Optimizing a Site for Google

A fully optimized site is not built from the outside in — in other words, as a
visitor conceives it. Instead, you build an optimized site from key concepts
and keywords, and its pages never stray from a tight connection to those
concepts and their related keywords. Furthermore, business-oriented Web
designers are always focused on their target audience — the people who
search for the key concepts and keywords embedded in the Web page. This
circular thinking — the relentless integration of design with result, of keyword
with content — distinguishes a finely optimized site.
In theory, you would construct a perfectly optimized site in roughly this
order:
1. Conceive the site.
Conception means determining the site’s purpose in specific terms. An
optimized site can have more than one purpose (information publishing
and Amazon affiliation, for example), but those purposes should be
tightly related. Conception means also identifying your target audience.
2. Identify keywords.
Boiling down the site’s mission to key concepts and keywords is essential.
Keywords can be single words or phrases, but keep phrases short for
now — three words at most. For example, using the fictional The Coin
Trader site (from Chapter 3), the keywords and phrases might be coins,
coin trader, coin trading, trading, collecting, coin collecting, and so on.
Eventually, you need keywords for every page of your site, and they
might differ from the core words used to distill the subject matter of
your entire site. During the entire keyword process, think about your
target audience — not only as a topical demographic, but as searchers
going into Google with certain keywords. When you identify keywords,
you identify your customers.
3. Register a domain.
Choose a domain name that incorporates core keywords.
4. Design the site.
Use spider-friendly principles explained in this chapter, Chapter 3, and
the final section of Chapter 2.
5. Write and acquire content.
Content development is an ongoing process that starts while you design
the site.
6. Optimize content by keyword.
Embedding keywords in your page’s text helps visitors and Google
understand the content quickly.
56 Part I: Meeting the Other Side of Google
7. Tag the site.
Tagging means embedding keywords into important HTML tags that
Google’s spider observes.
So much for theory, you’re probably thinking. Few Webmasters deal with
optimization issues from the very start. Most people optimize after the fact,
which is why SEO professionals stay in business: It’s harder to fix problems
than avoid them. But no matter how you approach it, improving your optimization
isn’t hard at all. And the knowledge it provides about sound page
design, content development, concise communication, and smart tagging
translates to invaluable online marketing technique.
The steps just provided merely sketch a process. The following sections get
down to the nuts and bolts.