When faced with the challenge of setting up a new website what’s the first thing one generally thinks of?

The look of the website!

And so we set off to create a look and feel, then we start filling it with info, normally adding pages as we create until we feel enough has been said … does this sound familiar? You might not do the website yourself, but probably followed the same thought pattern to some degree.

What you have now is a website which looks OK or maybe even good, filled with information, now what do you need to do?

Now your work starts, you need to get your site seen on Search Engines, and this is probably the first time you or most of you have thought about Marketing your site or making it more visible to Search Engines from the time you started designing your website.

When engineers build a car, long before they reach for the sheet metal and welding machines, they know what the car will look like and all its specs, and even for what country it is designed for, because what sells in the UK will not sell in the USA.

So back to websites!

You need to put a lot of thought into building a site before you even think of doing it.

As developers and host, we have many times been approached by clients who have spent huge amounts of time and energy building a website, then published it on our servers, then as an after thought sent us an email asking what we as hosts going to do to get there website to number one position on Google.

If you want traffic to your website via Search Engine searches, then you need to start from the end and work backwards, this will prevent a lot of duplicate work and time wasted.

So what does this mean in practical terms!

Our advise is before you even think of what colour scheme the site will have or the menu structure etc …. make a list of your main keyword/s that will best describe your new website. This might sound silly, but its not that easy, then under each keyword list a few less important but applicable words to each main keyword.

A website with the least amount of main keywords, even down to one main keyword will probably perform better than a website that has a wide range of unrelated keywords. Search Engines such as Google will visit your newly published website and list all your websites words and the frequency and placement of them to find a theme that runs through your site, and this theme is where it will index your website. So if its very diverse it gets a bit confused, and gives it a poor rating and in some cases will not even index your site at all.

Once you are happy that your keyword structure resembles your business or hobby etc website, start working around these keywords always keeping them in mind right down to style, colour, site flow, menus, text, images.

Thus if you set up your website looking Back to Front, you stand a much better chance of organically setting up your website without knowing all the SEO information, and your site will beat a lot of others to the top of the pile in its relevant keyword/theme category.

Happy Web designing!!