This article explains the nitty gritty of what to work towards and how to structure your site to achieve most benefit.

Let's get started, shall we? First up - the planning before you do anything, preferably even before you purchase a domain name.  There is planning to be done to get the most search engine benefit out of your site.  This stuff is boring.  Dry.  Difficult to read.  Understanding it will do things for your website that you cannot imagine.

Keywords and Keyword Phrases: Setting Your Targets

Let's just say you run a hair and beauty salon.  The first thing you need to do is reverse the thinking process of people looking for your site.  It matters what you think your site is about and what you offer a customer, but it is far more important to know what the web searcher is looking for.  You may think that your business is about "hair styles" and "beauty treatments".  But surfers may not be looking for these things - they may search on "pedicure manicure brisbane" or "professional hair stylist".  You need to know what people are typing into search engines when they are looking for your goods and services.

There are two parts to this puzzle - there's you...and your competition.  You need to know what phrases people are looking for (say, "website designer" or "business website") and you also need to know how competitive these phrases are.  There's no point deciding to focus on "hair salon" - there are 65,600,000 results in Google - far too competitive.  However, if you look for "Brisbane Hair Salon", there are only 603,000 results competing with you.  Pick your battles well.

You may think that your business is about "hair styles" and "beauty treatments"...surfers may...search on "pedicure manicure brisbane" or "professional hair stylist".

Website Domain: The Name

The name of your domain will matter.  The domain name www.brisbanehairsalon.com.au will rank better for a search on "Brisbane Hair Salon" than www.miffyshairstyling.com.au.  Because every page on your business website will start with your domain name, the benefit of a well chosen business name will multiply with every page you put up.  This is often a tricky balance, because your domain name should also reflect your business name.

Website Design: Top Level Structure

The "structure" of your website will matter.  Lets say you sell widgets and gadgets.  Users and search engines like it when you categorise your pages and provide structure as to what pages are about, with pages logically grouped by topic.  If all of your pages are just in the base directory of your site, then you aren't categorising them at all!  If however you have a few pages in the base directory (your home page, about us, contact and the like), then you have a folder named "widgets" for all your "widget" pages and a folder named "gadgets" for all your gadget pages, then here's what your site looks like:

www.widgetsandgadgets.com.au
www.widgetsandgadgets.com.au/contact.html
www.widgetsandgadgets.com.au/aboutus.html
www.widgetsandgadgets.com.au/gadgets/gadgets.html
www.widgetsandgadgets.com.au/gadgets/bluegadgets.html
www.widgetsandgadgets.com.au/widgets/widgets.html
www.widgetsandgadgets.com.au/widgets/redwidgets.html

Much better for the search engines, as each folder clearly defines what a particular group of pages is about. So think about all the pages you want to put up on your business website, then think about how to group them into folders (or equivalent of folders), so that all the pages relating to a single topic are grouped together.

...think about all the pages you want to put up on your business website, then think about how to group them into folders

Website Content: Pages and Page Names

Once you know what folders you're going to run with, you should then think about how to split up all your content across multiple pages. If you're a seller of gadgets, you could probably write pages and pages about gadgets.  Big long pages aren't great - shorter pieces of information are better (unless you're deliberately trying to produce a "one page encyclopaedia" that contains all the reference material necessary in a single place).  When you know what each page is about, you should decide on a file name for the page that is clear, easy to understand and contains words that are relevant to whats on the page.  So, maybe you'd end up with some pages like this:

• index.html
  Index is the "home page" of every single folder on your website.  If a file named index.html is in the base directory of your site, then it is also the home page of your entire website.  In this case, its the index page of the "gadgets" folder - this would talk about gadgets generally and what information you have on gadgets.
• gadgets.html
  This would most likely be about the benefits or uses of gadgets.
• gadgettypes.html
  A page about the different types of gadgets and how they are different from each other.
• gadgetprices.html
  A page about the prices of gadgets.
• gadgetinformation.html
  Perhaps a page of information about gadgets - like Frequently Asked Questions (usually called "FAQs").

So what you have here is 5 pages, all about gadgets.  In a gadgets folder, all of which should link to each other.  Search engines are going to rightly interpret that you have a lot of information about gadgets on your site.  Perhaps you only need 3 pages about gadgets, or maybe you need 10.  Either way, this is all about looking at what you want to say on your website and splitting it up into smaller pieces, so that each page is about a single topic.  All of the file names (except index.html) contain the word "gadget" which tells you (when you're editing), surfers (when they're surfing) and search engines (when they're crawling) that each page is most definitely about "gadgets" in some way or another.

...looking at what you want to say on your website and splitting it up into smaller pieces, so that each page is about a single topic

Website Design: Navigation

Once you've figured out how you're going to structure the website for your business, along with the pages necessary to categorise each topic, next comes how to link them all up so that viewers can get around your site easily while search engines get everything they want.  Your navigation should generally follow the "flow" of your folder structure.  So all of the gadget pages should link to each other - they are all about the same stuff - gadgets.  People who want to look at gadget page #1 will probably want to look at gadget page #2 and so on.  Also, the search engines will look at this and get the idea that all of the gadget pages are related - they are in the same folder and they all link to each other!  So the search engines will rightly interpret that all these pages that link together are all about gadgets.  It will then rank you appropriately based on all of the content you have about gadgets.

So that describes what should happen within each folder, but what about the overall navigation?  Well, you should have a menu on every single page that links to every "major" grouping on your site.  If you have a folders for gadgets, widgets, whatsits and thingymajigas, then you should have navigation that points to each of these folders on your site.  Make it easy for viewers to see all of the topics that you have pages about.  Once they are on a topic page, your navigation will also show them every other page you have on that same topic.  Its kind of like a pyramid.

Next Steps

If you have all of the above planned out well, you're about 1/3 of the way there.  The next article deals with what to do on each individual page and how you should tweak it for users and search engines alike.