Know Your Visitors Ahead of Time

Before you can properly implement search engine optimization you
must start by understanding exactly what sort of viewer you want to
attract or are currently attracting to your website. In order to generate
the best possible optimization we need to know what your potential
visitors are looking for. If we cannot discover this then there is not
much of a reason to optimize a website for search engines. If you are
building a website from scratch then we must do a little more
research than website owners who already have an existing website.
If you currently have an active website, you should have access to
some sort of website statistics. We will discuss more about website
statistics and analytics application in chapter six. Website statistics
(or web log statistics) can help you find what keywords your visitors
are using to find your website, these statistics also help you to “see”
which search engines and websites are sending traffic to your
website. As I mentioned earlier we will cover website statistics
application a little later on in this book.
For new websites that are not receiving much or any traffic, we have
to take a different approach to finding suitable keywords for the site
and content. We will cover this subject in more detail in chapter four.
We need to ask ourselves a couple of question so we can properly
identify our visitors (target audience), this will help us determine
exactly how we want to approach our keyword project for the
website.