Web Design Discussion

Recently I was asked to optimize a site selling Spanish T-Shirts to attract lots of traffic from the search engines. Without traffic your site won’t make any sales. Of the other hand getting lots of traffic does not guarantee sale if your web copy is lousy. There are many factors that should be considered when you optimize your web site. My example site will be Wild Lily Designs, a site that specializes in selling Spanish Shirts.

Here are the steps I took to optimize the site:

1. Create a keyword list

Write down all the keywords related to the topic of your site. Try to also include keyword phrases. ie T-Shirts, Spanish Shirts,
Spanish Apparel, Spanish Clothing.

There are probably millions of web sites selling T-Shirts; therefore you need to narrow your focus. This is why Spanish Shirts or
Spanish T-Shirts would a better niche because it wouldn’t be as competitive. If your niche is too competitive you will have a difficult time getting high rankings. Ideally you want your site to appear on the first page for one of the major search engines…Google, MSN or Yahoo.

2. Find related keywords

These are words that are similar to the main keyword list you created above. You may be able to incorporate them into the content of your site as it grows. Keywords that have a very narrow focus ie Spanish T-Shirts, may not be a popular search term. If I broaden my search to include “Spanish” or “T-Shirt” I will find hundreds of words that relate to these topics.

Use a theosaurus dictionary or thesaurus.com to find similar words besides your main keywords. Another great free tool to barinstorm related keywords are the Google AdWords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). I will discuss more on the free and paid keyword tools I use in the next section.

Here is the list of similar keywords generated when I inserted “spanish shirts” in the Google AdWords Keyword Tool

madrid shirts
language tee shirts
spain shirt
spanish shirt
shirts in spanish
spanish shirts
spanish t shirts
real madrid shirt
spanish english dictionary
spanish apparel
sign language shirt
language shirts
madrid t shirts
shirt in spanish
hispanic t shirt
spain t shirt
language apparel
hispanic shirts
sign language t shirt
madrid t shirt
real madrid t shirts
language t shirts
sign language shirts
language shirt
shirts spanish
sign language t shirts
spanish t shirt
real madrid merchandise
i love shirts
hispanic t shirts
long sleeve shirts
spain t shirts
t shirts in spanish
madrid shirt

From this list you get both the singular and plural forms of the keywords. You may also want to include madrid shirts, madrid t-shirt, spanish shirts.

To find out how often people are searching on these keywords you need to use keyword tools. I use a combination of both free and paid tools.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 10:24 am and is filed under SEO . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.