Website Redesign How to Step 5: Building a SEO Strategy

By now, pretty much everyone who has a website knows that search engine optimization (SEO) is important. Search engines account for the majority of website traffic and using SEO properly can help you ensure a solid return on your website efforts. There are a lot of factors involved in creating a SEO strategy that can help your new website rank higher in search results.

So—where do you start?

Target your keywords.

The first step to any successful SEO strategy is to define the keywords which you want your website to rank for in search engines. Try to pick words based on relevance, traffic volume and achievability.  There are some great free tools to help you pick your keywords, we suggest you try Free Wordtracker, and Google Adwords because they are feature-rich and not to complicated for beginners. If you want to learn more about targeting keywords take a look at one of our webinars on SEO.

Okay, so now you’ve chosen your keywords, what are the next essential elements to your SEO?

• Title Tags. Title tags tell search engines what your webpage is about. It is important that your title tags are descriptive of your webpage, use your keywords and follow a consistent format.
• Headings. A heading is an H1, H2, or H3 tag which is placed within your website’s HTML and helps search engines: denote page structure, define which information on the page is most important, define what is in the content of each section on a page, and builds relevance for your keywords.

• Meta Descriptions. Meta descriptions set the blurb in the search engine results and act as a kind of “teaser” for your visitors. It’s best to keep the description to 155-160 characters and to put your keyword in and especially to make sure that it accurately describes the content of your page.

• Alt Tags. An alt tag tells a search engine what your pictures are about. This is helpful for SEO, and is important for the accessibility of your site. For your visitors with a disability, or those that use screen readers, alt tags are an essential way for them to interact with the content on your page. 
• Keyword Density. Keyword density is the number of times a keyword occurs on the a webpage in proportion with the other words on the page. This is an important step in your SEO strategy because it helps you build relevance around your keywords, it re-affirms that what you say in your headings and title tags is actually what your page content is about. In general, it's best to keep your keyword to about 2-7% of any given page’s content.

• Anchor text. Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink and it tells search engines what the next page is about. This is an important way to improve your clickthrough rates (informing a user about what’s on the next page encourages confidence for them to click).

Posted by Amberlie Denny at June 2, 2010 10:00 AM

Comments

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The more important concept to keep in mind is that you must choose keywords that best relate to the content present on a web page and on a website; Keyword selection is fundamental to success when it comes to executing a paid search. Keywords and phrases strategically placed and crafted into the website can significantly boost your ratings in search engine results.

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Before you redesign your website, you must put the SEO Strategy in place in order to identify the gap and opportunities from the previous website performance, such as user behavior, traffic, keywords, content that helps you get some ideas to develop the new site structure to match with target audience.