Designing your Site

Outline of Steps for SEO

We will look at some of these steps in more detail in later chapters, but here we will try and get an overview of some of the main factors involved.



First and most important:

You need lots of content, LOTS of it. Before you have even considered site design and such, you should have 100 odd pages of actual content. Yes, there are supposed to be two zero’s on the end of that 1… 100, I mean it. A page of content means about 200-500 words. Of course, no-one does this, I didn’t! But, if you are serious of getting gobs of traffic, and you do have lots of rich content to publish, just think how far ahead you will be of poor schmuks like me.

As I mentioned before, designing your site for traffic, both human and search engine spider is very different than a few years ago. It’s now about what is on the page that people can see. No more having a 200 keyword list that is set to the same color as the background
at the bottom of the page.

If you are impatient, according to the “SEO guys”, here are the most important factors in deciding your SERP, along with a number I came up with to show relative value. This shows you the actual relative value between, say, having good anchor text links compared to keywords in the H1 tag. These ten factors add up to 21% of the SERP based on these estimates.