Optimising your client's website for SEO

By optimising your new client's website for their keywords you are improving the chances of their website displaying high in the search engines like Google much sooner. You need to do this before setting the website live. The more thorough you are with optimising the site, the better your client's website will perform. This will play a major factor in turning your new clients into raving fans as well, especially as for some it only takes a little bit for them to be found (tip: keep a note from before you do this as to their placements for their identified key words / phrases).

To optimise your client's website:

1. Speak to the client to gain an understanding of what products or services are their most important. Ask them what they believe their potential clients would enter into a search engine to find their products / services?
2. Go to the Google AdWords keyword tool.
3. Peruse the client’s website and find the products and services that may work well as keywords. For instance, a paving company may have "pavers," "paving," "natural stone" or "bricks."
4. Type a potential keyword into the search box. A list will appear with the word you typed in as well as a range of other related words. The results will show how much competition there is for these words (a full green bar means lots of competition) and how many Local Monthly Searches are done for this word.
5. Choose a selection of words, up to about 5, that are relevant to your client’s website and have a high number of monthly searches and preferrably a low competition. Take note of words that are very similiar but have a very different Monthly Search rates. For instance, “paving” is searched by many more people than “pavers” so you may like to optimise the site for “paving” instead or as well as “pavers”. Write these words down in a list with the most searched term at the top.
6. Repeat this for all the keywords you want to use.
7. Start editing the client’s website and include the highlist ranking words wherever you feel is appropriate. Google ranks the various fields in a website in the following order:
   1. Page Name
   2. Titles
   3. Headings
   4. Links - as much as is reasonable, link keywords on one page to other pages in the website (a popular location is on the home page - or in a footer promo box)
   5. Alt text on images
   6. Meta Description - what you write in here has to make sense as it is the text that appears underneath a web page in the search engine's results.
   7. Text

Ensure that you optimise your client's website wherever possible. This includes adding content to the keywords field in the Gallery Tool, using keywords in the descriptions of products in the catalogues, and including alt tags on ALL images.

When working with keywords, keep in mind the following:

• Do not use heading font excessively. Google will penalise you for this.
• Do not bold or underline excessively - only for your keywords.
• Use 6 - 8 different keywords on each page. It helps to type the keywords you intend to use for that page in the Meta Keywords box. Any more than 8 and Google will start to think you are keyword stuffing.

Last Updated: 29/10/2012

For updated content please refer to the SEO Guideline here