Before You Start

Wait! If you’re already set to hire a web designer or build the site yourself, take some time to plan what you’re about to do.

Ranking Number One covers a wide range of tips that can be applied to sites already in progress, but if you’re planning to either redesign your entire online presence or do something dramatic, this section provides advice at the broader level.

Setting your goals

Setting goals and taking stock of your existing website: discover what you’re trying to achieve and learn where what you currently have falls short. Goal setting is a critical area missing in most site redesign plans – if you don’t set any goals, how can you measure success?

The pros and cons of site redesign

what you should focus on and what you should avoid. There are numerous design mistakes that happen over and over and have the tendency of annoying or confusing visitors. You’ve probably seen many of these in sites you’ve visited, so learning to avoid them can put your site ahead of your competitors.

Site hosting

All websites live on a server somewhere so hosting provides the foundation of your site and has a profound impact on visitor experience. It’s important to know the the ideal attributes of a good web host, and why quality web hosting services dramatically affect your SEO.

The importance of keywords

search engines are all about keywords, so finding your own set of keyword phrases decides where your site will appear in search results. It’s key to know what your competitors are targeting but you also must make conscious and data-driven decisions about your own keywords.

Blackhat SEO

The world of search engine optimization often has bad advice. There are ‘good techniques’, such as the ones covered in this book, which are endorsed and recommended by search engines. Then there are so-called ‘blackhat’ SEO tips, based on the idea of tricking search engines for instant results – these can get your site delisted from Google, Yahoo! and other engines.

In a perfect world, SEO should be built-in to a website from the ground-up. It’s harder to retrofit SEO techniques into an existing site, but if you are starting from scratch with SEO in mind then you’re in a great position to rank well.