Creative Designs

These days everybody is talking about SEO secrets that will get your website to the top in 3 easy steps! Or in one week! And all you need to do is to slightly modify your web design. Guess what? That won't happen, not the way they tell you. Its not that easy, you can't just take a pill and have it done already.

Basically, there are no secrets. The steps are outlined in Google's Webmaster guidelines. You can read and follow them just as easily as anyone but it requires some work. However, before you jump the gun and get over to that site and its content, there are a few things you could do that would go a long way in your quest for SEO.

1. Domain Name

If you're embarking on a new web design and have the opportunity to select a domain name, select a name that includes your key word. This provides you a valuable relevancy to the services you are providing on your website. For example if your website is about selling herbal tea and your key word is herbal tea, you want to select a domain name that would include that key word such as herbaltea.com or findherbaltea.com or any number of variations of those. By including your key word in the domain name you are imparting important relevancy and search engines take note.

2. Selecting a Web Host

There are some free hosting companies but I don't recommend using them for various reasons among which is ad ware and the fact your customers won't reach your home page readily or the bandwidth is too narrow or shared with another domain or goes down often which means your customers won't be able to reach you easily. You want to select a web host that meets its promises to keep your site running 24 hours a day 7 days a week. That offers great support with a bandwidth that is not limited for your business use. You only have a few seconds to hold on to that visitor that reached your site; they won't wait till your site comes back up again or if it takes a long time for your home page to load. Most people want it to happen right now don't you know?!

3. Search Engine Friendly web design

Its obvious you want your home page to be impressive and an attention getter. That's all well and good but it must also be friendly to the search engines if you want to index higher on the search pages. Search engine spiders are text driven creatures so you must pay attention to your text. Make your home page rich in key words, your key words. Use them early on the page to obtain more prominence or importance. However, you have to be careful here not to over do it because too many key words bunched up together especially on a short page could be conceived as spam. That would hurt you more than it does good. The rule of thumb here is about 8% max. That means 8 words or less out of 100 should be a key word.

4. Selecting key words

There is nothing special about key words. That is to say, they're not some specially created words you use. Basically they are the search terms people use to find the information they're looking for and so search engines use those to find your site so they can display it to the searcher. For example, for my business, which is designing websites, a good key word would be "Web Design Company". So your key words maybe different than mine or someone else's but they have the same property. They are the words you think people are going to use to search for your goods or services. So how do you find them? Well, there are programs out there that can help with that. Word Tracker.com is one of them. Google has one called keyword Tool and there are also some free programs such as Free Web Submission. The way this works is you put in one main key word pertaining to your business or services and the program will find the most popular key words that is related to that. Those are the terms people use for their search so you want to use them too. When you run the program you can see the key words from the most popular to the least. Now you can pick the ones you want and go to work.

OK now you can run over to Google's Webmaster guidelines and read all about what Google is looking for. Use it as a good guide and try to follow it as best as you can because the same things or similar are used by the other search engines.

Jim Gharib is a graduate Electical Engineer who's design experience ranges from radio/TV to computer based electronics systems that spans over 35 years. He is also a poet with one published book and has been designing websites for 3 years. You can visit his website IG Webs.

posted by lks  # 11:30 PM 0 comments