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Your Website from the Ground Up in 10 Steps
By Scott Van Achte, Senior SEO, StepForth Web Marketing Inc.
(http://news.stepforth.com/)

So, you have finally decided to build yourself a website, but
really have no idea where to start. The following 10 steps will
give you some insight into what you need to address when
creating a search friendly website from the ground up.

While this article is not an exhaustive list of everything you
need to know, it does touch base on many of the important
aspects of creating a new website.

Step 1 - Keyword Research
Even before you choose your domain name, you should put a little
time into some keyword research. Research all the possible
keywords that will fit your industry and the website you plan on
building. Having a clear idea of what your end targets are will
make the rest of your job much easier and help things to just
fall into place. Take a look at Keyword Research for SEO
(http://news.stepforth.com/blog/2007/07/
keyword-research-for-organic-seo.php), written earlier this
summer, for more help on this.

Step 2 - Domain Selection
If you already have an established brick and mortar business and
the website will be an extension of that business, using your
company name as the domain name is in most cases the best idea.
If your company name is either irrelevant, or simply unavailable,
you may want to consider a domain that has your target phrase
listed as part of the domain.

A great example of this is if your site is focused
geographically. Using the location as part of the domain when
possible will give you a little extra juice with the search
engines and help draw people to your site as they instantly can
see the relevance in the domain.

Let's say that you are building a website focused on your home
town, "Somewhere USA". A domain you may consider could be
"Somewhere.com"; however, this would probably be already
taken. Other options such as "SomewhereInfo.com" or
"SomewhereGuide.com" may be good alternatives. The same goes
for retail stores. "SomewhereCameras".com or
"SomewhereBakery".com would also be good choices.

Avoid excessive use of hyphens; sometimes it is appropriate to
use one, but if you can help it, avoid more than that as it can
appear messy and even spammy in some cases.

Step 3 - System Back End
If you plan on having a large scale website that will grow and
change constantly then you may want to consider a content
management system (CMS) such as Joomla. If you decide to go this
route, you want to ensure that whichever CMS you choose is search
engine friendly and offers items such as unique title tags,
custom URL's, and full control over content, heading tags,
image alt tags, etc.

Starting a website using a non-friendly CMS is like buying a car
without an engine. Sure it may look great, but it won't get you
anywhere.

Step 4 - Site Structure & Navigation
This is really one of the most fundamental aspects of your site
creation. If the structure of your site does not work well, then
your site may be doomed from the very beginning.

Take a look back at your keyword research and brainstorm all the
areas of your site that you may want to develop content for. In
some cases you may find valuable keywords that would fit
perfectly into a few pages of content for your site. If the
phrase and the content would be a good match for the theme of
your site, go ahead and note them as pages to create. Get a
list, or flowchart, of all the content you plan on adding and
sort those pages into relevant categories.

Be sure your site files are saved in a way that makes sense -
this includes both the file name, and the complete path to the
file. Save files, including similar content in a relevant
subdirectory, with simple file names representing each. Let's
take an example of an informational site dedicated to a specific
geographic location. If you have a series of pages dedicated to
recreation, you may save them as:

/recreation/parks.html
/recreation/trails.html
/recreation/beaches.html

Keeping your URL structure clean and tidy can not only help with
search engine rankings, but it will give a good visual
impression to the site visitor as well. Often, using each of
these categories as main points for your primary site navigation
may make the most sense.

Also be sure to keep your site relatively flat, with as few
layers as possible. Don't make the search engines follow a
dozen links to get to the deepest levels of your site. Unless
the site is literally tens of thousands of pages, there is no
need to click more than 2 or 3 links to get to any deep content.
The shorter the path to an internal page, the more credit by the
search engines.

Step 5 - Navigation
When developing the end site, you also want to make sure that
your site navigation is search engine friendly - this is
critical if you ever want free organic listings.

If possible, use a text based form of navigation. You can use CSS
to style the text links to fit into your graphical design. Text
links are the best method, but image based navigation and
even some forms of drop down menus are also search engine
friendly.

If you choose to use image based navigation be sure to include
image alt text relevant to the link to give something for Google
to associate with the linked page. If you absolutely must use
Flash, or any form of navigation not friendly for search engine
spiders, be sure to supplement this with text based links on
another location of the page.

Step 6 - Analytics
It's never too early to start thinking about your stats. Before
your site goes live you must have some form of accurate
analytics in place so you can measure your site's traffic and
progress.

There is an endless supply of analytics options out there to
choose from. You can simply use the stats software that comes
free with your web hosting, however, more often than not, they
tend to be very basic with no flexibility. Advanced choices such
as ClickTracks can give you rather in-depth statistics, but for
a very small mom and pop operation it may be too expensive.
Google Analytics, is a free option that can give you most, if
not all the data you will need and does not require access to
your raw log files.

If you do opt for an option such as ClickTracks, check with your
host to ensure that you will have the raw log files you require.
StepForth can also help you with your statistical analysis and
offers a number of inexpensive ClickTracks service packages
(http://stats.stepforth.com/comparison.php).

Step 7 - Content Creation
Now is the time to get that new, fresh content posted to your
site with the SEO in mind. Make sure that the content you write
reflects your industry and target keywords. You don't need to
flood the content with your target keywords, but make sure they
are in there a few times. When it makes sense to do so, also
include some acronyms to help Google establish the overall
relevance.

If you perform a search in Google for "~keyword", any words
that Google bolds in the search results will be acronyms that
Google deems relevant. Include some of these where possible.

Step 8 - Basic SEO
Ensure that ALL pages of your site include unique