It is a common notion that the only people who can build a profitable and successful website are those who have a great appreciation of search engine optimization (or SEO) techniques. In fact, many website designers are conditioned to look for SEO as an afterthought; just after a website is designed and is published. Others spend it first, then wonder later whether or not people are ever going to find their websites. So who wins the SEO contest?
Both sides can have a point. On the one hand, many successful web sites may well have been designed strictly from a marketing perspective. They were focused on improving visibility of the web site in the search engine results. Whilst keyword placement may have been important, it is the look and feel of the site that makes it user-friendly and search engine-friendly at the same time. Building a user-friendly design is a sure-fire way to improve the odds that people will find the site, and subsequently, its products and services.
Let’s break this down even further to some basic steps you can take, to make sure your website is as friendly to the search engines as it is to your readers. Learning and understanding how these algorithms work is a lengthy and involved process. In fact, a lot of SEO operations are based on “black-hat” (or illegal) techniques that are not conducive to real quality in the long term. This is something you would do well to avoid at your peril.
The very first thing you should do is make a list of keywords you would like people to use in search engines. Some will be obvious, for example “USER devotion” and “door-to-door business”. You want your targeted keywords to be in your content. There is a wide range of keyword-finder tools that you can use, such as Wordtracker (for free), Google AdWords: Keyword Tool (for free), Be Aware (for a monthly fee). I will recommend Wordtracker for its ease of use and extensive keyword list. Not to mention the list you have at the beginning of this article.
Once you have your keywords in place, you can move on to the design elements of your site. It is important that you choose one or more HTML elements for each keyword, to make sure they appear in the appropriate places in the HTML code, if they are not already there. The format I suggest is to have between 8 and 11 keywords in your title, with 6 (the most important) listed at the start of the title. If you are designing your own site, I would also recommend you to use the bold or italics fonts to try and grab the attention of your audience.
Another important factor is the alt tags on your images. Ideally, you should insert the main keyword in the alt tag, instead of doing something like “night-ages”. This can make it even harder for your site to be indexed.
The next important thing you need to consider is that while you are designing your site, you must make sure that it is as accessible as it can be by as wide a range of computer screens available, it also needs to be easily viewable for those with disabilities. As well as using the appropriate web accessibility tools, it is a good idea to test your site on a few of the more popular screen reading software available. If and when your site is properly optimised for the screen reading software, your site will undoubtedly be a lot easier for your readers to use and will avoid a common problem with other websites, i.e. the difficulty many people have when reading on computers set to a lower screen resolution.
Once your site is in place, you should do as much as you can to get your message across, and of course Google will rank your site more highly if you follow the guidelines and protocol of their webmaster guidelines.
Note that, in order to get your site to get a high Google rank, you DO need to work at making your site search engine friendly. Although SEO does not guarantee your success, it certainly increases the odds that your site will be found by the large number of internet users who use the search engines every month.
