Building a SEO friendly web site from scratch
BEFORE YOU START THE DESIGN STAGE
- Research the keywords for the site and their competitive intelligence -- they are pretty much intertwined.
- know what content you will need to support your desired keywords
- it is best to start with a few targeted seed words and use either Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or Google's Keyword Tool and explore for some great keywords. Look for two types of Keywords.
- Very popular, but generally very competitive
- More 'obscure' words but these can probably rank sooner and with less effort.
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Once you have a series of keywords,
- Make a list of pages that need content developed for to support those KWs
- Target one main Keyword phrase per page and have a few related, supporting keywords
- If you already have certain functional requirements for your site, cross refernece those needs with the pages you need to create to support the keywords
- It is important to merge the site's functional needs with your content needs to support the keywords. It really depends on what is the purpose of your site
Now you're ready to start the design stage
NOTE: If you try to funnel the keywords and
function needs into existing pages, it is easy to do a mediocre
job. BUT to do a top notch job will require extensive tweaking of
each page. If you start from scrarch with SEO as part of the
process
the outcome will be much better with a lot less work.