Essentials In Planning Your Website

You are ready to begin building now the first question you must ask yourself is “What is the main objective of my website?”

Begin with these four basics:

1. Who are my target audience?

2. What information will I need to provide for them?

3. Am I selling something online? If not is there ample ways for customers to contact me such as phone numbers or a contact me page?

4. Do I have enough brandable imagery such as logo, brochure, or other images?

Once you have answered those questions its time to sit down and draw out a sitemap. When you have your sitemap completed it will be easy for you to build your site yourself, hire a web designer, or a design firm. Proper planning is the key to success.

Choosing The Right Keywords

It is very difficult to choose the right keywords to describe your business so people can find you when they put those words in a search engine. Let’s say you are ready to build your website. Do you understand search engines and how they work? I’ll use Google as an example. Google sends a program called a spider to crawl your site and the information the spider collects goes back to the search engine which in turn determines your position in the search engine result pages (serp). You of course want your site to appear as close to the top of the search page as possible so more users will see it and visit your site. Thats where keywords and key phrases come into play.

Keywords are words that average people use to look for sites. So think of words that describe your site. Choosing the right keywords can mean the difference from being in the top 10 to being so far back in the search no one will find you. Google, uses the “density” factor in their algorithm. If keyword is mentioned more than once it must be part of a message. The search engine looks for repeated words and tries to form a message. You have to find the proper page relevance for the listings. The high relevance will give you a high page ranking and the low relevance a lower ranking.

The word you think is the best keyword may not always be so. There are many free tools online to help you accomplish finding keywords (wordtracker). Find a keyword with an equal level of supply and demand. Those keywords will drive traffic to your site by driving up your position in the search engine.

Once you have found the right keyword you will have to build your sites content around that keyword. This is critical. Try to blend the keyword into the content of your site without using it to many times. Your keyword shouldn’t count for more than 7% – 9% of each page’s content.