Ten step solution to search engine rankings and a good website: Part 2

6. Psychoanalyze your audience.

This is very important. When developing web pages and content, especially at the beginning, always keeping mind what your audience will be searching for when they go to do a search. Imagine yourself as a random web surfer, and target the mind of the prototypical user. Fine-tune your web pages to contain phrases that you think users will likely search for.

7. Reverse Engineering.

Psychoanalyzing your potential users will only go so far. After all, you are only one person and everyone has different search habits. What’s a person to do? Analyze your actual users behavior. Most web servers maintain visitor logs that provide useful information such as the search terms that people used to visit your site. You’ll be amazed at the phrases people have used to discover your web pages. Take those phrases and fine tune the content on your pages even more to cater to your actual customer interests.

8. Discipline yourself.

The key to developing a robust website is to consistently produce new, high-quality content. Begin with reachable goals: develop and upload one new page of content per week. At this rate, you’ll produce over fifty new pages of content per year. By pacing your content production out over time, you give users a reason to come back to your website.

9. Webs of Knowledge.

When your ideas begin to run dry, and you are running out of content for your website, try our brainstorming method for systematically developing inter-related webs of knowledge. Using this method will help you to develop content that naturally supports other pages on your website and creates an organic sense of coherence throughout.

10. Never forget the user.

This is the most important step of all. The most essential thing to remember when building a website is to make it user friendly and user relevant. There is a real temptation to simply cater to the search engines in order to rank well. However, if your page is cluttered, not well organized, hard on the eyes, unnatural text, etc. most users will move on to a different website. You want to retain loyal visitors. Never sacrifice the quality of your website for the sake of search engine rankings.