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