We’re hopeful the following suggestions will save time, improve performance and make life generally better/easier for all of us.
It is a common mistake to think something like “we’ll design the site, and write the content, and then send it off for SEO”. That means rewriting and re-designing each page…after rewriting and redesigning them from the old site to the new site.
Please forgive the following lecturing tone, but, well this is sort of a tutorial, so take advice on what you already know with a grain of salt, and please embrace/question/challenge the rest. Some points will be stating the obvious, but there is also a lot of nuance and detail, so hopefully reading it carefully will be of benefit.
First things first – writing for the web is not technical. When words like ‘code’, ‘tags’, ‘keywords’, ‘anchor text links’ or ‘format’ get thrown about, they are no different than ‘punctuation’, ‘word choice’, or ‘grammar’. Really. I have a certificate to teach English so I’m sort of qualified to say that!
Let’s set the scene:
Site visitors will vary widely by demographic and purpose. Stereotypically they will fit within three general sales cycle categories. Discovery – Research – Purchase.
Ecommerce buying emotional triggers include ‘fear’ and ‘guilt’, and ‘trust’ ‘value’ and ‘belonging’ are most important. Instilling confidence through understanding is very important. To achieve conversions the site needs to be understandable, and convey quality and trust.
Whatever business that can be “closed” on the site, should be closed through the site. There probably won’t be a lot of personal follow-up for a very long time, and if we do marketing right there will be a lull, and then an avalanche of inquiries – and inquiries will turn into person to person contact that needs attention. The site needs to support these issues.
Ideally there should be a lot of first visit conversions, and visitors should be expected to return multiple times. Relationship marketing (trigger “belonging”) is fundamental. Content and layout needs to ‘ask for the order”
Returning ‘customers’ will be coming to ‘take care of business’ (information, contacts, etc) – but they are also ideal for cross-selling (a parent interested in the quality of the science classes finds out about after school programs or the futsal league – or spa treatment discounts for members, or swimming lessons, or wellness etc) To me this translates into content that always hints at and leads to more information.
Reach, relevancy, audience, behavior, purpose, goals, style…
… downstream value, re-usability, — efficiency of effort(s)
Concepts/Definitions:
Search Engine Optimization SEO — is not technical. it is about making the information findable. The more understandable and the more organized the site is for humans, then Google and the search engines will follow. Sure, there is a lot of technical stuff behind the scenes, but usually only to correct poor development practices. Websites are software, but they are really quite simple once the basics are understood. Hwoever, shortcuts cause more problems then most people realize.
URL – the website address for each page
Page Title – what you see in the browser tabs and at the top of the screen. For PIA new-site these will be automatically generated for most pages from the header tags, so while really important for SEO, not something we have to think about too much.
Meta Description – what is displayed by Google and search engines on the search engine results page. This is the 160-character paragraph that describes the Page. Primary pages should be generated manually as Custom pages. Secondary, less important pages should be generated automatically using a set phrase “Phuket International Academy” + headers from the page, and anchor text.
Headers, or H-tags – H1 through H6. Content writing MUST use these protocols.
H1 – there should be one per page. “About Us” for example.
Anchor Text Link – what sentence or paragraph describes the page, or describes the block of content. Usually this will point at the page or content from another page or website.
Keywords/Keyword Phrases – SEO sees these as ‘what words do people use to search’, the content writer would see these as the words of interest to readers – emphasize them and repeat them. The nuance and subtlety to this is that word order in phrases can be very important. Keywords for ‘topics’ or pages require research, and writing must incorporate this research otherwise the content is not relevant to the target audience. So it won’t be as interesting, and people won’t find it after searching on Google etc.
Article Spinning – the new method for generating both incoming traffic (people) and quality incoming links to the site (mandatory to achieve Quality Score and decent Search Engine Results Page performance) involves submitting articles to various blog and article directory submission services. The trick is to have non-duplicated content for each submission. This can be done by using synonyms and some code tags to tell software what to do.
Example:
Phuket International Academy (PIA) {Blueprint|Standard|Formula} for {Personal|Human} {Development|Achievement}
The Phuket International Academy (PIA) is a {innovative|pioneering|revolutionary|brand new} sports, education, arts and wellness facility {located|sited} Phuket Thailand. {It|PIA} {is comprised of|comprises} three synergistic centres: the PIA Day School, the PIA Sports, Arts and Wellness Centre and the PIA Mind Centre
When submitted to the article directories, random combinations will be generated and unique, non-duplicated content will be indexed by search engines. People will find these articles, but more importantly if anchor text links are used then good quality links to the site are established and the Quality Score is raised. There is some risk of diluting keyword ‘juice’ of the original site, so keywords in articles should be minimized – but anchor text should be relevant.
Under best practices each of these points need to be addressed when writing the original content.