Building a new website from scratch is difficult enough. By identifying the aims of the site and following our 5 simple tips in your planning process. Your site will be search engine friendly and ready to start driving traffic to your website.

1) Find out what keywords are important to your business

The starting point for any successful search engine optimisation campaign is to start right at the beginning. Look at your marketplace and find out what your customers are searching for and which search engines are important to your business. Google, Yahoo and MSN are all essential considerations. Use the search engines to firstly find your competitors, secondly to look at the keywords and search terms they are organically marketing, and finally to use this information to create a list of keywords and search terms which are appropriate to your business. Once you have assembled a list the next stage is to find out if your keywords will perform at a high level. Each search engine offers tools which will help you to find out how popular a search term is. Use this information to create a definitive list, removing, adding and editing to maximise your keywords potential traffic levels.

2) Build your site navigation to maximise your exposure

The next stage of the Search engine optimisation process is to create a website category tree using your keyword list. Simply categorise your keyword list into groups and to split the groups into pages. Each category and page should have approximately 4-6 keywords associated to it. Use the category tree to build the navigation of your website.

3) Target the content of your site to your market

This simple stage makes complete sense. Content is the most important part of any successful Search engine optimisation campaign. By targeting your content to include the appropriate page and category keywords and search terms, you are enabling each of the search engines to view your sites content, understand subject matter, and list and index the page correctly under important keywords and search terms. By following this process, you will be in control of where and how your site appears within Google, Yahoo and MSN. This will help to maximise your sites exposure.

4) Write descriptive, keyword rich, page titles and meta data

To help maximise page search engine marketing and indexing it is essential to make sure your page titles and descriptions contain your on page keywords and search terms and are descriptive, selling the page to the user. Don’t forget traditional marketing, good content with a clear sales message will increase your conversion rates.

5) Make every page unique

Finally the more pages you have the more opportunities you have to appear under more keywords and search terms. Keep adding new pages to your site, target the pages to new markets, and make every page unique. Don’t duplicate content.

The next stage to maximising your site organic, search engine optimisation conversion will be to commence a link building campaign. This will need to be a combination of social media marketing, one way link building, article submission, directory submission and social media bookmarking.