search engine optimisation (SEO), content management sytems (CMS), e-commerce, website design

In order to optimize a client’s website for search engine optimisation (SEO) many factors have to be considered. First it is necessary to sit down with the client and endeavour to understand their business and find out what terms they think people will search on to find the services that they provide.



From this information you can draw up an initial list of targeted keywords.  Building upon this initial list of keywords is where the process of search engine optimisation (SEO) begins. There are a variety of tools that enable the analysis of this initial keyword list.  These tools show how often these keywords are searched upon and other related terms people would use to perform similar searches.  Thus at the end of this step of the search engine optimisation (SEO) process we can draw up a refined keyword list.



Then it is necessary to write relevant text for the website incorporating your refined list of keywords at the correct density to be hit by the search engines.

This is where it becomes complicated. In order to ensure the correct density of your keywords in relevant pages it is best to design specific landing pages for each set of search terms. I am not saying that you have to stuff your pages with loads of repeats of your keywords.  What I am saying is that you have to write highly relevant copy specifically designed around your refined keyword list and that this is much easier to do if each page is clearly focused on a specific subject.



In the illustrations here for Richard Price Photography, the brief was to attract clients for commercial work, portraiture and weddings. Clearly people looking for each of these different services would enter entirely different search terms into the search engines. So it would appear logical that in order to perform as well as possible in each of these separate searches three separate pages needed to be designed. So three refined lists of keywords were drawn up and then write highly targeted and relevant copy was specifically designed for each page. The advantage of this strategy is that when people search on those terms they are taken to a page specifically tailored to their search terms. Hopefully they are then more inclined to engage with the content because they find it relevant and then explore the site further.

Your refined keyword list is also important for designing your description, title and keywords meta tags and each of these must be specifically targeted on each page. The identifier for the page also needs to be specifically designed to include keyword in the html, so in this example the three pages were saved as;
commercial_photographers_manchester.html
portrait_photographers_manchester.html and wedding_photographers_manchester.html.

Now we have three highly targeted pages for each area of the business, with relevant content, targeted meta tags, and addresses. The questions now are how do you go about getting the search engines to find them and how do you get them to rate highly? These questions are highly complex and will require some time to explain so I think I will stop for now and return to these issues in the next part of this series.0