Whether you already have a website or whether you are thinking of creating one, a properly designed website from a search engine’s perspective can save you a lot of work when it comes to getting free targeted visitors. This aspect of search engine optimization (usually called on-site SEO) combined with other methods such as building incoming links, submitting to relevant directories, and creating media attention for your website can create a winning combination that can lead to more traffic and higher profits.
This list will touch upon many of the different things that are needed to build a website that can rank high in search engines. Remember that when it comes to search engine optimization, it will not be a human that is looking at your website but instead, it will be a piece of software called a ‘spider’ that will read through your website and process it through its ranking algorithms. So it is important to keep in mind that you are focusing on creating a website that looks good to the search engines, but you will also want to focus on how it looks to your human visitors as they will be your audience and a potential source of income.
If you are feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of SEO, and you need to choose between focusing on designing your website for humans or for search engines, always focus on designing it for people and not software. In fact, there is a good chance that you could spend little time worrying about SEO and spending all of your energy on creating a good experience for your visitors, and if you did this then you could still have a very successful website. If you create content that is valuable enough, your readers can sometimes literally do your marketing for you.
We will begin by focusing on the on-site aspects of search engine optimization. I am going to assume that you have at least a basic knowledge of HTML for this. You really do not need to know too much, only a very basic understanding will do.
Picking the Keyword(s) That You Want to Rank Highly For
Ideally, you would want to pick a handful of keywords related to your website that you would like to rank highly for before you even begin designing your website. That way you will be able to incorporate those keywords into all of the aspects of your website’s design. When it comes to SEO and optimizing your website for certain terms, it is best to focus on slightly more targeted keywords rather than general keywords.
For example, if you love animals and you wanted to create a website about pets, instead of trying to get a high rank for the general keyword ‘pets’ (where there is a lot of competition) you might try to focus on the keyword ‘how to train your dog’ instead. Once you have an idea of the kinds of keywords that are relevant to your website and are not so competitive that it would be almost impossible to get a high ranking, you can incorporate these keywords into the SEO methods that are described further below.
Incorporate Your Keywords Into Your Title Tags, and Create a Unique Title Tag For Each Page
If you look at the top of your web browser, the text that you see at the very top of the page near the minimize and exit buttons is what is in the title tags of the page. The data that you put into the title tags is very important for a number of reasons, some SEO-related and some just related to making sure your visitor has a good experience on your website. The title of a webpage will usually be the first thing that a person sees, though they will not pay too much attention to it. If the title is clear, simple, and relevant then the viewer might skip right over it, but if it is messy or unrelated (or missing entirely) then it will reflect badly on your website and create a bad user experience.
If you look at the title of the page you are reading right now, you will see an example of one of the best ways to structure your page titles. Notice how I have my unique page title at the beginning, followed by a title of my website (which also happens to contain a relevant keyword), followed by a short catch-phrase. This is a page title that looks good both to my viewers and to the search engines. One rule for naming pages that you will always want to follow is to always include your keywords and/or the unique part of your title first, and then include the name of your website.
This is such an important topic that I have made an entire in-depth article about the different types of search engine listings, but I will give you a quick overview. There are basically three different types of search engine listings: a single listing, a double listing, and a full listing. I give examples of each one in this article, but I will say that if you can manage to get a full listing for a popular keyword then you truly are a search engine ninja. OK, enough about titles, if you want to find out more about getting a full listing then read the full article about listings.
