When you're getting ready to have a new website built, it's simply not good enough to hope that the guy(s) or gal(s) coding your site will have either the time or the digital marketing smarts to build the pages so that they are optimised around a particular search term. As a marketer in the 21st Century, you know you need at least get the basics of SEO right but whenever you talk to the developers it feels like you speak a different language.

That's where this template comes in, it enables you to put together a plan for each page of your website. You can give the completed On Page SEO Template to your web developer BEFORE they start to build. With this they can easily include your on page SEO as they put the site together. You get the SEO built in, your developers get clear instructions... win/win!

Before we start, you need to understand what URLs, Slugs, Page Titles, alt text and other SEO jargon is all about so head over here for a quick explanation.

The 4 Instructions (told you it was easy)

• You need to change anything in this document that is <enclosed in these brackets> to something that makes sense for your organisation
• Columns A-E in the spreadsheet are where you place each page in your menu.
  You can see that there's a parent, child and grandchild structure here.
  In the example "Company Overview" is a child of "About Us"
• Column F is where you note the 'focus Search Term' for each page. Think about what each page is for, what questions it answers for your website visitor and then imagine what that potential visitor would type into Google. If you want to be a bit more scientific about it, use Google Trends to give you some suggestions. Type in one or two words and see what Google says people are searching for.
• The remaining columns are pretty self explanatory, if you know your stuff. If you don't, I urge you to read this.

Download the On Page SEO Template. It's over here on Google Docs. You can't edit it (just in case you actually overwrite it with all your own, commercially sensitive data) but you can download it and put it in your own favourite spreadsheet editor. I like Excel. It's the best of all the Microsofts.

With a bit of bending, you can even make this template work for you if you manage big e-commerce sites. Think about page types, rather than each individual pages and you'll be OK.

Any questions, hit me up on Twitter or Google+