Business owners are usually concerned about technical issues regarding building, designing and maintaining a business website.
Preparation
However, actually the first thing you have to do is keyword research. Make sure you select the right keywords for your website.
The second interesting thing is that we use to think about a website not about the web pages. The truth is that Google or other search engines index and show web PAGES, not websites. So we have to think about optimization of our web PAGES, for the selected keywords.
The last thing is to prepare the website’s title and subtitle. This is usually easy – you can take your company name, company slogan or the main product name.
So far we have prepared:
- a list of targeted keywords for our web pages
- a list of pages, every page focused (optimized) for one particular keyword
- web site title and subtitle
Blueprint
The blueprint is a simple Excel sheet with the name of the website (the domain name), the website’s title and subtitle.
The rest of the blueprint is a list of web pages on a web site. The pages are organized in a table with the following columns: Page Name, Parent Page, Keywords, Title.
The pages on your website are usually the following:
- Home
- About
- Contact
- Privacy policy
- Terms of use
- Disclaimer
- Blog
- Product/Service A
- Product/Service B
- …
These names will be listed in column “Page names” in the blueprint. Only product or service pages need to be optimized for the defined keyword(s).
You can, of course have your main product or service on a home page and then the home page will be optimized for the main keyword(s) for your product/service.
A quick tip: links to pages like About, Contact, Privacy policy, Disclaimer, Terms of use, might be listed in the footer of the website. That way, the more important pages (like product or service pages) can be listed in the website header, on the website’s main menu.
Depending on the structure of your web site, you may or may not have a blog. If you have a blog, add the names of the blog categories to the blueprint as well. Make sure the category names target your main keywords.
Again, for every blog post, think how to assign your keywords and the title to every post so the post is optimized for your keyword. As a parent page for the blog post, type the category or categories it belongs to.