Webmojo Web Design and SEO

All websites want to be listed at the top of the best known search engines. Website developers and business owners alike understand that an effective site involves more than simply spending time and money on a good design. The overall goal is to get visitors to the website and then make it 'sticky', using good, solid content to keep them there. In this context, design is only used as a tool to make the content visually appealing to the target audience.

Boosting a company's web presence is a crucial aspect of any good marketing campaign, and search engine optimization (SEO) is how successful websites get visitors, and keep them. Search engine optimization is the art of striking a balance between the words and phrases visitors use in search engines when looking for information, with website content that is written to appeal to site visitors.

The first step in creating effective SEO copy is to determine what keywords or terms site visitors are using to find your website and/or your competition. By using tools such as Hitwise or the less expensive alternative, WordTracker, you can find common terms and phrases your content should be built around.

The top search engines, Google and Yahoo, also have their own useful tools for determining which keywords are being searched on, and how much traffic you can expect to get for certain keywords and phrases. It's often best to be very specific when selecting your search terms too, choosing multiple word keyphrases instead of single words. For example, 'SEO copywriting' instead of just 'copywriting'.

Once your keywords and/or keyphrases have been identified, the next step is to build effective copy around those terms. Building naturally flowing content around specific terms and phrases may take some getting use to, especially if the phrases are a bit awkward. Despite these limitations, try and produce quality sentences. The general rule of thumb is to always write the content that appeals to and caters to your site visitors, even if it's not perfect for the engines.

Discovering which keywords your site visitors are looking for is the first step in writing SEO copy. Writing copy that motivates and interests your readers, while keeping focused on the purpose of the website (based on these terms) is next. Writing effective SEO copy takes time and practice, but the end result is a major boost in both your site's appeal to visitors and its overall search engine rank.

I've just had a meeting with a potential client regarding their website. They launched into a list of things they wanted including, videos, animations, 360 degree images etc. What they hadn't thought about was the whole purpose of the site. Who is was for, what it was for, who the stakeholders were and what success looks like.

Building a website is a time consuming and costly exercise. There are many component parts to a website, the look and feel being only one of them. The problem is many people only focus on the pretty pictures and Flash animations, only stopping to think about SEO once the site's live. This is a recipe for disaster.

SEO starts before a single line of HTML is written or a single pixel has been added to an Illustrator canvas. SEO can be used to help you figure out some of the BIG questions you should be asking when developing a website.

SEO will help you better understand your market, SEO will ensure you understand what your potential market is searching for, SEO will help you understand the competition you are up against. In extreme cases SEO may even help you decide if your proposed enterprise is worth pursuing at all!

Leaving SEO until after your website is live is a big mistake and one that will ultimately cost you dearly. You will be left scrambling around desperately wondering why your site isn't attracting customers and why Google and the other search engines are not listing your site when people search for what you offer.

Get SEO sorted from the get go and reap the benefits.

David A Robinson

Improved search positioning means greater exposure to targeted traffic, but few E-Biz owners really understand how to run an effective search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. According to Andy Jenkins, founder of online business forum http://StomperNet.com, “Your web site ranking is determined, in large part, by the quality of your content – it must be both compelling to your visitors and consumable to the search engine spiders.”

A Matter of Substance

Jenkins reveals two key practices that can help you cooperate with the search engines and give them the kind of useful information they’re after:

Avoid Duplicate Content

When pages living on separate domains are extremely similar, the engines will classify them as “duplicate content” and rank them very poorly. One page will go in their normal index; the other will be relegated to their supplemental index, where none its value is manifested. This often poses a problem for eCommerce stores selling numerous similar items.

Every page of your web site probably has some design elements that are the same, like your navigation bar, header and footer, and any special messages, like “In Stock” or “Money Back Guarantee”. To keep from ending up in the supplemental index, you should strive to have at least more original content in your product descriptions than exists in the permanent template layout of your pages. In other words, if you have two hundred fifty words of repeating content on each page, you should also have at least two hundred fifty-one words per page of new and different content.

If writing interesting, witty descriptions of your products seems difficult, it may help to try manifesting your copy in some form of ownership. For instance, if you’re selling a box of tortellini, talk about how simple it is to cook, how good it tastes with pesto sauce, how wonderful it is to enjoy with your family around the dinner table. You’re simultaneously engaging your customers, sharing the benefits of using your product, and avoiding the mire of the supplemental index.

Implement Latent Semantic Indexing

Search engine algorithms have grown increasingly complex over time. Optimizing your copy is no longer a matter of stuffing it with keywords: “This pasta site is the best pasta site for the pasta lover’s pasta needs.” Now, in fact, repeating a keyword or phrase too often will raise red flags, and may even cause your site to drop in the rankings.

The engines have learned to recognize the relationships between many words. So to rank well for a keyword, you need to talk about things that relate to it, also know as “latent semantic indexing”. For example, if you’re trying to rank for the keyword “pasta”, you might talk about carbs, marinara sauce, fusilli, linguini, and so forth. It’s okay to sprinkle “pasta” throughout your copy, but concentrate on using latently related words. You’re generating copy that’s interesting to the users reading it, and palatable to the engines ranking it.

(Tip: To discover keywords latently related to your keywords, perform a Google search with a tilde in front of the keyword – like “~pasta”. You’ll bring back results containing latently related words: noodles, recipes, Italian, etc.)

While the search engines regularly revise their algorithms, the basic principles of SEO remain the same. You don’t need to play games or try to trick the engines to show up in their results. Advises Jenkins, “The engines want to give users the information they’re seeking. So if you create a user-friendly site with good, valuable content, you’re going to do well – period.”

The fact that having a website is good for your business may sound like a cliché given the number of times you may have heard it already. But what you may not know yet is that just having a website is not a guarantee for success. With so many websites on the internet, your business will only do well if people actually find your site. This is why you need to do search engine optimization or SEO. This helps your site to come up, on or near the top of search results and so people visit it more frequently. And with some good WordPress plug-ins for SEO, you work can become that much easier. More…