The 10 Critical Website Optimization steps
1. Search Engine friendly pages
The HTML used to construct your webpages needs to accommodate the insertion of your keyphrases at strategic points: including: title, headings (H1, H2,H3), links and "meta description". Make sure the tools that are used to build your website support search engine friendly page construction. You should not continue until this is done.
2. Keyword Research
Keyword Research:Find out exactly what phrases people enter into search engines when looking for the products/services you provide. These are known as "keyphrases". Use this tool to do Keyword Research ( Goggle Keyword Tool ). This is the most critical step in getting traffic. Once you complete this step you should have a really "huge list of keyphrases". Every phrase is a "potential stream of incoming traffic". Use single "root" words to uncover new phrases. Now create a short list by cherry picking "the most relevant high trafficked" keyphrases for your business. Your short list should still be very long, if it is not then you have probably thrown out phrases that you should not have, or you did not make your original search broad enough.
3. Map phrases to pages
if you already have a website then go through your short list and try to "match" each page's content to one (and only one) keyphrase. You know you have a good "match" if you can use a keyphrase as the "title" and "heading" for your page and it still reads naturally. Also include the phrase (and close variations of it) in your main content, but do not use brute force...your content should read naturally.
4. Create a Glossary of terms
Go through your short list and pick out any phrases that may require explanation to someone interested in your product/service. Add each phrase to your glossary. Make sure your glossary is a list of phrases which are links. When clicked on each link should take you to a page (optimized for the phrase, see point 8 below) which provides a definition.
5. Create an FAQ
Go through the short list and pick out any phrase that could form part of a genuine question that someone interested in your product/service might ask. Add it to your FAQ. Make sure your FAQ is a list of questions containing the phrase which are links. When clicked on each link should take you to a page (optimized for the phrase) which provides an answer to the question.
6. Create a keyphrase-rich hierarchy
For all those phrases you did not manage to find a "match" for, you need to build new pages to leverage them. To do this, organize your short list of phrases into a "semantically related hierarchy". The top of the hierarchy will have the most general phrases, which then branch out into more and more specific phrases (known as the "long tail"). The difficulty here is that you end up with many choices for each level of the hierarchy (because many keyphrases are really just duplicates with slight variations). When faced with choosing which phrase to use, "pick the one that "best matches the content you want to write and also has the most traffic". Use this tool ( MindManager ). It is amazing for this kind of work. In fact I would go as far as to say I would not be able to manage the amount and complexity of all the keyphrases without this tool. Using MindManager you can very quickly organize many thousands of phrases into a logical hierarchy and list all dupes for each branch, ordered by traffic volume. (It is also irreplaceable for any kind of brainstorming. I even use it for keeping my recipes).
7. Create new navigation
Your new hierarchy naturally shows you all the pages you need to create and how they are linked together. Start creating your website navigation starting at the top and working your way down the tree. Build all the links into your website, but do not add content at this stage, just have empty pages. If you already have a website then create a new top level link from your home page that links to this hierarchy of pages. All these pages should contain useful information for your visitors. It may, therefore, be convenient to call the top level link "Resources" or something like that? All links to a page must use the keyphrase the page is based upon as the visible/clickable text...if your links are images then the keyphrase can be placed in the "title property" and "alt property" of the <a href> tag....plain text links are safest though. All "child" pages should link back to their "parent" page. You should try to keep the number of levels of navigation in your website as "flat" as possible (not too many levels deep).
8. Optimize the pages
Each page you create (or modify if you have a "match") should focus on one keyphrase only. Insert your keyphrase in all the strategic locations previously mentioned and then write content that makes use of the phrase.
9. External links
Try to get as many links pointing to your website as possible (try to get links to lots of different pages, not just the home page). Make sure that the visible text in the links use the same (or a closely related phrase) as the page they are linking to. Make sure the link is plain HTML. Find directories and submit your site, find forums where your customers hang out and answer questions and drop links, create a blog and link back to your website, write an article every week and submit it to those businesses that provide article or press release services, create entries in wikipedia, join industry portals, do anything you can think of where customers lurk and always try to drop links as you go. Remember your link should be plain HTML and the "clickable text" should contain your keyphrase or something closely related.
10. A final check
Learn how to "view source". In most browsers you can go to a page and click on the "view" menu and then select "view source". Make sure that when you view the source for your page you can read (scattered amongst the HTML) your links, keyphrases and any accompanying text. if you cannot neither can the search engines! As an example, say you wonder why you are not getting traffic for the phrase "efficient widget generation". See if you have a page with a title that matches and then do a "view source" if you don't see "efficient widget generation" in the source (or you cannot even find a page with that title) then it is very unlikely you will attract traffic for that phrase; unless of course you have hundreds of high quality external websites linking to your website using that phrase...but once again that is beyond the scope of this document.
Note 1
Your internal linking structure is important: use a 301 redirect in your .htacess file to ensure that only http://www.example.com or just http://example.com displays your website. Whichever type of domain name you decide to use (WWW or no WWW) all pages should link back to your home page using the one you have chosen. (if you decide not to use the WWW, then it should be http://example.com NOT http://example.com/index.html or http://example.com/default.html). Check that your links are all plain HTML links (not javascript or flash becuase engines cannot follow these and find your pages)
Note 2
It is worth mentioning "long tail traffic" strategies. You will notice that the keyphrases at the top of your hierarchy will have much more traffic (your research tool gives you the traffic figures) than those at the bottom of the hierarchy. The longer phrases at the bottom are your "long tail" keyphrases. You should always try to get long tail traffic and following the above steps will ensure that you do. It is a very simple concept, just make sure you build pages that use those keyphrases that have more than two words in them even if they do not have much traffic. Even though longer phrases are not searched for anywhere near as much as 1 or two word phrases...you will have much less competition for them (sometimes zero competition) AND the traffic will be even better targeted and therefore convert into sales at a higher rate. Put most simply "if you build lots of pages for lots of long keyphrases you get lots of small amounts of highly converting traffic" :-)
Once you have completed these steps you will definitely increase your traffic substantially, however if you are in a competitive space you will need to spend a lot of time on point number 9. Indeed getting links to your website should be a never ending task. Make getting links to your website a priority for the duration of your business's life. You should budget at least an hour a day for it?....every time you comminicate with someone, think, "is there a way to get a link?" ...the simplest way to get links is to create really useful content that other sites will want to link to and if you follow the above steps you should achieve that. Of course this takes time and effort.