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…)

Your web page title, regularly known as your page Title Tag, is a particularly significant factor to think about when enhancing your website to attain high Google rankings. Get your Page Title Tags right and it is actually going to help get that initial Page Google ranking.

What internet site designers generally do is just put your company name in the Web page title tags.

That is fine if you're just improving your website for your company name, but let us accept it, most people do not know what your company name is, so by having just your company name in your website page title it isn't actually doing you much good.

What you wish to do is to include your keywords in your pages titles, because that is what the general public will be hunting for.

The Title Text generally appears in the Blue Bar at the pinnacle of every internet page.

Putting your Keywords in your Page Title is of greatest significance.

say you are in a Library hunting for a book on online marketing, you will be faced with hundreds of books on internet marketing, what do you do next?

You would possibly look at the titles printed on the pricks of the books till you see the one that looks applicable to what you are searching for, you then look within the book to determine if it matches exactly what you want.

This is similar to how Google works. First of all someone searches a keyword on Google e.g. Balls. Google examines all the web pages in its database that have the words 'Golf Balls' in the Page Titles ( or as in our analogy – spines ). If the net pages don't have the words Golf Balls in the Page Titles then it might be a significant issue. You must make it as straightforward as feasible for Google to find your pages.

there are more factors Google uses, but you wish to make your website as obvious as possible to Google when anyone is hunting for what you offer.

So, by putting your keywords in the Page Title the site stands an excellent chance of getting listed when that term is searched.

A very simple explenation of the title tag and it's importence to on page SEO

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?Strategy-to-Boost-Your-SEO&id=3149725

Keyword Search Software is the mainstay of every great marketing campaign. Serious entrepreneurs use this type of program to identify and create a plan that will turn a profit. The Internet is a vast area containing many small subsections called micro niches that are specific enough in their content to be targeted by a combination of words. This is the main advantage of this type of application — being able to find these phrases and knowing whether it is advantageous to create a plan of action.

This is the bases of a good SEO plan keyword research is vital to your success. Choosing the wrong word can negate any effort you put into your SEO

The goal of every online marketer is to find a small section of that vast sea of information known as the Internet and make money. This can be enhance greatly through the use of a Keyword Search Software program. It solves the dual problem of what area to target and can it make money. These are the two hardest questions that most beginners have to answer when formulating a start up business. By removing these obstacles, a campaign has a much greater chance of success than before.

Consider any specific segment of the population at large. They are typically seeking out information on the vast conglomeration known as the World Wide Web. All of these people are usually trying to solve some sort of problem in their lives, whether is be weight loss or the ability to swing a five iron. The spots where they are looking are called niches and the more specific areas are called micro niches. This is where keyword search software comes in handy — finding these small targets and knowing whether consumers have a need for a product or information program.

A great application will contain a minimum of the following features:

* Commercial intent – how likely a person is to buy

* Monthly search volume for a phrase

* Pay per click costs

* Strength of competition

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