Following on from our last blogpost where we looked at utilising Google Adwords to test SEO, how can we then take the keywords that have passed our Adwords test and predict what potential they can return for our website from top SEO rankings?

Often you will hear a figure of 42% banded about as a good reflection of a percentage of the traffic that an organic no1 ranked website typically entices from the total searches for a given keyword. This figure actually comes from data leaked by AOL back in the summer of 2006. A lot has changed online since 2006 and too more recent studies have sought to review that no 1 ranking CTR figure.

This blogpost discusses a report by optify.net whom conducted a study in December of 2010 on a collection of websites with consistent page 1 rankings for their given keywords. The Optify report discovered that the no 1 ranking website received a CTR (click through ratio) rate of 36.4%, a drop down from the above figure of 42%.

Evern more dramatic was a study by Slingshot SEO, which is discussed on this fine blogpost. The Slingshot SEO study had it’s no 1 ranking websites delivering CTR rates on average 18.2% of total traffic. Now that’s 42% down to 18.2% is this the end for SEO? No, not at all.

What we have to remember is that the Internet changes constantly and search engines aim to reflect this in their listings. Over the last year or so, we have seen Google Results begin to offer not only websites, but also video, google places, social media and shopping results too. It’s also true that over the last two years Google has also taken steps to feature sponsored links more prominently, hence why most keywords now trigger up to three sponsored links that appear above all others in their results.

click to enlarge

As we discussed above, it is true that page 1 Google results are now populated with items that were not there before. Google Places, sponsored links, videos even thesedays Google’s own flight finder as our blogpost image shows! However, not every keyword is like this. Some keywords trigger fewer sponsored links, no Google places or any video listings at all. In other words, some keywords still deliver results more like our page 1 rankings back in 2006 when the AOL data showed a healthy CTR rating for no 1 keywords up in the 40%s. This means, that if your targeted keyword is one of these lucky keywords with most of the page 1 space to themselves, then you can probably expect to attract a higher position for CTR than you might do if you were competing for ‘flights to Paris’.

This also does not mean you should avoid keywords like ‘flights to Paris’, it just means the figures need to stack up for you based on a lower CTR. it is also worth remembering that far more people are using the Internet now than they did back in 2006, hence it is more than likely that your targeted 18.2% of today’s search numbers are ever bit as lucrative as 42% of the lower overall search figures we had back in 2006. Today. 18.2% of the keyword searches for ‘flights to Paris’ on google.co.uk should deliver something like 2693 hits on your site every month.

When looking at the three figures on offer, we can see that 42% to 36.4% to 18.2% is a very big drop down. However, this drop happens for the no 1 organic ranking website only. If we look at the no 2 ranked website, then back in 2006 AOL reported a figure of 11.9% CTR, Optify this year reported 12.5% CTR and Slingshot SEO’s report stated 10.05% for position 2 – a fluctuation between all 3 studies of (relatively speaking) only 2.45%. Want to view the figures from all 3 studies for all of the top ten positions? Just so happens I’ve made a quick spreadsheet list for you available to download in the members area. If you’re not already a member, click here to register for FREE.

It makes sense for the number 1 organic position to show the most fluctuation as that is the position that has been pushed most aggressively down screen by the changes made by Google over the years. This means that when we come to predict our traffic on keywords we have chosen for SEO, we need to evaluate our CTR figures based on what we see on page 1 already. Our competition is not simply other organic sites, it is also anything that is occupying screen space and hence enticing a click through.

click to enlarge

The keyword ‘budget flights Paris’ when searched for on google.co.uk has only one sponsored link and no Google Flight Finder (unlike ‘flights to paris’ above), hence the no 1 organic site is positioned further up the page. We can therefore expect a higher CTR from this keyword than we should from the above mentioned ‘flights to Paris’.

As well as looking for what your keyword triggers around your organic results, also ask yourself how unique are you for your keyword? If your target keyword is your brand name, then it is very likely you’ll attract a much higher CTR rate. Additionally, if you offer a product unique to you, your CTR rate for directly related keywords should equally be high – especially if no one else quite offers the solution that you do! If however, page 1 is full of people offering exactly what you do, your CTR rate is likely to be much lower, so you need to bear that in mind when predicting traffic from future SEO rankings.

All in all, like any prediction, you have to take an educated guess based on what you see on page 1 and what you know about your market. If you want to play conservatively (as I tend to do with SEO estimations) then base your figures off the CTR rates offered by Slingshot SEO – they seem to have been constructed from tough keywords with lots of ads competing for space with the organic listings. If you feel your page 1 gives the organic rankings less to overcome, then by all means go for a CTR higher.

Once you have a CTR value your happy with, simply multiply your CTR percentage by the exact match search number and you have an estimated number of hits to your website when it achieves a no 1 (or any of the top ten positions you choose to measure) ranking . The only thing that remains is therefore to make it rank…..

Want to take this research further for your site and your keywords? Then click through to buy my latest videos and spreadsheet, together entitled  ‘How To Predict Traffic and Turnover Returns on SEO’.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could take the info discussed above and use that to estimate how much you might earn when ranked in any individual position on page 1 of Google? This product will show you how to do exactly that!  Also, I’ll show you the best way to ensure your estimated CTR rate is accurate by showing you how to uncover the current CTR rates of all of the top ten ranking websites (ie your competition) for your keyword! Click here for more info on this product now >

SEO and high organic rankings are a mid to long term goal.
They take consistent effort, time and lots of supporting research and content creation. As any battle weary SEO will tell you – it’s good to know it’s worth the effort before you start! That’s why solid Keyword Research is so important to any successful SEO campaign.

However, once you know which keywords you want to target, it’s still a good idea to give them a ‘wee test’. Google Ads is a great way to do just that. Buying the top position for your target keywords for a week can help you ensure that your website is setup fpr your market. A week spent within the top ad position for your target keyword will tell you whether or not your site offer attracts clickthroughs and, if it does, whether or not your site is setup to entice those visitors into becoming customers. Great information to know before you embark on the battle for page 1 organic rankings!

Here’s a quick video that will show you how to work out how much a week spent in the no 1 sponsored link position might cost you, and how many clickthroughs you should expect from that position.

Once setup, you’ll be able to view what happens to your Ad via the Adwords dashboard. As started briefly in the video, if you attract lots of clickthroughs to your site from the ad, but none of these convert, then you should look at your website copy. Be sure that your ad is sending people to THE most directly relevant page of your website and not just the homepage.  In the video example of a London caterers website, this might be a menu page or even a special offer ‘buy today’ page.

If on the other hand, your ad has many impressions but very few clickthroughs (you should base this off the no of clickthroughs Google Traffic Estimator predicts your keyword should generate across the week), then you look at your ad copy first. Is this selling your offer well? Does your ad copy differ from other advertisers on page 1? If so, how?  If you feel your ad copy is great and competitive, then you perhaps need to look at your offer itself. Is it really of interest to the people searching for your chosen keyword? Are there better keywords your offer would be more appropriate for?

Finally, if your ad generates good clickthroughs and you convert some sales too then…..you’re set to go with SEO! Well done!

In the world of online marketing, there is so much going on and so much to learn, it’s tough to know where to start.

When starting out with a new website, a new niche or even within web marketing for the first time I highly recommend you take some time to find your market online and simply ‘watch’ it for a while. Learn where your market congregate, what they are talking about and what they want. Having some insight into your market before you start any marketing helps to shape, formulate and fuel your strategy.

Google Alerts is a great tool with many uses, one of my favourite is using Alerts to find and monitor my target markets online. I’ve had a few emails over the past few months asking me if I can elaborate on the methods discussed on this blog. Hence, this nicely brings me onto to my first ever CoffeeKicks video! I’ve given myself an ongoing aim to create more video demos of our methods and to create more member freebies and extras.

Please let me know if the video above was helpful, and if you haven’t already, please do sign up to my mailing list to download the supporting document discussed in this video and to gain access to my new member areas of this blog.

P.S. If you found this article useful, you may well also like my new videos uploaded to the Product page that will help you take this concept much further.

It’s that time of year again, and as 2010 draws to a close I thought I’d take the opportunity to share with you my thoughts on the world of SEO in 2011. Following are the SEO practices which I think will remain important in 2011, as well as the factors that I think will become more significant over the course of the year.

Practices that will Remain Important

1. Building Links from Different IP Addresses

Building links from a wide range of different IP addresses will almost certainly remain an important SEO practice. Remember: it’s not just the number of links that you build but the amount of IP addresses that you get links from that will determine your PageRank.

2. Building Links from High PR Domains

Building links from domains with a PageRank higher than 3 will remain a key SEO practice because these will continue to provide the best links.

3. Ensuring Google Indexes as Many Links as Possible

Although no SEO can claim that every one of the links that they generate will get indexed, it is still important to rely on a good method to ensure that Google indexes as many of them as possible.

Whether you add an XML sitemap using Google’s webmaster tools, link from a blog post with an RSS feed, link via an authoritative social media profile or use a social bookmarking service, make sure you have a way to increase the amount of links that get indexed.

4. Carrying Out Thorough Keyword Research

No matter what changes we see in the world of SEO, keyword research will still be THE most important part of your SEO. This is one practice that is not going to diminish in importance any time soon.

Factors that will Become More Important

1. Changes to Google Local Results

Local searches are becoming increasingly important to Google’s algorithm, and as such we are likely to see a greater emphasis on optimising for local results. According to Google itself, 20% of searches are now “related to location”, and the annual Local Search Usage Study by TMP Directional Marketing and comScore puts the amount of local search queries this year at 8.3%.

Google is now reflecting this in its results pages, and I think it’s inevitable that Google local listings are going to become even more important over the course of the next year.

I’m expecting a lot of my SEO clients in 2011 to ask for optimisation of their Google local listings above that of their actual websites because their main keyword targets will trigger local results and therefore push organic listings further down and off page one. To see this for yourself, just make a quick search for ‘leeds architects’ on google.co.uk.

2. Greater Integration of Social Media with SE Rankings

There is a lot of debate going on at the moment about how social media is affecting Google rankings. One of the biggest debates centres on the ‘Like This’ button that Facebook introduced during the year.

The Facebook Like Button argument concerns the challenge that Facebook is posing to the search engines by blocking their ability to index sites through limiting how much of the web they can track at any given moment. It is unknown how this will play out, but watch out for more debate over the coming months.

This year I have also noticed that my Twitter pages are growing considerably both in terms of their PageRank and the quality of the links through to my main website. I think it’s now certain that Google will factor tweets, recommendations and other social media mentions into its algorithm more throughout 2011.

3. Continued Growth of Mobile Search

We are almost certain to see continued growth in mobile search throughout 2011, and as such new platforms like the iPad and its Android competitors could well represent the best monetisation opportunities.

Google recently revealed that its mobile search was up 130% in Q3, and Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP at Google, is quoted on mobiThinking describing mobile as “the future of search on the internet”. In addition, an analyst for RBC said back in June that by 2012 mobile search could grow to 20% of all searches as opposed to 9% this year (see TechCrunch for further details).

With mobile search being talked about in such terms, we can certainly expect to see large growth in this area.

Keep Ahead of the Changes

As well as continuing to focus on the SEO practices that will remain relevant in 2011, try to keep up to date with any new trends in the SEO world. By keeping your finger on the pulse, you will ensure that you stay ahead of the game whatever changes we witness in 2011 and get the most from all your campaigns rather than getting left behind.

If you have read a handful of my previous posts, you will no doubt be aware of my belief that the most important part of SEO is the initial keyword research. Keyword research is a two fold process – not only do you need to know exactly what keywords attract regular traffic each month, you also need to know whether targeting a specific keyword is realistic in terms of cost, time and work involved.

There are many keywords which have such ferocious competition online that ranking page 1 with a new website would take such huge resource that any investor would be unlikely to see breakeven, let alone profit for some considerable time. In such instances, it is often cheaper and easier for a wealthy investor to look at buying one of the high ranking businesses/domain names.

However, no matter how competitive a niche maybe, there are always gaps. Uncovering these gaps is truly what separates successful online marketeers from the rest.  Following on from our last post which looked at ways of uncovering the most ‘profitable’ keywords from your research, today we’re going to look at how to gauge what competition exists online for your chosen ‘profitable’ keywords.

To make this task much easier, I highly recommend the excellent SEO plugin for Firefox. This is a free application that simply involves signing up to the SEOBook website. Once installed, open up google.co.uk (or .com) and search for one of your chosen keywords. You’ll notice that as page 1 of your results appear, the SEO plugin gives you a number of useful values on the website’s listed, including PageRank, no of incoming links, any listings in DMOZ or the Yahoo directory and more.

In an ideal world, the page 1 results for your chosen keyword would have:

1. URL’s with Low Numbers of Links. At the very least, one website with a low number (less than 250) links – as reported by Yahoo/SEO for Firefox – appearing within the top 5 listings is a good sign.
2. No Meta Title Keyword Targeting. No, or only 1 or 2, websites with the actual keyword written directly into the title. For example, if you were targeting ‘buy cheap shoes’ you would hope to see a  Google Results page as below (click to enlarge).
3. Web 2.0 Pages Ranking. Additionally, you would also hope to see a web 2.0 page (most likely an article) ranking within the top 10 results. Look out for listings from EzineArticles, ArticleBase and GoArticles which tend to rank highly for lower competition keywords.
4. New / Young Domains. Ideally, at least two of the listed page 1 domains will be 3 or less years old.

If you can uncover a keyword that reflects all of the above, you have a real hot SEO opportunity! Usually, your keyword target will have page 1 Google competition that reflects one or two points form the above, but not all four.  At this point it is more useful to look at your keyword competition in terms of what you should avoid competing against.

Here are the competition factors that are very hard to outrank with a new website:

1. Keyword Rich Domains. If all of the possible keyword rich domains for your target keyword (eg buycheapshoes.co.uk/.com/.net etc) have been snapped up and you see them ranking page 1 for your keyword, your in for a very tough SEO fight.
2. Aged Domains. If all of your page 1 competition have domains that are over 5 years in age, your shiny new website is going to have big problems persuading the mighty G that your just as trustworthy.
3. High Page Rank. Whilst PageRank may not be as key a factor as it used to be, it’s still very tough to push your new website past websites with PR of 4 and above . Ideally, for your target keyword you would hope to see a website with PR 2 or below ranking well.
4. Lots of Links. If every website on page 1 has over 2K links then you have some serious link building to do. If this high link number comes in combination with no 3 (ie high PR), then your battle is harder still.

Overall, most keyword choices comes down to thinking over the gaps that a keyword may have and balancing this against the beefier sites you see listed on page 1. Sometimes you may find that the top 3 listings are taken up by aged domains with high PR and lots of incoming links. There may however be opportunity to push into the page1 listings beneath these online giants. For high traffic keywords, such a  strategy can be worth pursuing. The important factor is to know what kind of fight your getting into before you step into the SEO ring.

One of the most important factors behind commercially successful websites is their ability to discover profitable traffic channels for their online products. Whilst Google’s Keyword Tool can help us oncover keywords that have regular traffic, it’s another skill to then go on and define which of these keywords will have the best conversion from ‘traffic’ to ‘sales’.

Hopefully, some of you will have already read my post from March this year on using Google tools to find better keywords. Certainly any website that becomes commercially successful has an element of luck involved. However, here are a few tips to help delve further into your keywords in an effort to uncover the ones that truly have SALES value.

1. Adwords Spend
If a keyword has a large number of PPC advertisers, there’s a very good chance that this keyword converts traffic to sales well. If you use Google Keyword Tool to uncover your keywords, you’ll be no doubt aware that you can view average PPC costs on any keyword found. However, I find a more reliable method is to simply use your own eyes and note down how many people actually pay for that keyword.  To do this, open google.co.uk and type in your keyword. Ideally, you would now see a full page of PPC advertisers appearing under sponsored links above and to the right hand side of your organic results (click below to enlarge).

IF you see any less than a full first page of PPC advertisers be wary of this keywords ability to convert to sales. Ideally, you would want to see 3 – 5 pages of different advertisers all paying for their PPC ads on pages 1 – 5 of Google’s results, this is an excellent indication that this keyword is easily monetised.

2. Google Shopping
Google Product Search is the area of the world’s most powerful search engine where you are able to search all of the products uploaded to Google’s Checkout database. This area of Google can be a real goldmine when searching for ‘conversion’ keywords. Type your main keyword into the search box at the top of the Google Shopping page, Google will instantly offer you a number of alternative keywords in a drop down menu that appears almost as you type.

Let this menu hover, write the most relevant of these suggestions down and now go back to Google’s Keyword Tool. Research all of the suggestions for traffic numbers and any further keyword ideas Google suggests. By using Google Product Search intially, you are now feeding the Keyword Tool with keywords that Google has told you have ‘sales’ traffic, hence your keyword results should be more commercially focused.

3. Google Discussion
Finally, after completing steps 1 and 2 above, take your best keywords, type them into Google and click on ‘Discussions’. Are people already talking about your keywords? If so, this final step serves as further verification that your keywords have high potential for sales conversion.

I hope the above tips help some of you to uncover more lucrative keywords for your projects. If any of you have your own fine ideas for keyword research do let me know, I’d love to hear them!

Post 7 on SEO considerations when building a website from concept to completion.

All of the posts to date have looked at how to research, plan, build and design your new website. This week were going to look at how to make your new website as SEO friendly as possible. You’ll need one finished website, source code open and ready to edit.

As you digest more and more information about SEO & web marketing, you’ll come across two phrases that consistently come up. Thesedays, off-page SEO is rightly considered the most important factor for influencing high search engine rankings. Off page SEO is a vast span of techniques and opinions geared around link building, sourcing and optimising – much of which we’ll go into across many posts in the coming months.

On page SEO is what we’ll deal with here today. On Page SEO used to be the be and end all of web marketing, whilst that’s no longer true, good On Page SEO will still have a positive impact on your web rankings. Here’s how it should be done:

There are six factors to be aware of, listed here in order of importance:
1. Title Tags
2. Sitemaps
3. URL String
4. Website Copy
5. Meta Keyword & Description Tags
6. Image ALT Tags

Title Tags

When you view your website in a browser, the words that appear in the very top left of your browser window (as you look at the screen) make up your ‘title tag.’ Your title tag is also what SE’s list in their results  and also what browsers click on to visit your website. I believe that your title tag is THE most important on page SEO factor. When writing title tags, your page keyword target should be as close to the start of your title as possible. Keep your title short and snappy. When viewing your webpage source code, your title tag (opens with<title>) should be ideally directly underneath the <head> tag of your page.

Sitemaps

Whilst browsers opften appreciate a sitemap, search engines always love them. Sitemaps make it very easy for SE spiders to crawl through and find all of the pages you have online. I create sitemaps in four formats, html, ror, txt and most importantly xml. The latter is the form of sitemap that Google prefers. Some web marketeers use their xml sitemaps to quickly make Google aware of their new website by submitting it to Google’s Webmaster Tools. I prefer to let Google ‘stumble’ across a new website and find an xml sitemap already there – more on this technique next week. Ideally, your nwe website should auot-generate your sitemaps for you. If not, you can use online resources like this one to quickly generate an xml sitemap for your new site.

URL Strings

If you have been reading all of our posts to date, you’ll know that each of your webpages should have one overall keyword target and that this should be reflected within your webpage url. Click here to re-visit our page planning post.

Website Copy

With your keyword list to hand, read through your new website copy page by page, referring to your individual page keyword targets. There are three steps to making your copy SEO friendly. Firstly, wherever possible every webpage should ideally open with a title to your copy that has your page target keyword within it. For clarification, title here refers to the title above your text NOT your title tag discussed above. Secondly, every webpage should have it’s keyword target written into the first and last sentence of your page copy – again, wherever possible. Last but not least, try to place the keyword target of another webpage within your current page copy and link this to that second page. Try to create keyword targeted cross page links across your site.

Meta Description & Keyword Tags

After your title tag, there are two other meta tags that you should also ensure form part of every webpage. Ideally, both your meta description and keyword tags should ideally include your page target keyword. As your meta keyword tag is simply a comma separated list of keywords, this will be easily included here. Your meta description tag however should be written from the point of view of the browser. This is the text that browsers will read straight from a search engine result page, and hence should focus on enticing the browser to ‘click through.’

Image Alt Tags

Primarily, image alt tags are there to assist browsers who cannot view images to better understand the content of your webpages. Alt tags should therefore be descriptive. However, there is no doubt that they also present another opportunity for you to embed your target keywords within your webpage. Place your p[age target keyword somewhere within the alt tags of the first three images on your webpage.

If you’ve managed to worth through the above steps then your just about jet set to start marketing your new site! Upload your edited and optimised pages and read through each one a couple more times, checking for any missed spelling or grammar errors. In the next post, we’ll start looking at how to get your new website noticed.

Post 5 on SEO considerations when building a website from concept to completion.

Approaching the design of your website with a good understanding of where you want your finished website to go is something I’d strongly recommend.  If you worked through last week’s post, you should now have an Excel spreadsheet laying out your desired webpages and a site map representation of how the website pages will flow into one another. These are both documents you should hand to your website designer. In this post, I’m going to outline a number of things you should also hand to your designer to ensure your website is as search engine friendly as possible right from initial designs.

Don’t Leave Design Research To Your Designer

Taking a good look at how your competition present themselves online can give you the best of insights into what makes a successful website in your niche. Go to google.co.uk and search for your main keyword. Look through each of the top ten ranked websites and note down the following for each of them;
- How is the website structured, ie what sections can you browse to from the homepage?
- What sections of the website feature directly on the homepage?
- Does the website sell ‘price’, ‘service’, ‘exclusivity’ or something else?
- Are they highly visual or word led? (Remember that a Html website will always outrank a Flash animated equivalent.)
Using your notes taken above, now ask yourself the same questions for your own website to be created – what do you see for your own website? Jot down your thoughts.

Target Your Market

As well as understanding what keyword you want your website to target, it’s also useful to have a solid idea as to the kinds of people you hope your website will attract. I find the easiest way to think of your target customers in through considering;
a) what supermarkets they might shop at and
b) what newspapers you believe they would read.

From here, try to also note down further brands you believe your target market would radiate towards. Look through the websites of the supermarkets, newspapers and further brands you have noted down. What feel do they portray? What kind language do they use? For example, are they clean, professional, fun? How does their approach compare with your own ideas for your own website? If your website plan has a totally different approach, can you justify this in terms of your product or strategy and not just your own personal taste…?

Make a copy of all your notes for your designer. Add to your notes the following:
- A list of your own favourite websites.
- Your domain name.
- Your main keyword target.
- Your contact details.
- Your keyword spreadsheet and site map.
Ask your designer to:
- Display your website navigation either top right or screen left, these locations are where your browsers EXPECT your navigation to be.
- Ensure that navigation links are created with text and not imagery, text links are easily followed by search engines.

- Ensure your website design allows for a title and text lead on each page, important SEO tricks for a later post.
- Ensure your colour scheme makes links easily identifiable, you want your browsers to ‘click’ through.
- Ensure your homepage design sits within a screen resolution of 1024 x 780 pixels without creating scroll bars, this is the most common screen format thesedays and your website will be far more inviting without scrollbars.
- Feature a latest news/articles section featured straight from the homepage, again an important SEO trick for a later post.
- Ensure that all created webpages follow the names/urls set out in your keyword spreadsheet and site map.

Using the above format will ensure that you can leave your designer to do what he/she does best, ‘create’, within a structure that is target market, usability and search engine focused. In the next post, we’ll start looking at how to make your new webpages as SEO friendly as possible before we start promoting them.

Part 4 of a series on SEO considerations when building a website from concept to completion.

If you have worked through last week’s post, you should now have a list of around 10 keywords that you would like your new website to target and, ultimately, rank for.  Now we know where we want our website to go, this post will start to look at how it’s going to look and work…nearly time for the crayons!

But first, let’s spend some time focusing some attention on the pages that are going to make up our website. Initially, I believe this is best done using a spreadsheet. Create the following headings across five columns; Page Name, Functionality, Keyword Target,  Title and URL. Believe me, this is going to help when we get to actually designing the website!

Enter information into each of the column headings for every page on your website as follows;

Page Name: Here write the name of every page on your website. Don’t worry too much about any pages you’re not yet sure of. For now, just list the ones you know you do need. For example, every website has at least a ‘Home’, ‘About’ and ‘Contact’ Page. It’s the pages inbetween that vary across ‘Products’, ‘Services’ and ‘Information’. I recommend you find a place directly on your ‘Home’ page for a ‘Latest News’ stream, this will help with our marketing strategy further down the line. For this reason, I often call my ‘Home’ page ‘Home/News’.

Functionality: Make a brief note of any functionality each page within your site requires. Functionality can range from a simple contact form right through to an online credit card gateway. The simplest way to think about functionality is to consider whether you need a page to ‘do’ something. A ‘do’ tends to require some form of functionality.

Keyword Target: Once you’ve listed out all of your webpages within columns 1 and 2, take your keyword list and assign one keyword to each webpage. Your ‘Home’ page and one other should target your main keyword – one that hopefully you’ve managed to reflect within your domain name.

Page Title: As your assigning keyword targets for each page, now is a good time to consider how your going to embed that keyword target into the title of the page. The title of any webpage appears in the top left hand corner (as you look at your screen) of your webpage within your browser. You’re page title also appears as the link to your website within any search engine results page. It is THE most important meta tag and should both reflect what the page is about and should have that page’s keyword target within it. In our ongoing example of ‘buycheapshoes.org.uk’, the keyword ‘buy cheap shoes online’ is a good keyword permutation of our original main keyword target (buy cheap shoes). Hence, it might be good to choose this keyword for the actual ‘Store’ page on this website. We might title it ‘Buy Cheap Shoes Online Store – buycheapshoes.org.uk’  or something similar. Thinking about this now will greatly improve your on page SEO when it comes to web design and build.

URL: After assigning each page a keyword target, you now need to reflect this same given keyword within the url string (filename) of each individual webpage except the homepage which is always called ‘index’. Looking at our example of buycheapshoes.org.uk, we would call the ‘Store’ page a url string of ‘http://www.buycheapshoes.co.uk/buycheapshoesonline.html’ or even ‘http://www.buycheapshoes.co.uk/buy-cheap-shoes-online.html’. The hyphens don’t really help your SEO (at least not anymore) but I often find they make a page URL more readable for browsers.

After completing the above, you should have something that looks a lot like this;

(click to enlarge)

You can also click here to download this spreadsheet as an example to work from.

Creating this spreadsheet for your website will take a little time. But, once you’ve have worked through these headings, you’ll find the whole process of design and build far easier. Not only do you know where your website needs to be heading, you also know how your keyword targets need to spread throughout your new site. Handy stuff to know before you start designing.

Finally, before our next post, try and recreate your spreadsheet as a visual flow chart or ‘site map’. Aim to show every page within your website and add brief notes to aid the visual interpretation of how your website will look and more importantly ‘navigate’. Hopefully, this will be far easier working from your spreadsheet than it would have been without?

Click here to download a sample-sitemap PDF

Next week, we’ll look at moving on from your spreadsheet and site map into our first steps into actual design.

Part 3 of a series on SEO considerations when building a website from concept to completion.

Last post we looked at how Google’s Keyword Tool can help us find a keyword rich domain for our new website. This post will follow on from here and look at how we can dig deeper into Google and find more keywords to target with our new website – as before, these techniques utilise free tools. This will give us a good list of keywords we intend to target with our website before we sit down and think about how our website will look and how we will structure it (guess what the next two posts will cover?)

By now you will hopefully feel fairly comfortable using Google’s Keyword Tool? If not, please visit the last post and look over it again. We’re going to utilise another free tool called Google Suggestor – click here to download. Have you noticed that when you begin to type in a keyword into Google’s search box Google offers keyword suggestions based on the letters you type? Google Suggestor uses the same technology to find keywords for you from your original keyword target.

How To Use Google Suggestor

1. Download and install the software. This is a desktop application, so you’ll need to open it everytime you want to use it.
2. Type in your starting keyword, in the example below I’ve started with ‘buy shoes’ to follow on from our example in the last two posts.
3. Click on ‘Suggest’.
4. You should now see a number of keywords appear based on your original keyword.
5. Click ‘Suggest’ again, and again until no more keyword appear.
6. Now, click on ‘Settings’ which is the first icon to the left (as you look at the screen) from ‘Suggest’. Click to enlarge the image below.
7. Tick ‘Reverse seeds’
8. Now click on ‘Suggest’ again and again until, once more, no more keywords add to your list.
9. You now have a pretty wide list of possible keyword for your website. Select all of your keywords from within Google Suggestor then cut and paste them into a text or Word document.
10. Spend a little time weeding out any keywords that are just not relevant to your target market or that just don’t sound too realistic. For example, from my ‘buy shoes’ list, I’ve removed keywords like ‘buy shoes online canada’ (as I’m targeting the UK) and keywords like ‘price half one get one buy shoes’ (I know what this keyword is trying to say, but I’m sure the ‘shoes buy one get one half price’ would be better).
11. Take your edited list of keywords and now open up Google Keyword Tool again.
12. In groups of 3 – 5, paste in keywords form your list and note exact match figures from Google. Jot down around ten keywords that both offer regular exact match searches and that you feel are most likely to be potential ‘buying’ keywords for your product/services.

If you’re still struggling for keywords after that, I have one more free keyword trick that should help. Search for your main keyword in Google. On the results page, in the top left hand corner, just above your results, you should see ‘Show options…’. Click on this and a new list of result filtering options appears in your left hand panel. Under the heading ‘standard view’, click on ‘Wonder wheel’.

What Is The Google Wonder Wheel?

The Wonder wheel is a great, free keyword tool that allows you to see how keywords are related visually. On clicking it, you should see your main keyword appear in the middle of a circle with lots of related keywords springing off your main one. Click on one of these related keywords and another wheel appears.

Keep clicking and you’ll dig deeper into Google’s database of related keywords, some of which should offer you more ideas for your own website. As above, jot down the ones you like most and check their exact match search figures in the Keyword Tool.

Using both the Google Suggestor and The Wonder Wheel should easy enable you to put together a list of around ten keywords you would like your new website to target. In the next few posts we’ll start looking at how to design, build and structure your new website – all from the healthy position of knowing where our website should be targeted from the beginning.