SEO Web Site Development

The aim of every website is to get to number one in the search engines.

The way to do that is with SEO (search engine optimization). But you need to do it right.

Get your SEO wrong and your efforts will all have been in vain. Get it right and you'll be rewarded with all the traffic you can ever handle.

First Things First

You'll need the following before you start:

• A business name. If you haven't got one yet, try this business name brainstormer


• A domain name. The best place to buy these is at Namecheap.


• Reliable website hosting

Next, decide the words you want to target for your website.

You won't be able to be in the number one position for every possible combination of words that relate to your website. That's simply not possible.

Instead, your aim is to feature high for a good number of your chosen keywords.

You're looking for words that people actually search for - not industry jargon unless your whole industry uses it.

The best way to find out what people are searching for is to use a keyword research tool. This will tell you how many people are searching for any given keyword and how much competition you're facing. As a general rule, the less words that are searched for the more competition. So "weight loss" will have much more competition than "low carb diet weight loss".

There are two top quality tools that offer a great way to research keyword popularity:

• Wordtracker which is a subscription service, although there is also a limited free trial. This is the service I personally use.


• Keyword Elite. This comes in especially useful if you want to generate lots of keywords for services like Google AdWords. Or if you don't like paying the recurring fees that Wordtracker charges - this is a one-off payment instead.

You're now almost ready to start the process of SEO Web Site Development.

Your next decision is what type of web site do you want to develop?

Probably the easiest way to set up your website is by using a blog such as Wordpress. This is a one click install with most modern hosts.

Trouble is that the default installation of Wordpress isn't very search engine friendly. There's a short tutorial on performing SEO on Wordpress blog below but here is a much fuller tutorial.

The other alternative is to build your own website. There are lots of software programs out there and much will depend on whether you are developing the site yourself or using a website developer.

If this is your first time developing a website, then I'd suggest using a program such as Xsite Pro which takes care of a lot of the infrastructure of your site and has a built in system to check that your SEO is up to scratch.

Whatever you use to develop your web site, make sure the following SEO basics are followed:

• Every page needs a descriptive title - this will be displayed in the search engines once you get your site indexed, so make it catchy and relevant to your content.


• Make sure you include a meta description tag. Describe the page in this so that the search engines are encouraged to use your description rather than make up one of their own.


• Include a tag that says
  <meta name="robots" content="noodp">
  so that the search engines don't use the description from the Open Directory if you're lucky enough to get listed there.


• Make sure you have a relevant heading tag with your relevant keywords in it.


• Include relevant paragraphs of text on your page. This sounds basic but search engines can't "see" images or videos like humans. They need text to work out what the page is about. Don't stuff your page full of keywords - write naturally and use synonyms (similar words) to make your page read as naturally as possible.