How to prepare your website to benefit from SEO

Once you have defined your target market and chosen your keywords you can start preparing your website to be picked up by the search engines for those search terms.

The 'Search Engine Optimisation' section gives you access to the important areas of your pages where you need to try and include your keywords.

It's important when you are doing this, to make sure you don't focus so much attention on your keywords that the text becomes unreadable to human visitors. It's human visitors who will be making the bookings after all and Google will lower your rankings if the content of your website is unnaturally biased toward search optimisation.

The Page Title

The page title is the field that is displayed at the very top of your web browser in the header bar, and will also be used by Google as the title in the search results.

PromoteMyPlace web browser header bar example visual:

PromoteMyPlace Google search page results example visual:

This needs to have the page's major keywords within it. Current best practice says you should include the keyword towards the front of the phrase.

So for example if you wished to try and rank for "Holiday Villa Marbella" it's better to place the main keyword (Marbella) towards the front e.g.  "Holiday Villa Marbella - Holiday Rentals in Marbella" than "Looking to rent a holiday villa in Marbella?".

The Meta Description

The meta description can be used by the search engines to not only rank your site but it can also be used by them to generate the description text when you appear in the Search engine results. With this in mind, it's useful to have something quite snappy and informative. Again get the major page keyword as near to the beginning as possible.

PromoteMyPlace search engine description example visual:

TIP: Make sure each page description is unique and reflects what the page is about.

The Meta Keywords

The meta keyword tag is used by some search engines and not by others. It's a field that has been abused by many webmasters, so the search engines have moved away from it so it's not as important as it used to be. That being said, it's recommended that you still include your keywords separated by a comma in this section.

TIP: Make sure all the keywords you add to the meta keywords field are also within the main text of the site. If not you are wasting your time and it could be considered "keyword stuffing" (which is where you add lots of keywords into different fields that are not actually on the page). Google won't reward you for this. Separate each keyword or keyword phrase with a comma and only use each phrase once.

For example: marbella villa, holiday villa in marbella, holiday rental villa marbella

Once you have done one page, make sure you repeat the process for all of the pages of your website.

The Page Heading

Headings on pages are very important, because Google places more weight on these than it does with normal text. You should include your keywords where possible in a natural and readable sentence.

The Main Content

For the content itself, make it easy to read by using short sentences, bullet points and short paragraphs rather than large chunks of text. Also it can help to  highlight a few keywords in bold - not too much but to make some of it stand out.

Remember the content here has three jobs:

1. To give the search engines the right information so you can rank and gain traffic for your major terms
2. To entice the visitors to stay on your site
3. To get visitors to turn to bookings