This will allow you to lay out all of the sections and sub-sections of your site to be created or redesigned. As the guidelines on this page are intended for personal sites, it is quite likely you’re creating a Blog, most technology for which facilitates segmentation, so this should be straightforward. Segmentation is vital to obtaining visibility for a group of phrases, not just one. The second step would be to label each page a specific topic. Therefore, your pages will have keywords in the folders (sections) of the URL. The third step would be the creation of heading tags (H1 tags – H3 tags), making sure that you include keywords in the titles. Remember, tags must also be relevant to the visitors, not just the search engines.
Preparation of content is the 4th step of this process. Remember that the location of the keywords to be targeted on the page and in its source code is relevant (Also read SEO Web Design and CCR). You likely already know that straight repetition of keywords will never work to obtain rankings, but keep in mind that your visitors also must be called to action, so creativity in SEO Copy Writing is paramount. Try writing the website content without thinking about SEO and then come back to it when you are finished. Google was created to present targeted and relevant information in its results first, but can only do so given the breadth of the Internet through an automated algorithm, so have content that appeals to humans first, crawlers second.
Wherever you include images, make sure to provide alternative tags (alt tags); HTML alt tags were originally developed to allow software to vocalize/make audible information to disabled people who are unable to view the page, and represents only one of many W3C guidelines, in which you should be well versed. When writing your alt tags, you should place a keyword or keyword phrase in for good measure. Even though the search engines can’t “see” your image, you should make sure that the keywords correspond to their respective images (i.e. you shouldn’t post a picture of a dog and tag it as SEO Web Design, which would be absolutely silly. If the image is of a dog, then tag it as “Emma the Canine SEO Web Design Guru”.)
The last area of free advice is about submission of your new site to Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Don’t worry about any of the other search engines, as these represent over 95% of all search engine traffic. Make sure to submit every page of your site at least once per month. Don’t allow your content to get stale, as search engines like fresh content, as if they are alive and have to consume information in order to exist. So, give them what they want: fresh and relative content.
Finally, have fun, because your personal website should be empowering and allow you to say whatever you want about whatever you choose. Getting your space on the web to rank is even better. It will take a while, but with a strong effort and by applying these principles, you too can perform SEO Web Design for your site.
