Or “How To“  Structure & Design a Superior SEO Website – Part 1

“SEO is misunderstood by many, contrary to what most people think it is not all about picking a few likely keywords (or key phrases) & then getting your site to rank for them.”

Because although this is how most people envision the process, this is a very myopic view. The SEO process is actually only the means to an end, the end goal is for the website to earn as much money as possible.

So you if you’re scratching your head wondering what SEO is, now that we know what it is not, let’s try and explain. To run a successful SEO campaign, you need to start with the end result you desire (sales, money in the bank) and work backwards through your sales process to the first customer contact, ie how did they find you?

Put yourself in the mind of your ideal customer and try to think how they would, what would they be looking for?

Keyword Brainstorming

This is possibly the most critical part of the process, you need to research as many possible, cover all angles to start with and then whittle down to your main target keywords and phrases.

If in Google (or another search engine)

• What did they type into it? – ie what were this customers buying keywords / phrase ?
• Is this customer typical? – your usual demographic? if not who is?
• Is this the only way of saying it? what alternatives are there?
• Then think about the other customers who are going to your competitors, what words and phrases are your main (top 5 ) competitors targeting?
• Compile as complete list as you can of the main (upper level or short-tail) phrases.

Having gotten your primary list of desired targets together we need to expand them out, like branches of a pine tree structure, each branch dividing and branching further, lets use an example to illustrate.

Say..  we were looking at the phrase “Superior SEO” as a site name

..Obviously we know that gets no traffic at all, never mind buying customers (we ve been #1 for 2 years .com and .co.uk) so to optimize a site for just that would be silly. So aim higher (ultimately) but then build downwards with all the possible variations you can think of, the thesaurus is your friend here – Superior Synonyms

“Superior” + variants and trophies

• “Truly Superior”
• “Define Superior”
• “Superior Definition”

Other ways of saying superior (applicable in context, there’s plenty more)

• Top
• Best
• Expert
• Advanced
• Supreme

“SEO” variants and modifiers

• Optimization (or optimisation in UK / Europe)
• SEO Optimization
• Search Optimization
• SEO web design

Other ways of saying “SEO” (we know they mean slightly different things, but your customers may not)

• SEO Optimization
• Website Optimization
• Internet marketing
• Search Marketing

Then start playing with combination s of the two sides, together..

Superior SEO

• superior SEO optimization
• superior search engine optimization
• superior search engine marketing
• superior internet marketing
• superior online marketing

And lastly we have to then add in the second set of modifiers, company / services / plus all the singular and plurals as well, consultant consultants consulting consultancy etc, each of which can happily sit on the end of the above phrases, giving examples as diverse as :

• superior online marketing service/s / company
• superior internet marketing company / service/s
• advanced search engine optimization
• ultimate online marketing consultancy.
• advanced seo web design
• superior web design
• Etc etc etc, almost ad infinitum..

So we can see that any truly superior SEO web design must encompass all possible ways of saying the same thing, and must rank as equally for all of it as possible, and just focusing on one or two phrases is anything but superior.

SEO Ibiza was optimized along these lines and is 2 & 1/2 years old now and so benefits hugely from this approach – if you take a look at these superior rankings you can see the effect at work, obviously these were not the prime target phrases, just an example of how a superior optimization system works across all the variations of the phrases.

So again sticking with this site, the strategy is.. (in reverse order)

1. Primary (short tail) – superior,  seo, wordpress web design, that kind of thing
2. Medium-tail – superior definition, seo web design, advanced wordpress web design, / (thesis etc)
3. Longtail – all the other terms  all the other modifiers advanced etc, and then aimed at all the subsets too, web design, techniques tips etc.

We want to rank for the big words eventually, but in the meantime we want use superior seo to rank for every single longtail hit possible, from our target keywords in any combination. Building out the lower end of your traffic pyramid like this ensures that you don’t get to the top for a phrase, only to find it was a flop, lots who should know better, do and will continue to make this mistake.

But having your list of phrases is a long way away from having a site optimized for them, although it’s a start, but in the next of this series of posts we will cover possibly the most important part of this process, how to map your keywords, to your site design and infrastructure, in the way that will best please Google, this is critical and the bit most web designers often get badly wrong with dire consequences, stay tuned..