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The first thing you need once you have created a website is to be on Google’s first page ideally on first position. And SEO definitely helps with that. But before we jump deep into SEO territory, let us examine what SEO is all about first. And what can we do BEFORE we get a website done so that SEO is a breeze.

Before starting out with your website or even before buying your domain name, there are certain things you need to look into.

Step 1. What EXACTLY are people searching for?

It is important to know what phrases are people searching for on Google that is related to your business.

There is a fantastic tool available for this. It is free. And it is from Google themselves. It is called the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

Even if the purpose of the tool is to drive you towards using Google Adwords, it doesn’t force you in any way.

To access this, please visit: https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

The above screenshot shows how the Google Keyword Tool looks like.

I will attempt to explain this with the use of an example. Let us look at a Chauffeur Drive business. The keywords I can think of from the top of my head are – chauffeur and executive hire.

I have input these keywords, the value of the CAPTCHA image and hit search.

What will appear is a list of search terms that people are searching on Google for.

However, this is a “broad” search. What that means is that these are the terms that people are “broadly” searching for. What we need is “exact” searches. For this, please scroll down and on the left side, unselect “broad” checkbox and check the “exact” checkbox.

The next thing to do is to decide whether you are looking for global or local searches. And then sort the results in a descending order on that column.

Here, I have sorted the results in a descending order for Local Searches.

While an SEO consultant can give you advice, the next bit is something that you need to decide on your own. The higher the number of searches, the better it is to target that particular keyword / phrase. But at the same time, it has to represent your business as well.

For example, in this example, we could target the phrase “stansted airport” since it has a huge number of monthly searches. But if we are just doing SEO for a Chauffeur company, then people will take one look and leave our website if it has nothing to do with Stansted Airport.

The factors worth looking at here are – The amount of competition (lower is better), number of searches (either global or local) and the spread of the searches over the year.

Let us assume that you decide to go for the phrase “limo hire” and would like to rank high for it.

Step 2. Finding an available domain name.

Once you have found a search term with lot of searches, the next thing to do is to find a domain name that matches up.

In an ideal world, the best option is to go for a name with all the words from the phrase without any hyphens in it and a .com extension. However, extension is not as important as the name before the extension itself.

One thing worth mentioning here is that search engines look at .co.uk domains as representing local UK companies and .com as representing global companies.

Getting back to our example, let us see if limohire.com is available.

I am using www.godaddy.com as in addition to .co.uk and .com, it also allows you to search for .co, .cc and many international domain names too.

As you can see, limohire.com is unavailable. But you have other options as you can see in the next screenshot.

While it is not always possible to get the exact domain you may be looking for, you can use online tools such as www.bustaname.com or www.nametumbler.com to find ones that are close and are available.

It is worth shopping around where it concerns domain names.

Also, while it is not extremely important to get a domain name that is in line with popular search keywords / phrases, if you get one, it will definitely help you get to the top of Google with lesser efforts since each and every URL on your website will contain those popular keywords / phrases.

Let us assume that you have got an appropriate domain name and have got a lovely website created.

In the next part, we will discuss how you can do “certain” things ON your website or every page of your website so that once Search Engine Spiders come to your website, they are able to index it well.

At Kulkarni Software, we offer a range of Web Design Glasgow, Web Development Glasgow, SEO Glasgow and Software Development Glasgow services. If you need any help or consultancy with any of the above free products, please click on the following link to contact us.

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