Before You Start
Then, for each keyword that you are interested in, check out what the competition is like and see if you think you can compete. (Note: seoquake is a very usefull addon to Firefox that shows at a glance what the pr of the site is, how many pages are indexed and what the age is etc.)
Select keywords that yield good number of searches and that are achievable.
Website Design and Keywords: Overview
The basic rule of On-Page SEO is to include your keywords wherever relevant in all of the website sections and elements listed below but to do so in a "natural" way that avoids tripping a search engine spam alert and that does not affect your visitor's viewing experience.
Use different pages to target different keywords - for example, in our own site, we use one page to target "website design Suffolk" and "web design Suffolk", another page to target "website design Bury St Edmunds" and "web design Bury St Edmunds" and another page to target "website redesign" etc. We sometimes "mop up" less competitive keywords as sub-keywords in the same page.
It is often best to use your home page to target your most competitive keyword and/or your the "golden" keyword that will bring in most of your business: this page will normally receive the most links to it.
Meta Tags
It is best to use a different Title, Description and Keywords meta tag for each page. The code for this goes in the Head section of the website.
The Title tag is THE MOST IMPORTANT for SEO purposes - put your main keywords at the start of the tag. It should be less than 64 characters long; the more words you put into the title tag the more diluted each word becomes. Consider putting your company name at the end of the tag or even on a different "About Us" page - note some consider this makes your site look "small fry" to the reader but, in SEO terms, it is effective. One of our websites dropped from no 1 to no 7 in the SERPS when we altered the position of the keywords in the Title tag.
Many SEO experts feel that the Description and Keywords tags no longer play a big part in SEO - however, it is good policy to work your appropriate keywords for the page into the Description tag and to put them into the Keywords tag. Remember that the words in the Description tag will often appear in the SERPS so make sure that these are such as to entice people to click on YOUR website.
The code from our Suffolk web design page is below:
<title>Website Design Suffolk, Affordable Web Design Suffolk</title>
<meta name="Description" content="Website design Suffolk and South Norfolk: individually designed websites at affordable prices for small businesses." />
<meta name="keywords" content="Website design Suffolk, web design Suffolk, website designer Suffolk, web designer Suffolk, affordable website design suffolk" />
Website Design: H1 - H6 Tags
The H1 - H6 tags are very important for telling Google what is important on each page. H1 is used for your most important heading - and is therefore most important for SEO; h6 is used for the lowest level of subheadings and therefore carries the least weight with Google. For key effectiveness, ensure that your title tag and h1 tag both contain the main keywords for the page.
Use ONE H1 tag at the start of each page and put your important keywords into it, preferably in the order that people are liekly to search for them. Then, use H2 tags for your subheadings, H3 for sub-subheadings etc. If you need a subheading in a different style (for example in a 2 column design I sometimes have 1 column with a different coloured background and different coloured text) then use H3 - H6 tags for these headings as appropriate.
The code for these headings is:
<h1>Website Design Suffolk</h1>
<h2>Website Design Suffolk and South Norfolk</h2>
Note that you should NOT spam Google and put your keywords into EVERY subheading - try to put them into the first heading and subheading on each page (as Google pays most attention to the top of each page) and then mix things up - put them into some headings but not others, vary the order of the words, use synonyms, have some subheadings with no keywords in etc.
The style of these headings is defined in your stylesheet, for example:
h1 {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: x-large;
color: #000000;
}
h2 {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: large;
color: #000000;
}
Content
Weave your keywords into your content in a "natural" fashion so that it is easy to read but so that your important keyword combinations appear in the first few lines (these are most important in terms of SEO) and then occasionally later on in the page. It is good policy to work your keywords into the last few lines and also into the middle of some sentences. Again, use synonyms and break up some later keyword strings up to avoid being spammy.
Remember, if you want your page to be found for - for example - "website designer Suffolk", then "website designer Suffolk" should appear on your page. Sounds obvious? It is once you know, but it's amazing how many people don't follow this very simple rule.
To avoid being spammy, use synonyms ("web designer Suffolk") and vary the order ("Suffolk web designer"); also break up your keyword string ("we are a web designer in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk"). Google gives most weight to keyword strings in the right order and next to each other ("website designer Suffolk"); then it looks for keyword strings that appear close to each other ("a website designer in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk"); it gives least weight to those websites where "website" appears at the top of the page, "Suffolk" appears in the middle and "designer" appears at the bottom.
Alt and TitleText
Sprinkle keywords "naturally" through the alt text and title text of menu items, footers, hyperlinks and images if and where relevant. Note that images (with keywords in the alt text / title text and the image names (see next section) work best when they are near to text containing those keywords. Again, do not overdo this or you could trip a spam filter and get a nasty penalty.
Sample code for image alt text:
<img alt="Website design: Suffolk 12 Step Workshop" src="website-design-suffolk-images/website-design-suffolk-12step.gif" width="170" height="142" />
File and Folder Names
If you can, buy a domain name that contains your target keywords. We have found that keywords in the domain name can help with an exact match search.
For Ipswich Property Rental, which offers flat and house rentals in Ipswich, we chose a domain name containing the keywords (Ipswich Rental) and then made the company name fit the domain name:
http://www.ipswichrental.co.uk/ Note that Ipswichrentals.co.uk (our first choice domain name) was gone so we chose ipswichrental.co.uk instead. This site is currently no 3 for "Ipswich rental" - an exact match with the domain name - but is only no 9 for "Ipswich rentals".
Where appropriate, use URLs that contain keywords - but be wary of overding this as it can trip a spam filter. For example, in a recent property site that we did for the above Ipswich Rental Property, our "About Us" page was in a folder called "about" (to avoid being too spammy and putting keywords everywhere) but then included the main keywords (Ipswich Rental Property) in the filename:- http://www.ipswichrental.co.uk/about/ipswich-rental-property.htm Sometimes, you can avoid folder names and just have filenames at the main top level.
Also use keywords for images where relevant. Rather than using the useless (in SEO terms) labelling of image1, image 2, use a mixture of different terms incorporating relevant keywords in different ways.