Surprised to find out that good SEO is more about good content than good web design alone?  Well, it’s true.  Many web designers will tell you that they’re going optimize your site to achieve top search engine rankings—and while their intentions might be perfectly legit—the fact of the matter is that a site’s SEO-friendly design & development really only serves to support excellent, keyword-rich content to be contained within a site.

At least that’s the quick version anyway.  Regardless, now that we have that common misconception out of the way, we should move on to the real bread and butter of getting higher search engine rankings…writing good, keyword-rich content.

What Are The Standards Of Good Keyword Optimized Web Copy?

Writing good SEO-friendly copy for your website will generally be a matter of customizing to specific site needs on a site-by-site basis.  However, there are some rather steadfast guidelines to follow:

Keyword Research First – It’s impossible to write good keyword-rich content without having specific knowledge beforehand on which keywords and keyword phrases you’ll utilize.  Many start their research by using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to come up with ideas for some high demand, low supply keywords to use.  Regardless of the method, you’ve got to pick topically relevant keywords to use first.

Write Naturally – Some “over-optimizers” used to suggest that the best way to rank well with good keyword rich content was to use a certain keyword density, or in other words, an exact percentage of how many times the keyword was used in the copy compared to the overall word count.  This is nonsense these days—could even be implied as spam—so avoid.  Instead, try to create a helpful piece of content that you would write regardless; it’s best to write naturally and then maybe go back and add in the keyword phrase you’re optimizing for a few times where it fits optimally.  Never, never over use it on purpose though.

Optimize Your Title & Headings – Definitely use the keyword phrase exactly once within the page’s title.  This is super-important.  You might also use it naturally in a heading or sub-heading within the page copy.  Other than that, just remember: keep it natural.

Use Similar Keywords – If you’re writing a topic focused piece of web content or blog post, chances are already good that you’re using lots of natural related lingo throughout the copy in addition to your optimized keyword or keyword phrase.  This is good—you’ll want to have a few appropriate related keyword variations and relevant similar keywords within the copy.  Again, though, this is almost instinctual anyway when writing topically-focused web content.

The Bottom Line – Keep it natural, natural, natural.  Write what your visitors want to read.  Be sure to answer questions they’re asking and address concerns they might have.  Really work hard to put yourself in the mindset of your target visitor when writing.  By all means, build the content around a specific keyword—and ideally focus on just one main featured keyword per page or post.  But at the same time, never push it to the level of becoming unnatural or spammy.

Follow these simple steps to writing good, keyword-rich content—and of course, make sure your web designer has paid attention to the important supporting factors within the design & development.  With this strategy in mind, you’ll be well on the way to getting higher search engine rankings.

Choosing the right blog platform is not always that easy—not that it really should be all that difficult either.  Here’s the thing…between the major blogging platforms out there, many get confused as to what these systems and services actually offer and how they work.  Let’s try and clarify the confusion here a bit if possible…

The Big 3 Blogging Platforms

WordPress

Extremely popular among its users and professional web developers alike, the WordPress blog platform has certainly earned its position at the front of the pack.  Often a significant point of confusion, though, is the fact that there are actually two different variations of WordPress out there—WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

For those looking for a standalone blog system that’s free and already hosted, WordPress.com is the answer.  While this is great for those just testing the waters with blogging, mostly because it’s free and easy, there are drawbacks.  For example, going this route more or less ties you to using their system, their hosting, and often, their domain—the dot com version of WordPress is not very flexible for developers and power-users.

Enter WordPress.org.  For those wanting to integrate a top-tier blogging system with their websites—or perhaps even use the system to power their entire site—the dot org version of WordPress is hard to beat.  Dot-org WordPress is actually extremely stable and robust open source software that you have to install on your own hosting provider (that must meet certain requirements).  From there, a developer is free to customize and integrate to their heart’s content.  This is probably why WordPress.org is becoming as extremely popular as it is.

Blogger

Blogger is Google’s entry into the blogging market.  While it’s hard to fault what comes from Google, this platform isn’t as pro-friendly as some of the others.  In other words, it’s created more for the average consumer—the person that just wants to start blogging without having to mess with all kinds of complex setup or anything of the sort.

Blogger is free—and most Blogger sites are hosted and reside on the service’s own servers.  From the standpoint of simplicity, all you’d really need to get started is to log in with a Google ID, pick a name for your blog, and pick a blog theme from the array that they offer.

Downfalls to Blogger?  Well, even though it was pretty much the first, it has lost some popularity with power-users due to fact that it simply isn’t as well-featured or easy to integrate with an existing site (like WordPress is).

TypePad

TypePad is another reasonable popular blogging platform.  As one of the top tier blogging systems out there, it adds a nice alternative choice to the above mentioned platforms.  While it’s secure, works as it should, and offers a good choice of quality designs to choose from, it is a subscription-based service with fees beginning under $10 per month.

This blogging platform can be integrated with your own existing website or can also be used as a stand-alone option through their provided hosting.  However, even when integrated into a third-party site, users still must manage the blog through TypePad’s service—this can be a hindrance for some.  The bottom line is that it’s probably worth a try if you’re not satisfied with the other options out there, even though it really doesn’t stand out as a best pick option for many.

Our Pick?

We knew you’d ask!  Here at Sleepless Media, we choose to use WordPress.org almost exclusively.  It integrates beautifully with our customers’ websites—and customization is practically unlimited.  Then there’s the fact that it’s been designed and tweaked from the ground-up by a passionate team of open-source developers to be faithfully SEO-friendly.

There’s a massive user-base out there, so any bugs or security flaws are quickly found and worked out by the masses—this also means that there are very frequent revisions and updates releases.  Not to worry though, because the platform integrates a one-click update option.  Just like “there’s an app” these days for pretty much anything, the same goes for WordPress.org—there’s a plug-in available to allow pretty much anything you can imagine.

Oh, and to top it all off, did we mention that WordPress.org is free?  It’s certainly hard to argue with this pick when the possibilities are nearly endless and the cost to access this excellent software is zero.  Although customizing, integrating with websites, and further development do come with a nominal price for time, skills, and expertise, all in all, the cost is kept to a minimum thanks to the head start from WordPress.

1. Goals.

Without specific goals in mind (in other words, a list of the exact traffic measurements and figures you’d like to achieve), effectively grasping quality SEO results is a misnomer.  Without goals, you might get there, or you might not…the thing is, you’ll never even know one way or the other.  The key to success is carrying out your optimization plans with focus and aim, through measurable and definable goals.

2. A Plan.

Yes, in order to be as SEO-friendly as possible, every website with this vital ambition in mind needs a plan to achieve the actual results they desire.  We make business plans when starting and growing our businesses, we use blueprints to build our homes—why not carefully craft a written game plan for SEO too?

3. Keywords.

Moving on from the conceptual things your website needs to succeed with SEO to the more tangible items used to carry out the plan, we definitely need to include keywords.  Every page of an SEO-friendly website is ideally optimized around just one or two unique keyword phrases.  This means the written content, the meta-data, the image tags, and so on.  Part of your SEO plan will be developing a list of targeted keyword phrases to utilize on your site (and defining where they’ll go).

4. Clean Web Structure.

Using squeaky-clean HTML/PHP/CSS coding (not Flash) is the way to go when creating a website structure that’s extraordinarily SEO-friendly.  Search engines really like to see attention to detail in the coding—this means being fully standards-compliant whenever possible.  Clean web structure serves two purposes with the search engines.  First, they’re able to crawl and index your site better because it is easy for their “robots” to understand.  And secondly, they know that if you pay attention to the details, you’re most likely offering a better quality site than your competitors that don’t follow this principle.

5. Great Content.

What do your visitors come to your site to see?  Content.  What do search engines help their users find?  Again, content.  Coincidence?  Not at all.  Provide great quality content—always go above and beyond and strive to make it perfect.  Be informative, yet different than the masses.  Offer your visitors what they’re looking for and over-deliver in every way with content.

6. Title Tags.

Moving on to the picky details of SEO, there’s one small technical detail that undoubtedly makes more of an impact than all the others combined.  Look at the very top left of your web browser’s window…okay, did you look yet…what does it say?  This is the page’s title tag—and it’s vital to a web page’s SEO-friendliness.  It should be brief, to the point, descriptive of the page’s content, and it should contain the page’s optimized keyword.  Search engines use this to understand your page and also to help them describe what your page is all about to their visitors.  If nothing else, be sure to get this one right.

7. Additional Meta-Data.

Other behind the scenes Meta-data like your page’s Meta-description, Meta-keywords, and image tags are often dismissed these days as being unnecessary.  This couldn’t be further from the truth—search engines today might not take this information verbatim, but it does help define the overall focus of your website’s pages.  It also helps with usability—which is another plus-factor when it comes to SEO-friendliness.  Don’t get spammy with Meta-data or “over-optimize” it, but do be sure to use it accurately for what it was intended for.

8. Balanced Link Profile.

For many SEO-spammers, achieving a great “PageRank” is viewed as the holy grail.  Ignore this strategy and instead focus on building a super high quality balanced link profile instead.  This means achieving a variety of natural incoming links (backlinks) to your site from a good cross-section of relevant authority sites when possible.  And the part that many forget is that it also means sharing a few outgoing links from your own site when they’re helpful to your visitors.  Search engines are smart enough to know that sites with a huge number of incoming links only—especially when they’re built really quickly—are suspicions and unnatural.  Being this is undesirable for sure, because search engines only want to share healthy, natural, organic quality sites with their visitors.

9. Great Navigation.

Having crystal clear navigation throughout your site is extremely important in order to be SEO-friendly.  Your visitors need to be able to make their way around your site with complete confidence.  But also an important factor, the search engine bots also need to be able to crawl your site with ease.  A great navigational structure will help you achieve both.  Also accurately listed under this category is including a search engine friendly sitemap within your website.

10. Activity.

What good is a perfectly SEO’d website if there’s just not any activity there?  Visitors want a vibrant, fresh website environment full of new and updated content (and the search engines know this).  Accordingly, the search engines do give favor to sites that are updated on a regular basis—sites that are full of activity.  One helpful way of achieving this, of course, is to include a blog section in your site.  Keep it professional…but keep it lively as well to look alive to the search engines.

At the initial sight or sound of the two-word terms “web design” and “web development,” it is understandably easily to assume that they are one in the same.  Or at least similar, for that matter.  But really, the two major parts that go into the creation of a website are substantially different from each other.

How about a few comparisons that help to explain web design vs. web development:

• Web designers are artists; Web developers are geeks (in a good way, of course).
• Web design is an art; Web development is a science.
• Web designers are architects; Web developers are builders.
• Web design is creative; Web development is technical.
• Web designers are right-brained; Web developers are left-brained.

The list could on, but these examples will probably suffice for now—and hopefully provide some initial clarity on the relationship between web design and web development.

What Does Web Design Involve?

Web designers basically practice a unique brand of graphic design.  Great web designers are creative artists that know how to bring design together perfectly with goals and desires in order to “paint a picture” that draws the visitor’s eye.  Web design is all about getting the colors right and getting the shapes and sizes right; it focuses on images, fonts, and where they should be on the page.  And naturally, it combines all of the elements found throughout a website into one cohesive look & feel.  Web design really is an art!

What Does Web Development Involve?

Web developers take the graphical web design—the look and feel, if you will—and make it work.  Web development is all about coding, software programming, and making the technical aspects of a website work exactly the way they should.  It also typically involves the ensuring that security and web hosting are setup and implemented just the way they should be…and that everything works well together from a functionality perspective. Your web developers are the mad scientists behind the scenes that bring the designer’s vision to life.

Now, For The Kicker…

Some web designers are also great web developers; and some web developers are also very proficient at web design.  If that sounds confusing, just remember, like anything in life, sometimes the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain work together in perfect harmony.  As a full-service web firm, here at Sleepless Media, we happen to be harmoniously proficient at both the art of design and the science of development.

Why Is Balance Between The Two Practices So Important?

You’ve probably seen websites that come across as way too technical and logical.  On the other hand, you’ve surely run across websites that theoretically look fantastic—but then they don’t work correctly or jam up your entire computer.  Either of these scenarios can happen when balance between design and development is off-kilter.

The bottom line is that in order for a web design to work, in order for it to achieve and carry out the goals expected of it, a fine-line combination of both web design and web development must be implemented with great care.