Web Design Keywords Nov 2007

Web design Sunshine Coast

When customers contact us for some web development we often are asked to "have my website at the top of the search engines". Well; using clever web design we can do that for 367 widgets however if your website is not selling 367 widgets, that will be of little use. The point I am trying to make is "what will your visitors type in to find you". Web development on the Sunshine Coast or whatever area you are in should start with this question.

Determining keywords is a critical step in web design. If your website does not contain related keywords, web surfers will be unable to find your website when they conduct searches. This should be part of your web design checklist.

The formula is a little tricky - you will need to locate terms that are popular and relevant to your web site. These terms may or may not be terms that *you* feel are relevant terms. The optimal terms in a site should be terms that a potential customer would use when searching for a website with your content. In order to achieve success your website should be optimised with terms and phrases that are descriptive, related to your content, and which receive a significant amount of searches. The caveat, of course, is that you want to find terms and phrases where there is little competition, so you quickly achieve high ranking in the important search engines. Whilst completing this also ensure you adhere to web design standards.

Markets saturated with other websites competing for search terms make it difficult to find quality keywords. Sometimes it is better to optimise for a less popular term, one that is more targeted at your visitor, because it is more likely to have a higher conversion rate than a less specific popular term. The first step to determining keywords is brainstorming a list of logical terms and phrases that relate to your product or offerings. This should be done by a number of individuals; sometimes people have very different ideas for search terms and by identifying a variety of people and their search terms you may tap words that hadn't occurred to you. There are a number of free and low-cost tools available online and for download that will allow you to expand and research terms that have been brainstormed. The results typically vary with the tools but overall the tools will assist you in determining where to focus your keyword efforts. The tools will often assist with pay-per-click engines, creating expanded, related keywords or phrases that can be bid on. More on web design sales.

In addition to examining log files to see what terms customers are using to find a website, visit competitors' web sites and examine their meta tags for additional terms, use a thesaurus to find related terms, include misspellings of keywords in your meta tag keywords, and optimise for various forms of nouns and verbs, including tenses and plurals.

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