Getting a number-one position on Google for your main keyword is the holy grail of SEO – unless that is you’re ranking in Google America and you’re targeting the UK market (or vice versa).

Making sure that your website ranks in the right country is crucial to how much targeted traffic it will receive. But how do you ensure that it will appear in the right territories?

The type of domain that you choose will almost certainly be a major factor because Google automatically assumes that you are targeting a particular territory based on the domain. For example, if you have a .co.uk domain (or .org.uk, .net.uk, etc) then Google will automatically assume that you are targeting the UK market, whereas if you have a .com, .org or .net, it will assume that you are targeting the US market (and the same is true for other territories).

But what does this mean if you have a .com domain but want to target the UK market?

4 Ways to Target a Specific Country

There are a number of steps that you can take if you run a .com website but you want to target the UK market (and the same rules apply for any territory). These will inform Google which market you are targeting and will therefore give you a better chance of ranking in the right country.

1) Add Your Address to Each Page

By adding your address to each of your web pages (down at the bottom of the page where it won’t distract visitors but will show up clearly for the Google spiders) you will inform Google that your company is based in the UK, which will suggest that you are targeting the UK market.

2) Set Your Geotarget

Go to Google’s Webmaster Tools and register your website if you haven’t already done so. Click on ‘Site Configuration’ then ‘Settings’, and from here you will be able to change your website’s geographic target. If it is not currently set to the UK then simply switch the location and Google will have a better idea of which market you are targeting.

3) Add a Google Listing

Head to Google Places and simply add your listing for free. This will allow your listing to show up in Google Maps and will clarify to Google where your company is based. On top of the SEO benefits, this will give you extra marketing clout by making your site even more visible to potential customers.

4) Add Your Site to Directories

Find some online directories in the UK (or whichever territory you are targeting) and register your site with them. This again helps Google to understand where you are targeting your website, and on top of that you’ll be getting some online adverts to help with your marketing efforts.

Make it Easy for Google to Work Out Your Target Market

Choosing the right domain for your target market is the easiest way to ensure that Google knows who you are targeting. But where this is not possible, use the four simple steps outlined above (the first three alone will take you all of half an hour) and you will be providing Google with the extra information it needs to understand which territory you are targeting.

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

In our last post, we looked at a number of things your designer needs to know in order to give you a search engine friendly website. In this post, we’ll look at some equally important considerations for your website coder/builder too.

But Phil, My Web Designer IS My Web Coder…

If you’re website is relatively simple, your designer might well also be the person whose turning that wonderful design into a living, breathing website. If however, you’re looking to incorporate any kind of CMS system, then usually your designer will be working with a coding partner who’ll be assigned to deliver the functionality of your website as you want it. Now if you’re web designer is a multi talented individual, (they do exist), and is capable of doing everything for you then read on and make sure this lil genius is aware of everything below. Just be sure however, that they aren’t in truth working with someone else hidden behind the scenes. It’s better that you know if this is the case.

How To Make Your CMS System Search Engine Friendly

CMS systems come in a variety of forms, however there are two factors they all share in common:
1. They utilise an online database of some form to stream page content from.
2. They generate pages dynamically by feeding page content from the database into set website style templates.

The above two features are very useful when it comes to enabling the easy editing of a website. However, these same two features can cause a number of problems for search engines looking to cache your website. By default, most CMS systems tend to not to be search engine friendly. Here are a number of factors you need to make changes to in order to reverse that default state!

Make Your Webpage URL’s SE Friendly

Do you remember in our post on ‘Pondering Our Pages‘ we made some decisions about what we should call our pages based on our keyword targets? Well, by default most CMS systems give webpages a very ugly URL that reads something like http://www.domain.co.uk/index.php?query=2345th or something similar. This needs to neatly read http://www.domain.co.uk/keywordtarget.html. Almost every CMS system has to be setup in order to achieve neat urls automatically. Make sure whomever is creating your CMS system is very aware of this.

Meta Tag Placement

As CMS poweered websites generate pages on the fly, they have a habit of mixing up your webpage coding. Technically speaking, it doesn’t matter too much where pieces of coding sit. However, to a search engine, they really need to come across your meta tags (title, description and keywords) pretty much right away. Your meta tags should sit directly below the opening <head> tag on your website – to check this, right mouse click on your website from within a browser and select ‘view source’ – see below (click to enlarge).

Ideally, your meta tags should be editable directly from the CMS interface and for each individual page of your website.

Title Styles and Tags

Ideally form an SEO point of view, every page on your website will contain at least 250 words of copy that opens with a keyword rich title. Your web design will have given your text and titles a colour scheme, font style and size. Whatever these are, you should ask your coder to ensure that copy titles are coded as <h1> tags. This will probably mean your website stylesheet edits the look of the <h1> title style to match your design. Your coder could also make your copy titles ‘look’ like your web design by using <h2>, <h3> and <h4> tags, this is often quicker but nowhere near as search engine friendly.

Site Map Generation

Most CMS systems now come with an easy way to auto-generate a website site map. This is an excellent feature to enable, as it will constantly adapt your website site map to take account of any web updates you make. Ask your web coder to ensure the site map is generated in xml format, the preferred format for Google.

Getting your website right technically is not just a matter of making sure it works. There are a number of coding structure factors that if approached correctly form the start will greatly enhance your ability to market your new website online.

In the next post, we’ll look at some simple rules for the effective on page SEO of your new website.

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.

Part 2 of a series on SEO considerations when building a website from concept to completion.

If you took a handful of successful websites across a variety of markets, I’d bet that the one factor that they all share is one of choosing the right keywords. Whether you discover the your keywords by hook or by crook, once you’re ranking for them,  a simple equation begins to work in your favour; the right keywords = the right website traffic. It makes sense to find, and target, these keywords from the start and, as we discussed last time, if possible reflect them within your domain name.

Over the next two posts I’m going to be outlining a couple of quick and free keyword tricks to help you find the right opportunities for your website. These are of course totally by ‘hook’ methods, if anyone out there does have any tips that work by ‘crook’, I’d love to know

How to use keyword research to discover keyword rich domains.

There are many pro keyword tools out there on the market, some of these really are excellent and I use two in particular myself. However, if you’re not obsessing about keywords on a daily basis, these tools prove expensive. So, if you are running one or two company/personal websites, you need to find another way of researching your keywords effectively. Whatever your wish maybe the web usually provides and who better to help us with this task than Google? The very people we want to seduce with our new website.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool is perhaps the place I visit most often online. Officially, this tool is there to entice you into spending your hard earned pennies on Google Sponsored Ads, which when used properly can a highly lucrative advertising medium – more on this in a later post. Unofficially, Google’s Keyword Tool is where those of us with ambitions to crash the top ten organic rankings can quickly find the right keywords to get excited about.

From this webpage, Google will tell us approximately how many times any keyword we type into their search box was searched for across the previous month. If that wasn’t enough of a freebie, this tool will also tell us about a number of permutations of your original keyword that people search for, along with search numbers for last month.

Let’s apply this fine free tool from Google and find a domain for our new website:

1. Open Google’s Keyword Tool.
2. Make sure your regional settings read “English, United Kingdom” (see below) – unless you are targeting another part of the world and hence this should be set to your target region.
3. Type in your ‘wish-word’ ie the keyword you believe you would like to rank no1 for oneday. I’ll stick with ‘buy shoes’ from the last post by way of example.
4. Type in the captcha and click ‘Get Keywords Ideas’ (click the image below to enlarge).
   
5. Unless you’ve been making words up, you should now be presented with a good page full of keywords.
6. Let’s filter them so they are easier for us to assess. First, pull down on ‘match type’ (see below) and set to ‘exact’. You should now see the search volume figures beside all of your keywords drop in dramatic fashion! Exact match means that Google gives us figures for people typing in the ‘exact’ keywords we queried, ie ‘buy shoes’ and not ‘shoes buy’ or ‘shoes to buy’ etc. Only ever buy a keyword rich domain based on ‘exact’ match figures, they will give you far more realistic web traffic expectations.
7. Next, click on ‘Local Search Volume’. This will rank the keywords in order of search number. ‘Local’ refers to the UK here. Click below to increase image size.
   
8. Open up a second browser window, pressing ‘Ctrl & T’ together is a nice shortcut for doing this quickly. Browse to your favourite domain retailer and check the keywords as domain names in order of search volume eg ‘buyshoes.co.uk’, ‘buyshoesonline.co.uk’ etc. It’ good to use a domain reseller that quickly shows you a number of domain options for a given search, 123-Reg has a nice, easy screen for checking options. By typing a co.uk domain into their search box, 123-Reg will let you know instantly whether or not the .com, .net and other versions of your domain are available as well as your co.uk.
9. Everybody has different ideas as to which version of a domain you should buy or avoid. If you work mainly in UK markets, as I do, then the .co.uk is definitely your preferred choice – Google tends to rank .co.uk domains higher for searches made from the UK. I also always buy the .com version if it’s available too.
10. Often things are quite this easy, in which case I apply the following rules, which have worked for me so far (geared towards UK markets);
    - search for yourkeyphrase.co.uk domains first
    - if this has already gone, and your keyword has no more than two, occasionally three, words in total, search for your keyphrase hyphenated, eg keyword-keyword.co.uk
    - if both natural and hyphenated co.uk domains have gone, or your keyphrase is more than three words, search for .org.uk versions of your domain. These domains have ranked very well for me in UK markets.
    - 80% of the time, the above steps will find you a good, keyword rich domain. If so, check the .com version of your domain, just in case it’s free too. If you don’t uncover any domain options, move on to the next keyword from your Google list.

Overall, domain checking does take a little time and you will probably have to check a fair few domains before you uncover one that you are happy with. Try to focus on matching the highest traffic volume keyword against a domain that you feel could represent your business/website effectively. Some people don’t like .org.uk domains (I agree these are harder to utilise for conventional ‘offline’ businesses), some people don’t like hyphens. That’s fine, choose a domain that you feel good about in all of it’s extension, connotation (does the domain truly reflect what you offer?) and traffic potential. Getting all of those three right pretty much means you’ve found a domain worth bagging. Don’t be frightened to note a few domain possibilities down and think about them for a day or so. I often do this, and so far the domain has always been waiting for me when I’ve returned to buy.

Going back to our working example of ‘buy shoes’, let’s see what potential domains we have uncovered? Click to enlarge the image below.

The fourth keyword I checked for domain potential uncovered some possibilities. As you can see above, www.buycheapshoes.org.uk is available to buy. With Google showing 1000 exact match searches in January 2010, I’d say that’s a pretty good domain for a ‘cost effective’ online shoe retailer to consider. If the .org.uk doesn’t feel right then a little bit of digging will also show that ‘buy-cheap-shoes.co.uk’ is also available to buy, as is ‘buy-cheap-shoes.com’. Overall, I tend to struggle more with hyphens than I do with org.uk, but’s that nothing other than personal preference! Both versions of the domain will work well in targeting the keyword ‘buy cheap shoes’ for Google top ten ranking.

Don’t Go Domain Crazy
Here’s a word of warning. Many people I work with online tend to go a tad domain crazy when we delve into domain research. It is better to spend some time researching and thinking about the right domain for you than quickly buying ten or twenty domains in the name of ‘freezing out the competition.’ For example, the above domain ‘buycheapshoes.org.uk’ is definitely not right for you if your stock retails at the higher end of the market! One of the great things about the internet is that there is always another keyword opportunity/keyword rich domain to find. So, find the right one for you then spend your time promoting it. If you haven’t found the right one, keep searching. Try new keywords altogether, ask your friends and family what they would search for when looking for your goods/services. You will always be surprised.

Next time, we’ll look at how we can delve deeper into Google’s keyword data and find more keywords for use throughout our new website.

This will be the first of a handful of posts aimed at taking you through the creation of a new website from scratch. As my blog is all about website marketing, I’ll approach everything from the point of view that we want to gain as much exposure for our new website as possible. Each post will discuss all the necesary SEO focused thoughts at each stage of yur new website build. Which brings me nicely to the first post – what’s the first step you should take when setting up your website?

Step 1 – It’s All In The Domain Name

Web design has grown largely out of two, previously unrelated, fields – graphic design and computer programming. In fact, the majority of web design agencies tend to have started life as some form of graphic design/marketing/branding agency and moved into websites as the internet grew into a primary form of  advertising (this is even true of H2). This fact often means that many a website project starts out with the digital equivalent of paper, coloured pencils and crayons. There’s nothing wrong with this in itself, but it’s not where I would recommend you start. If you want your website to generate good leads from search engines, then you need to start with some form of direction and that comes from a good, keyword researched domain name.

Why is your domain name so important?

Fundamentally, I’d say this comes down to the way the internet has changed and shaped marketing from it’s traditional base. For example, there are many opportunities for us to stumble across traditional marketing – we ‘passively’ discover adverts within newspapers, inbetween TV/radio shows and through our letterbox each morning. It is far harder to place a website somewhere on the internet and expect people to ‘passively’ discover it. 99% of online website visitors ‘actively’ find webpages by typing in queries (usually within search engines) and following links from their query results. Well marketed websites target the most lucrative keyword searches that people regularly type online for their offering.  If your domain name does the same, ie reflects the keywords you want your website to rank well for, you’ll make your online marketing far easier in the long run. Equally, by starting your website panning with your domain name, you’ll be making your whole website far more keyword targeted right from the start.

Despite the huge growth of social media and web 2.0, Google UK is still by far the most visited website in the UK. All search engines love keyword rich domains, they make it easy for search engine robots to understand exactly what a website is offering and hence where a website should be ranking. What does it mean to be keyword rich? Put simply, if you were selling shoes and you owned the domain buyshoes.co.uk you would have a wonderfully keyword rich domain. This domain would make it significantly easier for your website to rank high for the keyword search ‘buy shoes’. As this keyword was searched for 2,900 times in January 2010 on google.co.uk – owning this domain offers an online shoe retailer a distinct advantage in the online world. You should aim to find such an advantage for yourself .

Why not your company or brand name as a domain name?

First off – if available, you should still buy your company brand as a domain name. You can point as many domain names as you like at your website and you wouldn’t want anyone else owning your company/brand name! But when it comes to your online marketing, make your keyword rich domain the focus of your marketing activities as this domain will give you the quickest, and usually highest, rankings for your new website. Targeting a company or brand name towards a specific keyword takes so much longer – you have to gradually teach the search engines that your company domain name, eg ‘smithsandson.co.uk’, is relevant to, and should rank for, ‘buy shoes.’ Most company brand names are not keyword rich and have little value other than to the company themselves. Many well known brands have bought domains to target specific keywords/rankings, the best example of this might be B&Q who online operate under the domain www.diy.com. Should you find a keyword rich domain, then securing it for your company will give you a true online asset. Domains like diy.com or buyshoes.co.uk will always have a market value, especially if they come with current top 10 ranking positions.

So, how do you know what keywords to target and hence what domain to buy? In the next post we’ll be covering off exactly that. For now, if you’re starting to plan a new website and have found this post, begin to write down what you believe would be your perfect, keyword rich domain names. Don’t worry about whether they are available to buy or not as yet, we’ll be working from your ‘perfect’ list to ‘reality’ in the next post. 

Making your ‘keyword rich’ domain name your first step in planning your new website will bring a focus to your overall project. Once purchased, your domain will begin to feed into your design, navigation and copy thoughts – all of which we’ll cover off as we go. You’ll have a better understanding of where you’re website should be heading and where you expect to be ranking. Knowing all of this before you pick up that crayon will give your website project strong momentum from the start.