Keyword research must be the foundation of any serious website design process.

Most web designers make a serious mistake when they build sites. They either don’t consider search engine optimisation at all, or they add it as an afterthought once the site is built.
You need to build each page of your website on the right keywords, right from the start. Do your keyword research upfront, so you know before you even build your site what keywords your visitors are likely to be searching for.

And most important, don’t undertake a website design … or a re-design … without first taking SEO into account. Even the best looking site is worthless if no one can find you on Google!

Three top keyword tips
1.    Use your main keywords in the headline on your page.
2.    Use your main keywords in the first paragraph of the page.
3.    Use your main keywords liberally throughout the page. But don’t “stuff” your page with keywords. It must sound natural, or Google will get suspicious and penalise your site. It helps, too, if some of the keywords are in bold. This is an extra bonus that will encourage the search engine “spiders” to give greater weighting to your keywords – and give you a better ranking.

Meta tags – the second aspect of webpage optimisation

Meta tags are the hidden tags written in the HTML code of your website. They are designed to tell the search engines what your page is about. If you want to get a top search engine position, you must put the right content in your meta tags.

The all-important TITLE tag

It’s worth noting that Google now relies most heavily on the TITLE tag when it ranks your site. It is vital that you put your keywords in the TITLE tag. Don’t just put your company name. This is a mistake that many website owners make. You can put your company name as well as your keywords, if you like. (But if your title is more than 10 words, the last words will probably not appear in the browser bar.)

Sometimes the TITLE is the only information about your site that appears in search results. The TITLE is what people use for bookmarks. So it’s important to get it right.
Using your primary keywords in your TITLE tag is the most powerful thing you can do to boost your search engine ranking.

The DESCRIPTION tag

After the TITLE, the description is your second chance to persuade people to visit your website – or not. So it should be an accurate guide to what’s on the page. And it must be worth reading.

Ideally, you should use exactly the same keywords to start your description tag as you used for the TITLE. Then you can elaborate further on the content of the page.

The KEYWORD tag

The third meta tag is the keyword tag. A few years ago, people used to think the more keywords they could cram into this tag the better. They would list hundreds of keywords. Now, this is a waste of time. In fact, Google regards it as “spamming” and will penalise you if you repeat too many keywords.

So limit the number of keywords on each page of your site. It’s best to focus on just a few keywords for each page.

As you can see meta tags are not rocket science. And if you do it right, you are almost guaranteed to dramatically increase your search engine ranking.

Headings

After the meta tags, the next thing search engines look for on your web page are the headings.

In HTML, these are designated by H1, H2, H3 etc. H1 is usually the main headine, with H2, H3 etc for sub-headings.

Since headlines often contain important hints to the content of the webpage, search engines take note of any keywords found here. So it’s important to include your keywords in the headline and sub headings.

This may seem a bit technical, but it’s important. Make sure your web designer uses these H1, H2, H3 tags on your pages (not all web designers do).

Don’t accept from your designer that it isn’t important to use H1 tags anymore. If you’re serious about SEO, it definitely is!

Body text

This refers to the main content of your web page and it is very important that your keywords are used in the right places on the page.

Search engines look at the first paragraph for a clue as to what the web page is about, so you need to include your main keywords there.

Furthermore, search engines look at the final paragraph, on the assumption that it will summarise the ideas on the page, so it helps to have your keywords in there, too.

You also need to use your keywords on the rest of the page, in a natural way. Don’t overdo it, though. The copy must sound natural. Google is so sophisticated now, it can detect when keywords have been used unnaturally in a page, and you are likely to get penalised.

Every page on your website – not just the home page – needs to be search engine friendly! This is the basic level of care that your website designer should take when building your site. If they didn’t, you will need to go through each page and make some tweaks.

In summary

The ideal web page has the main keywords in:
•    the title tag
•    the description tag
•    the headline and sub-headings
•    the first and last paragraphs
•    a few times in the main body of the page.

If all these places use the same keywords consistently, you will have the maximum chance of getting a good ranking.