How To Structure Your Website Content
July 13, 2011 
2 Comments
This is the next post in the series How to Build a Business Online in 7 Steps.
Step 2: Website
The objective of this step is to improve your website so that it ranks on the first page of the search engines and the conversion rate increases substantially. The conversion rate is the percentage of people who visit your website that take some action on it, such as giving you their email address, downloading something, or preferably buying something!
Step 2.1 – Content structure and topics
As a business owner you may be called regularly by search engine optimisation companies offering to get your website onto page one of Google for a large monthly fee. The majority of these companies will select specific keywords to target and then use techniques to trick Google into ranking your website for those keywords and only those words. They may get your site on page one for a few weeks but it will quickly disappear into obscurity if this method of ranking is used.
Ranking a site by selective keywords is a costly, lengthy, and error prone approach. If you consider that the majority of websites will often only get 1-5 visitors per keyword phrase, you will have to optimise your website for a lot of keywords to get any decent traffic.
My approach is different.
What Google and the other search engines want is good quality content, which is why I consider the most important element for improving your website search rankings is supplying content that is directly relevant and useful to your customers.
By focusing on content you avoid having to spend hours working out the keywords people are likely to use when searching for your products or services, and what’s more you can also cover a larger number of words and phrases that will bring people to your website for less effort.
Hang on a minute Greg didn’t we do some basic keyword research in the first step in this series? Did I waste my time on that?
No you didn’t waste your time. The reason why I got you to do some simple keyword research was not to produce a list that we are going to optimise for, but instead to use that list to give us ideas and topics for content you can put on your website.
By going through that research process you also got an understanding of the types of words and phrases people are using which, in turn, gave you a better understanding of your market.
EXERCISE
- Take a look at the spreadsheet of keyword phrases you generated in the first step. Go through the list picking out 3 or 4 keyword phrases that are the most relevant to your business. Make sure the phrases you pick have a sufficient number of related keywords that can provide you with topic ideas for your content. These phrases will be your website categories.
- For each category list all of the keywords from your list that are relevant to that category. Ignore all single words.
Coming Next…
What to do with the categories you have defined.
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Hi Greg
Hope your well
These ideas are so powerful and perhaps magical in business/product sales context.
I think its like bowling an in swinging yorker in cricket terms.
Its pure science
what has man created to play.
thanks
Nadeem
Thanks for your kind words Nadeem. These apparently simple ideas are in fact very powerful it is a pity that many business people are not aware of them which is why I am doing my best to spread the word online.