My website Search Engine Optimization plan – Part 1

To get a (better) ranking in the Search Engine Result Pages, in Google, Yahoo or any other, there a some things you can do easily. 
First you need to define a plan. Focus first on the things you can adapt with little effort !

Here is the plan I’m trying out on my website.

1. Define the most essential keyword(s) to describe your website. Knowing your website’s objective and your target group could in come handy at this stage.    Hey, would they be : "SEO, Websites and CMS" ?
   There are free tools to help you finding similar keywords.
   To make your life easier, you could do a search in Google for your keyword, and the number of results gives you an idea of the competition. Yep, this won’t be easy .
2. If possible get a domain name with your keyword or be creative.
   This helps your visitors and search engines to determine the topic of your website.
   seo.be and seo.com are already taken, the same for searchengineoptimization.be.
   But search-engine-optimization.be was free until a few minutes ago
   I’ll continue to use isee.be (shorter), but search-engine-optimization.be will come in useful for backlinks. But backlinks I’ll get to in a next stage.
3. Use a user friendly internal navigation and a logical website structure.
   A readable URL helps the user understanding the content quickly (and is search engine friendly). Choosing a good Content Management System (a search engine friendly CMS) could help you a lot ! To optimize WordPress (and here) is relatively easy.
   Don’t use systems search engines "can’t navigate". This means a big NO for JavaScript menu’s, frames, flash or images for navigation, etc…
   Read the Google guidelines !
4. Get a Google account and add your site to your webmaster tools. Here you can find useful information about your website, and you can announce your new website to Google.
   I didn’t bother to try if Yahoo, Live and other outcasts offer the same service. My mistake I suppose.
5. Write unique quality articles worth reading : (one of my weak points !)
   If humans find your articles important, they’ll also be important for Google, Yahoo and friends. A good article with meaningful keywords, helps Google to determine and classify the article’s contents.
   And other websites might want to link to your page which is for Google a vote for you’re article and your domain.
6. Choose each article title with care.
   Include one of more of your essential keywords in the page title (metadata) and article (H1) title, but only if it matches the contents of the article.
   In WordPress by default the website name seems to be by default the H1-tag, and the article title is the H2-tag. A combination of both is used as the page title but this is easily adapted. I’m not entirely happy about this, so I’m editing the template I’m using.
7.  Keep your website worth visiting : only an article every 6 months won’t keep me coming back. A living and breathing website, attracts regular visitors, and this is good for your ego ! And with some luck a few will link to one of your articles.

 That’s it for now, more later !