Do you recommend choosing your keywords before writing a page and optimizing during the writing process, or writing the page totally from the user’s point of view and optimizing later?

Each page must be based on a theme that relies on a few related keywords. Once you select your theme, write a nice article about it for your webpage. Write for the user and not the search engines.

The search engines are increasingly capable of monitoring user signals. If users are not impressed by the content or the quality of the presentation, this will be picked up by the search engines as minimal time spent on your website by users.

From an SEO point of view, there are three categories of webpages:

Greatest effort should be given to the choice of keywords for category 1 webpages. The development of the website’s authority is almost entirely dependent on such pages.

For category 2 webpages, reasonable effort should be given to the choice of keywords, so that when the authority of the website increases to the point that these keywords come into range, additional website authority becomes achievable.

For category 3 webpages, do not worry about keywords or SEO, other than to ensure that they function correctly. Thus, if a category webpage has broken links, this will be picked up by the search engines, and the website will be marked down.

Example

Let me give an example of a new website for a car hire business in a small English fictional town that we will call “Hogwarts,” in the county of Essex.

A new, recently-indexed website has a Homepage PageRank of 0. This seriously restricts the keywords it can successfully compete for. Even the keywords the site can compete for are restricted to the Homepage, which will receive the #2 boost mentioned in question 5.

Experience has shown that for a completely new website, niche keywords with HPR-KD of no more than 4.3 should be targeted. Internal pages on a new website are unlikely to accomplish top page positioning for any meaningful keyword.

Initially, it is likely that the Homepage could achieve top page positioning for a small town or medium-sized borough (category 1 webpages) related keyword. Niche keywords might be “car hire Hogwarts” or “Hogwarts car hire.”

The keyword difficulty for “car hire Romford” would almost certainly be too high for our new website, but with effort, may become a niche keyword in time (Category 2 webpages).

“Car hire” would have a keyword difficulty that will almost certainly remain out of range for a small to medium-sized business website (Category 3 webpages).

I would emphasise that from an SEO point of view, Category 3 pages are not to be ignored. They will not, in their own right, bring in new visitors; however, they can entertain new visitors and increase the overall positioning of your webpages.

The time spent on your website is an important user signal, regardless of the Category of webpages followed. If our new car hire website’s Homepage has a link to a superb page on “places to visit in Essex,” this could potentially benefit the overall performance of the website.