PART II - Optimizing Your Website

Posted by admin

January 4, 2008

This section deals with those aspects and elements of your website that should be optimized for Google in order to increase relevancy. You want to maximize how relevant your site and pages are to a given search query for a given search phrase (keywords).
In addition to optimizing your site for Google, you should also strive to incorporate some best practices into your website design and structure. For additional information on general website design principles, see Appendix A - Web Site Design Do’s and Don’ts.

Before we begin, make sure you don’t overlook the obvious:
Your website must contain high-quality, useful, timely content that people will actually want to read.
It is amazing how often this statement is ignored. You should spend more time creating useful and relevant content, and less time on fancy graphics, gratuitous animations, or Flash - especially on your home page. Remember that Google uses automated software to analyze the text on your site. This means it will ignore graphics and other multimedia elements on your site - and often your customer will too.
Think of site optimization as a long-term investment in your site “infrastructure. Once your site is optimized, it stays optimized and keeps its ranking over time (but not forever - you still need to update your site on a regular basis). This means free traffic over time. Compare that with paid advertising (such as an Overture pay-per-click campaign) where the minute you stop paying for your ads, your traffic goes away - it is a recurring expense.
As this section builds on the previous chapter, it is highly recommended that you complete the tasks described in Chapter 3 - Determining Your Best Keywords first, if you haven’t already.

Given that you can register domain names for as cheap as S6.95 per year , it might make sense to register your Primary Keyword Phrase for use as the domain name of your website. If the .com version of a domain name is taken, try the .net version or the .cc version. It doesn’t matter to Google.

When registering a domain name, separate each word in the domain name with a hyphen, otherwise Google will not be able to recognize the phrase and will think it is a single (usually nonexistent) word. Here is the correct format to use for domain names:

http://www.primary-keyword-phrase.com

As a general rule of thumb, don’t use more than two hyphens, it looks spammy and Google may take a closer look at your site for other possible issues.
Note: Don’t go overboard with this - by itself, it is not an important factor. There IS something to be said about having a branded, easily recognizable name that coincides with your business name however. This is more of a suggestion to include a keyword or two in your branded domain name. For example, if your business name is Blue Moose Web, register and use www.bluemoose-web-design.com instead of www.best-web-design.com.

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