How To Really Optimize Your Websites

I have always like to optimize my websites for better ranking on the search engines. Just now I had read a very good article on how to properly optimize your site written by Todd Malicoat, from Stuntdubl.com . Todd is one of the respected search engine optimization or SEO consultant around. It is quite an extensive article covering many aspects of search engine optimization.

As Todd mentioned, we cannot just focus on things like onpage optimizations such as keywords and metatags, though every bit does help. Instead we should look at the overall picture of marketing and the site's infrastructure. These are the real components of SEO that many of us tend to ignore.

In short, he list down 18 keypoints that we need to take into consideration when planning for a good overall optimized site. Here they are:-

1. Do we have a brandable domain?
2. Who should we host with that will be reliable?
3. Do we need pretty urls and will you use subdomains?
4. What is our website’s business model and how are we unique?
5. Who is our target demographic and what will they search for?
6. What will the information architecture be like? What are the important top level keywords?
7. Which platform should we use?
8. How do we create a professional design?
9. How do we prove high credibility?
10. What ideas can we use for linkbait?
11. If we can’t create great bait, how do we buy, barter, and beg for links?
12. Where else can we advertise?
13. What will we use for tracking and analysis?
14. What will help increase conversions and/or actions and how can we provide users incentives to stay or return?
15. How will we keep administration simple for the entire staff to use?
16. How can we manage our reputation?
17. How do we make the site “cluetrain friendly” and build a strong community environment?
18. How do we scale and specialize for effective use of time?


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For myself, I had to say that I had done some of the keypoints here, but many of them I had tend to overlook or didn't really care because of the amount of work involved. Well, time to change that mentality and take these points more seriously. Bottom line, we really need a really good plan for each website that we build.

You can studied the article in depth at Todd's site, titled 18 Questions Your CEO Forgot to Ask When Building Your Website.

All the best to your SEO efforts. And please come back here to share any result you accomplish.