Search Engine Optimization Process and Design Tips

While crafting compelling and usable web copy helps improve the end-user experience, its not enough if you want to optimize your website for a search engine. The following process and design tips should help improve your search engine ranking in order to drive the 'right' kind of traffic to your website.

Know the basics... Search engines look for clues to identify the subject of your site and then they compare you to other websites that fit into a similar category. Organic SEO requires that you review the content of your site and identify key phrases could drive traffic. A key factor that impacts your ranking is your competition. Consider how you could position yourself to take advantage of popular terms that your competition may not be using. Once you've identified the right keywords, build them into your design.

Process - the following steps will help you work through the process:

1. Identify keywords - scan your copy and pull out 3 or 4 keywords on each page that represents the subject matter.
2. Confirm with SME's - check with subject matter experts in your organization to confirm that those keywords are accurate and reflect the terminology used by your audience. Don’t be fooled and fall prey to your own corporate jargon that nobody else uses or understands.
3. Check the Competition- consider running a few test searches on Google to see what competition you may have for those terms. If you have a Google or Overture advertising account, try running a few tests to see how much demand there is for your keywords.
4. Web Analytics - Check your search logs to see what phrases people are using when they search for content on your site.

If you can find a keyword that is in high demand from a search perspective, but has relatively few competing sites optimized for that keyword, then have found an angle to position your website that will help you rank higher than your competition and drive more traffic to you website.

Design - once you've identified the keywords, consider the following design tips to optimize your ranking:

1. Page titles - incorporate keywords into your page titles
2. Bolding - bolding keywords in the copy is not only helpful for users as they scan your page but search engines recognize this as an indicator of what the page is all about
3. Navigation - build keywords into navigation, both internal body copy links and global navigation links should use the trigger words that people search with
4. Page URL - build keywords into the page URL
5. Homepage - include trigger words on your homepage
6. Robots - make sure the search engine robots can crawl your website to find static and dynamic content
7. Cross-promotion - search engines use the links that refer traffic to your site as an indicator of what content you have that is important and adjust your ranking.
8. Meta-info - while adding meta-info into a page (keywords and descriptions) doesn’t have an affect on all search engines, it’s still a good practice for the pages that are really important for you. Even if it doesn’t affect the ranking, some search engines still use the description data to display when they return your site as a result and so you are doing your users a favor by adding a clear and concise page description.

Comments

[Farid]

Funny we were debating about this stuff today with our web team. Great essay Chris!

Farid