Teach Yourself VISUALLY Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
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Chapter 2: Preparing Your Website for SEO
Your website is the most important element in the search engine optimization (SEO) process. You can optimize a well-built website easily and it will get a high ranking by default. A poorly structured website may be impossible to optimize and your SEO efforts may not help it reach the top of the search engine results. Thus, it is important to prepare your website before applying any SEO steps.
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Find a Website Niche
Before you start to build your website or choose the name, you have to determine your website niche or your business category. Finding the niche can help you to create a clear vision of the website’s structure, content, and organization. Also, it will give you ideas about the type of visitors you will have and how to design the website and the content to meet their needs. Websites in some niches have to be built in a specific way, such as is the case for e-commerce and news websites.
Compare Focused and General Interest Websites
Typically, there are two types of websites: those that are focused and those that address a general interest. Focused websites center on specific topics, such as iPhone cases or design jobs. While these types of websites are easy to optimize for search engines because they focus on one topic, it is not always easy to achieve the required target, especially if the website is a niche website with few visitors. General interest websites, such as the buy-and-sell websites and news portals, include a variety of content from different sources, which makes it harder to optimize them. At the same time, they are not as risky as the focused websites because they include different content categories.
Determine What Audiences Need
The audience or the website visitor is the most important factor that you have to consider when you design your website, build it, add the content, and optimize it for search engines. You have to understand the website visitors’ needs and how they will interact with the website. This information can help you determine the best website structure and content to use.
Consider a Product Website Placement
E-commerce websites and websites selling specific products are focused sites that require a special consideration with optimization. You need to focus all your SEO tactics to help the website appear at the top of the search engine results when a user types a specific product name or related words in the search field.
Establish Your Website Content
Website content varies according to the purpose of the site and its business target. For example, content on e-commerce websites focuses on product information, reviews, and image previews for the product. Tutorial and training websites include articles, images, and video websites such as YouTube focus primarily on video content.
Generate Revenue
There are many ways to generate revenue from your website. One is to sell a product or service to website visitors, which is considered e-commerce. If your website gets a good number of visitors, you can also turn traffic into revenue by including advertisements with your content. Deciding how to get revenue from your website depends on multiple factors; for example, you need to consider how advertisements will impact visitors’ satisfaction with your website.
Analyze Topics and Trends
To learn about different business niches and trends, you need to examine each niche with regard to people’s interest. One useful tool for analyzing each niche is Google Trends. With this tool, you can type any keyword or topic that you would like to use on a website and find more information about global interest in the topic, the countries most interested in the topic, and the related keywords to this trend or topic. You can also narrow the results from the left menu and compare this keyword with other terms in the Search Term area.
Analyze Topics and Trends
Type www.google.com/trends in your web browser.
Press .
The Google Trends page appears.
Note: You need to sign in using your username and password, or create a new account if you do already have one.
Type Online Business.
Click Explore.
The keyword information appears.
Scroll to Regional interest.
The map that shows the interest by region appears.
Click United States on the map.
The interest in the keyword United States appears.
TIPS
How can I compare two or more search terms?
You can compare two or more search terms in the Search Terms section. Click Add term. Type the term you would like to compare and then press to get a comparison between the terms on the map. You can use this option to compare two or more terms before choosing the term for your website.
How can I view the interest for the related terms?
You can view the related terms for your keyword at the bottom of the results page. When you click one of these related terms, you will be taken to a new results page, which shows global interest for the new term and different related terms.
Understanding Web Hosting
A web host is the online server or place where you upload your website files. The server is a computer with a special hardware configuration that enables it to save one or more website files. When a user types a website URL in the web browser, the server sends the website home page to the user. To understand how the website works, you need to learn basic hosting server terms and concepts, which you will use frequently when building your website and uploading it to the server.
Hosting Server Types
You can use several different types of hosting servers to host your website on the Internet. With Shared Web Hosting, many websites are located in one server and each website has its own patron on the server. This service is cheap and suitable for new websites that do not have many visitors. Once your website has a greater number of visitors, you can transfer your website files to a more professional server. A Dedicated Server is dedicated totally to one website, and the website owner should have strong networking skills to manage it. While it is expensive, it can handle large amounts of traffic and large numbers of files. A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is divided into small parts, which are known as nodes. VPS provides flexibility because you can increase the nodes when the website traffic increases.
Server Configuration
Storage, bandwith, and RAM are terms you should be familiar with when you search for servers or review different services. Storage refers to the storage capability of the website. You have to make sure that the hosting company will give you enough storage space to store your website files. An increase in storage size may lead to greater server costs. Bandwidth refers to the amount of traffic a server can receive. A larger bandwidth means that the server can receive more traffic. You need to make sure that the server provides enough bandwidth to be able to receive a lot of traffic, or provides a good upgrade plan to avoid any bandwidth-related problems in the future. RAM is the server’s random access memory. It is used to handle different website files, such as JavaScript files and Personal Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) programming language files that are used in creating dynamic websites.
Server Speed
The website speed refers to the server’s ability to respond to visitors’ requests by clicking links or loading pages. When visitors come to your website and find it loads slowly, they may leave and never visit again, unlike the fast websites. The server loading speed affects the visitors as well as the search engines that crawl your website to index its content. The search crawlers index the website content in a short period of time that can reach seconds. If your server is responding slowly to the search engine crawlers requests, the crawlers will leave the website without crawling all the pages. You can learn more about the server speed by reading customer reviews and feedback.
Server Security
Many new website owners do not give much focus to the website security issue, which can put them at risk of website hacking and malware scripts, which can infect your website and redirect traffic to other suspicious sites. The first important step in securing your website is to choose a secured server. While it is important to secure your website through using strong passwords, you need to make sure...
