords, if your competition isn't using good SEO you might not find what you're looking for, of course. Above the URL, it's likely that you'll also find some of their more important keywords in the actual title of the page which can be found at the very top of your browser.

Making sure to keep to one keyword per line, write your keywords into the tool. This is an amazingly useful tool for finding out which keywords are the most relevant and is a vital part of finding good keywords of your site. Head over to the Google AdWords Keyword tool, once you've gathered a list of keywords that you might want to use from your own thoughts and from your competitors.

At least for Google, but using its results generally will give you a rough idea of search volume, this tool is free and may not be as accurate as some other tools such as Wordtracker. What you should end up with is the average search 'volume' of each term so you can see which terms are likely to bring the most users. Make sure to set the 'match type' to 'exact' before searching so the results aren't skewed by 'similar' terms.

Remember to save the keyword data as you may well need it in the future. But remember no matter the search volume remaining relevant is absolutely essential at this stage, from this list you should be able to find the right keywords for your site. A new site should focus on keyterms that have less than one million standard results, as a general idea.

Where we will discuss working with keywords in more detail, look out for part 2 of this guide.