Priming your site for search engine optimisation is essentially about making the most of what you have. A little like being a beauty queen forced to go au natural with make up and wardrobe. Cosmetic enhancements may result in your site being indexed quicker but if the page’s beauty is only skin deep the high will be followed by plummeting lows as your site sinks without trace in the search engine results.

You can check that your web site is primed for search engine optimisation before you begin drawing up on-page optimisation and link building tasks.

Keywords

The easiest way to begin your preparation is to build a list of ten important keywords. These should reflect your main service offerings as they are the phrases you will want to appear in web search results for. When you’ve decided on these primary keywords, make a second list of their synonyms and variations. If you sell garden fences for example, a synonym may be garden fencing. These keywords should be ordered according to their important. Placing them in sequence in this way will focus your attention when you begin search engine optimisation activity.

Page Titles and Alt Tags

Now that you have your keyword list, you know the terms you should be including in your page titles and Alt tags. Aim to include a minimum of two to three keywords from your keyword list on each page. Don’t fall into the trap of shoehorning as many as possible into the small space allocated for page titles and alt tags though. The title and tags should accurately describe the content of the page or the image.

On-Page Optimisation (Content)

Having familiarised yourself with the keywords that will form the mainstay of your search engine optimisation campaign, it’s time to check that they feature prominently in the web page text. Not only should there be a good keyword density of the top ten phrases compiled during phase one of the SEO process but their synonyms and derivatives should also be easy to pick out. If you haven’t included keywords or secondary strings you’ll need to refresh the page content to reflect your newly identified key phrases.

Internal Links

When you’re optimising for search, it’s not just external links that you need to pay attention to. Links from pages within your site to other internal pages also play their part. This is very easy to accomplish naturally and uses the same principles as pay per click deep linking. Each time you mention a specific product or service sector, include a link to the web page on your site that is dedicated to that particular area of your expertise.