Search Engine Optimisation - Preparing your Website Pages

It is vitally important that your web pages are prepared correctly and are search engine friendly prior to submission. The information provided is intrended as a guide only and should be viewed in that light.

Where do I begin, how do I make a website ? How do I sell things ? What Domain Name should I buy ? What is a Host ? So many questions...let's examine the entire process in a rational process.

1. Determine the reason of why you want a website. Is it to sell xyz products to the masses or do you want an information or a brochure website. Whatever the reason, please remember that it is not the number of visitors that count...but the number of quality visitors, sales and repeat visitors that you receive. What would you prefer...a website that receives 10 000 000 unique visitors to your website and makes 10 sales a month. or a website that receives 10 000 unique visitors and makes 1 000 sales per month. You do the maths.

Let's Begin...

1. Determine your Key Phrases - "Why not a Key Word - singular?"

A lot of website owners become obsessed with singular "keywords" that they want their visitors to locate them. The bad news is that is is nigh impossible to achieve high search engine placement or rankings with high volume singular keywords...instead, you seriously need to think about relevant keyphrases that best describes your products and or services.

A method that we apply for finding the best keyphrases is simply to think of how our customers would find our website...what words, groups of words and or key phrases would they use to find our product and hey presto...we have a unique visitor to our website that is looking for our product.

To take this one step further...if your business is geographically located, then your key phrases definitely need to reflect this, as is the case with our example:

You operate a real estate business in Nelson Bay, Port Stephens NSW, then your keyphrase or keyword would not be "buying a home", "house", "home" or "real estate" it is an absolute waste of your time, effort and money. You would be better served by thinking what your customers would type into Google, if they wanted to buy a house or unit in Nelson Bay. It very well may go something like this:

real estate companies in nelson bay
real estate companies in port stephens
buying real estate in nelson bay
selling real estate in port stephens
homes for sale in nelson bay
houses for sale in port stephens nsw
selling a house in nelson bay port stephens
selling a house in port stephens
houses for sale in port stephens for $450 000
houses for sale by auction in nelson bay nsw
units for sale in nelson bay nsw
waterfront units for sale in port stephens
3 bedroom units or apartments for sale in nelson bay port stephens nsw

In the above example, (which is only a partial list):

the term "real estate" returned approximately 301 000 000 results on google...where would you be located ?
however, for the search term "homes for sale in nelson bay" google returned 1 070 000 results...even better..don't you think, however, if we take it one step further and laser target our keywords and or phrases "3 bedroom units or apartments for sale in nelson bay port stephens nsw" google returns only 10 100 results. Your website visitor clicks on your link and you now know that this person falls within the criteria and if serious will contact you for further information.

Ask yourself the question, what better describes your product and or service "real estate" or "3 bedroom units or apartments for sale in nelson bay port stephens nsw" and more importantly, what results will you achieve. In the weeks to come, we will provide you with a range of free SEO Tools that you can use to identify suitable keywords etc.

2. The Title of your Website - "Title Tags - Keep it relevant"

Do you create a Title Page that is great for Search Engines and bad for your website visitors or vica versa, bad for the search engines and great for your visitors.

The Title page is just that..."The Title" and should reflect that page and that page only.

So, what do you place on that page? In our humble opinion, your most important keyphrases for that page should be included in the <TITLE> Tag. Make a list of all of the relevant keyphrases for that page, subject and or product and narrow it down to the most relevant and voila you have a Title Page, that is not only great for the search engines but also for your visitors.

There has been some debate over the length of the title tag and what is considered acceptable to search engines, before they condem the page as a spam page. Some people claim 10 words is adequate, whereby others claim between 15 - 25 words are acceptable. Try different variations on different pages and monitor what works and what doesn't.

3. Meta Tags - "Do I Don't I"

As with anything to do with the internet, websites and or web pages, there is a lot of conjecture and one of the biggest debates currently centres around the use of meta tags. Our belief is that Meta Tags are important and necessary and have always been so. The major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN may not appear to be paying the attention to them as they have in the past, however that is the beauty of these search engines...what they may not consider important today, they may tomorrow and if you have not included correct Meta Tags, because of other people's opinion, you will certainly miss out when they do place importance onto them.

Please remember that there are more than 1 search engine and what's to say that one of these non-descript seacrh engines can come from nowhere and dominate the search engines as Google achieved a number of years ago.

Apart from all of this, Meta Tags helps you to identify what your page is really about and may assist you in writing relevant descriptions and ultimately better content and relevant laser focused content is what we should be aiming for.

The META NAME Description should basically contain a short precise description of the particular web page you are working on. If you take for example our Real Estate Business located in Nelson Bay the Meta Name Description may go something like this:

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Real Estate Office located in Nelson Bay, Port Stephens NSW - Buying and Selling of quality Houses, Homes and Holiday Units">

Please Note: Do not attempt to fool the search engines by stuffing keywords into the description. A general rule of thumb is to keep the description between 150 and 250 characters and ensure that between both the Title Page and the Description that they work together to best descibe your webpage.

Now we come to the Meta Keywords Section....Does this mean that we can stuff 30 000 keywords into this spot and repeat the same words dozens of time...Wrong...Bookmark this page and come back to read the answer or alternatively please complete this form and get the answer today.