Professional Website Design SEO Tips: Part 1 of 20 - Keywords

Welcome to Part 1 of 20 Professional Website Design SEO Tips.

Part one: Keywords

Keyword Selection
Creating a list of keywords is easy, but you need to make sure what you think are relevant keywords will be what your potential clients will be searching for. Put yourself in your client’s shoes; How would you find a business like your own, what would you search for?
There are a few simple guidelines to follow when selecting your keywords;

• Choose as many as you can find.
• Have a look at your competitors
• Only choose keywords that are relevant to your site

Once you have your list, start testing. Search for each keyword on Google to check out the competition, and then start grouping them to create phrases and do the same.

Keyword Ranking
Once you have established a good list of keywords, start ranking them by relevance to the pages content. Robots are less likely to rank your for keywords that are not relevant to the rest of the page. Your homepage’s first paragraph is the ideal place to start.

Keyword Placement
The placement of keywords along with the density is where some websites slip up. The first paragraph of the page along with the page title is what will show up in search engines, ensuring your highest ranked keywords are present here is an excellent place to start. Proper use of <h1>, <h2>, <h3> and <p> tags will help search engines prioritise your content by finding out headings of content and sub titles.

Keyword Density
The volume of relevant keywords on your site is paramount to your placement. Using the right phrases within context on your site you will encourage valuable visitors as well as pleasing search engine robots

Over doing it
The main cause of being dropped by search engines or losing your page rank is over doing the keywords. Yes density is good, but for your customers the text has to be readable, with increased robot technology, search bots can now penalise you for over doing the keywords placement.
Use statistics tracking to find out when you’ve been visited by search robots, and check to see if the changes you have made have affected your ranking for the keywords you have optimised.

End of Part One
Part 2 will be Tips on: Backlinking

Bye for now!
Dan

Whats required to make you business website design legal

This information applies to all registered UK companies with websites.

Did you know that in the UK companies must include certain regulatory information on their websites and in their e-mail footers from 1^st January 2007 or they will breach the Companies Act in the UK and risk a fine.

Websites should provide the following minimum information. This must be readily, easily and permanently accessible:

• The name of the service provider must be given somewhere easily accessible on the site. This might differ from the trading name and any such difference should be explained.
• The e-mail address of the service provider must be given.
• The geographic address of the service provider must be given. A PO Box is unlikely to suffice as a geographic address; but a registered office address would. If the business is a company, the registered office address must be included.
• If a company, the company’s registration number and the place of registration should be stated (e.g. XXXX Enterprises Limited is a company registered in England and Wales with company number XXXXXXX).
• If the business is a member of a trade or professional association, membership details, including any registration number, should be provided.
• If the business is VAT registered, the registration number should be stated – even if the website is not being used for e-commerce transactions.
• Prices on the website must be clear and unambiguous. Also, state whether prices are inclusive of VAT and delivery costs.
• Finally don’t forget the Distance Selling Regulations which contain other information requirements for on-line businesses that sell to consumers.

Disability Discrimination Act

The relevant quotes from the DDA Code of Practice are:

• “The Disability Discrimination Act makes it unlawful for a service provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide any service which it provides to members of the public”.
• “From 1^st October 1999 a service provider has to take reasonable steps to change a practice which makes it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to make use of its services”.
• “For people with visual impairments, the range of auxiliary aids or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that services are accessible might include… accessible websites”.
• “For people with hearing disabilities, the range of auxiliary aids or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that services are accessible might include…. accessible websites”.