Build a Better Website Blog

The most important website content is the text on your pages.  Besides the usual places to incorporate key words and phrases (such as your paragraphs and bullet lists), look for other opportunities to add search terms that reflect the page content.  Here are some ideas!
 
Each page must support the site as a whole
Consider how words on any one website page support each other and how keywords used throughout a site will strengthen the rank of the site as a whole. A page which uses the terms “rivers”, “streams” and “lakes” can rank higher than one that only discusses “rivers” since those terms are themselves related. A site with specific pages highlighting each may beat out a site that again only talks about “rivers”. So keep in mind the relevance of terminology within pages and over a number of pages.

Speaking of rivers, the tone of text should “flow” in the same general direction throughout a site. If different people are responsible for writing different pages, an editor should be appointed to give the site a uniform feel.

Maintain strong customer focus
Build the site and flow of information on each page from the customer’s point of view instead of your own. Meet their needs before presenting your credentials and “why to buy from us”. People are only interested in you if you can help them. Here’s a real world example… When prospects call or visit, instead of first telling them about yourself and your wonderful background, ask what you can do for them!

Make images more visible with alt tags
Although images don’t qualify as content to the same degree as text, you can make them more tasty to Google and Yahoo as well. Image “alt” tags should be used to describe photos and graphics to robots and visually impaired viewers. Insert a text description of one or more words as follows:
<img src=”images/tiger-photo.jpg” alt=”Photo of hungry Bengal tiger”/>

Runners enjoy an orange sunset. (description of image)

Squeeze in some fine print
Image captions, smaller print notes, and even copyright lines of text allow additional inclusion of keywords. You may not want to clutter a page with too much text or by repeating the same terms over and over, but there are always opportunities to squeeze in some remarks such as below an image. Even generic images could have a short comment under it. Your page about tigers in Africa may include a couple photos. Even if no explanation is necessary, “African tigers” would definitely not be out of place. Or maybe it’s an opportunity to inject some humor into a dry subject, pleasing both robots and humans simultaneously.

For best visitor retention and sale conversion rates, use conversational tone and provide plenty of text to generate interest. Use the terms that people are searching for.

Speak in simple language
Explain in terms that the average visitor would understand. Avoid using industry jargon when your target audience is the general population. It’s easier to trust you if they understand what you’re saying.

Keep text easy to read
Use short sentences. Longer sentences are often more difficult to follow. In most cases, a conversational tone will be more interesting and readable than a scholarly explanation. Don’t put too much information on a page. Instead, “continue” on to additional pages.

More text = more content
Don’t skimp on the total amount of overall text. Think of a search engine as a hungry tiger and your text as meat. Feed the tiger! Give it lots of juicy text to chew on. As long as page length isn’t excessive, more applicable words on a page means better results. You can work in many more keywords and keyword phrases in 300 words than you can in 100 words. As long as you break up the text with subheadings, bullet points, and graphics, human visitors will devour it as well.

Repeat yourself (again and again?)
Drive home important points by explaining yourself in a number of ways or by providing examples to illustrate details.

Put critical information near top of page
Important points and ideas should be visible “above the fold” to human visitors. Help them easily find key content without becoming impatient and having to scroll for it.  Long pages could include some links to “jump” to lower sections of that page.

Place targeted keywords prominently on page
Keywords that are introduced towards the top of the page actually count more towards that page’s search engine ranking as well. This is logical in that the main theme of any page is expected to be discussed at the very beginning. Think of each page as having its own headline, lead paragraph main discussion points, supplementary or supporting information, and finally a summary (including a call to action like “Sign up now!”). Thus, the first and last paragraphs on any page should emphasize the targeted keywords.

Use bold text for keywords
Where your targeted keywords or keyphrases appear on pages, make them appear in bold text at least once or twice to catch the attention of visitors and tigers! Using HTML, these tags are placed around the words: <b>word word</b> 
Yes, search engines give these highlighted words additional increments of credit towards pagerank!!!

Use the word “Free”
Find a way to work ‘free’ – in bold letters – into your site, especially the home page. You probably have something that you can give away, even if it is a PDF full of good advice. The internet was built on the premise of ‘free’. In fact, your customers may have typed in ‘free widget’ as a search term!

Use the words “Today” and “Buy now”
Why wait until tomorrow? Order now! Don’t delay! Take advantage now! Enjoy our product today! Be the first on your block! Foster a sense of urgency. Your visitors are looking for reasons to take action. Facilitate the process.

For best possible search engine optimization (SEO), keywords and keyphrases must be used appropriately within the text of pages.  This includes page titles, sub titles, headers, bullet lists, photo captions and regular page text.

Make text readable by search engines
Most of your page text needs to be typed as standard HTML which can be “read” by the search engine bots that regularly visit your site. The font must be available on nearly all computers. If a particular font is not available on someone’s computer, they will see it in a more common form (such as arial, Tahoma, Times New Roman).

Flash movies and images can’t be “read”, so any text contained in them does not count. This means that a completely Flash site might have horrible rank, making it less likely to draw visitors from organic search results. A site using images to display fancy text would face the same dismal results.  If vast majority of visitors don’t come from search engines, this is not as important.  Examples would be membership sites where only members are invited.

Searchable text must include targeted keywords, with an optimal “density” of 3-4% for each particular word or phrase. This means that if there are 200 words on a page that you want optimized for the phrase “black shoes”, you should try to incorporate that phrase 6-8 times. Any more than that and you may actually be penalized for “keyword spamming” by a search engine – lowering your rank rather than increasing it! 

Create distinct pages for each search term so that any single page might rank highly enough to appear within the first 3 pages of directory or S.E. results, even if it is not the actual home page. If you have several products or services, give each it’s own page where you can highlight the distinct terminology and characteristics. When the differences are slight, consider writing a page or article on one of them where you merely replace one possible keyword for another. For example, you may use the word “car” on one page and “auto” on another page.  Even then, you should edit the text to avoid a possible “duplicate content” penalty.

Utilize heading tags appropriately
HTML heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) carry more weight than standard text since their purpose is to show a hierarchy of importance. Try to work keywords into the highest level tag possible. Having headings and sub-headings also makes pages easier to browse by humans! Sample:
<h1>Main Heading</h1>
<p>Paragraph of text describing heading</p>
<h2>Sub Heading (work in some additional or secondary keywords)</h2>
<p>More text…</p>

This is a case where having a human web designer or at least good software is always preferable than most word processing web page generators. That’s because the word processor uses it’s own code instead of the standard heading tags favored by search engines.

Multiple subheadings, short paragraphs
Keep pages “skimmable” with the generous use of subheadings and white space. Make it easy to pick out important terms when visitors are quickly glancing at a page to see if it contains worthwhile material. They can then concentrate on sections of text that give the information they need. More meat and less filler! You can always link from there to ‘more details.’

META tags are a fundemental component of HTML and good SEO practices.  A META Description tag is a free advertisement in search engine results, so don’t waste it!

Your description “tag” appears near the title in the header area and should be unique to each page. It’s purpose  is to be an accurate description of page contents and goals,  of course including as many major keywords as possible. 10-20 words are appropriate since total length should be under 170 characters. This will appear in the results of some Search Engines, so it should not be just a collection of random words and phrases. Here is what the tag looks like:
<meta name=”description” content=”Brief description of the contents of your page.”>

META Keywords tag
While not nearly as important as Title and Description, the keywords tag should include any search terms that actually appear within the text of the page. The following practices are advisable: (1) keep your list below 20 unique words or phrases; (2) separate the words or phrases using a comma; (3) put most important word or phrases at the beginning of your list; (4) do not repeat words or phrases.  The keywords tag is not as important as it used to be in the early days of the internet.  But it’s use has been downgraded since it became an early source of “keyword stuffing”.

Talk to your webmaster about META tags.

Invite search engines to map your site
Be nice to those search engine spider robots which are constantly crawling the web looking for new and updated files. Invite them to chow down at your picnic! The META tag to include within the header code of each page you want them to find/index would be:
<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow”/>

Upload a robots.txt file
Another welcome to search engine spiders to visit your entire site is by placing a robots.txt file on your server to tell them which pages or sections to crawl or index and which to ignore. For example, you may not want an images directory or javascript file spidered. You may also issue individual indexing instructions to specific search engines. The file itself is a simple little text file, which needs to be saved to the root directory of your site (where your home page or index page is). In other words, you would
upload your version of this to your web host along with your HTML pages, images and other files:

#The following allows all robots to visit all files because wildcard is used
#But all robots are barred from cgi-bin images and scripts directories
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /images/

Again, be nice to the search engine robots and you will be richly rewarded!

Use unique title tags for each page of website.  This is one of the most productive and easiest SEO features to build into your pages.

The title tag appears in the header section of HTML code, near the top of the page.  Search engines give it considerable weight, so create your page titles carefully.

Officially (from World Wide Web Consortium http://www.w3.org):
“Authors should use the TITLE element to identify the contents of a document. Since users often consult documents out of context, authors should provide context-rich titles. Thus, instead of a title such as “Introduction”, which doesn’t provide much contextual background, authors should supply a title such as ‘Introduction to Medieval Bee-Keeping’ instead.” 

Brief explanation of page content
Page titles display at top of the visitor’s browser and should represent an abbreviated description of that particular page’s contents.  A title such as “Home” or “About Us” tells nothing about the content of a page, so it is useless to readers and search engine robots.  No “Welcome to my website” or other superfluous headings, please!  Proper titles should be under 64 characters in length, so 5-7 words is a good guideline.  Include the most relevant keywords or keyphrases. 

Avoid using “filler” words (the, your, home) since they take up valuable characters from a limited supply.  Avoid strings of keywords that appear more like “keyword stuffing” than a complete thought (“Web design – hosting – SEO – internet marketing”)  Your organization name should be part of your home page title if possible.  Here is how the title appears in page code:
    <head>
    <title>XYZ Shoe Company sells shoes and boots</title>
    </head>

Providing each page with a unique title and it’s own keywords enables visitors to find pages other than your home page when doing searches.  For example, the following are titles of 2 pages at Attraction Web Design.  If someone is searching for “search engine optimization”, they may find my (more appropriate) SEO page before my home page.
[Home]  Website Designer – Hosting – SEO by Attraction Web Design of Delaware
[SEO]    Website search engine optimization – SEO and keywords

Your page title will appear in the following places:
• Browser window title bar, and  when printed, at the top of the page
• As title for web page listing on the search engine results. This helps to guide interested parties to your site.
• Default entry in favorites (bookmarks) and history lists. This helps repeat traffic come back to the correct site.

Location of your office or customer base
If you serve a particular population, your location is a keyword too!  Notice that my home page title (above) includes “Delaware”.  Web surfers realize that they have to limit their search to a geographical area if they are looking for someone local to work with, so adding your state, city or town will rank you higher in those cases.  

Target your customer location

For the home page, I include my complete business name in case someone is aware of the name but not the web address.  The other words will give me a better chance of a high result for various combinations of searches, such as “web designer in Delaware”, “Delaware website”, “website design and hosting”, etc.

My business serves the entire USA, although most people find me by including “Delaware” in their search.  Especially if you only service a particular area, it is critical to include that state, city, county or locality on your home page and other important pages (both text and title).

Integrate photos and graphics in attractive ways.  Slideshows, photo galleries, videos and flash movies bring your site to life and stir interest, while reinforcing text.

Images on your website reinforce text for better conversion rates.  Pictures, photographs, graphics, diagrams all help visitors more quickly grasp your content.

Bring your site to life with images.

Slideshows reduce need for scrolling
For your home page or another page that you wish to keep clean and compact, a slideshow is a collection of two or more alternating images.  You can incorporate effects to transition from one image to another in a set or random order.  Besides showing your story, this is a simple way to bring your site to life with motion.  [Sample: http://www.pcvrc.com]

• Display products – show  samples of your work
• Examine a process -  give a visual tour of each stage of your service
• Text statements / quotes – complementary famous quotes, lists of accomplishments, awards, recognition
• Logos of affiliations – move through logos of your  professional affiliations, vendors, partners, customers or any groups that help build your credibility

Photo galleries tell your whole story
Set aside pages or portions of pages to providing enough photos to satisfy visitors and persuade them to get in touch.  A slideshow may be best for home page, but details pages can devote more space for all to display together.  Make it interactive so visitors can control what they want to view, clicking or mousing over thumbnails of their choice.   [Sample: http://www.jmweddingcreations.com/gallery.php]
• Show a process – include a storyboard from step one through step “x”
• Display o;ptions – show samples of each color, style, or other variation
• Multiple applications – Show samples of different ways to use the same product

Video can be casual
From a 20 second “Welcome” message to a 30 minute movie, allow the visitor to sit back and relax while you introduce your company or a particular product.  Decide whether to upload a movie viewer to your own server or just let the visitor open the movie with an application installed on their own machine.  The most  common client-side pluggins are Windows Movie Viewer and Quicktime.  [Sample: http://www.gndcollects.com]
• Automatically running welcome message on home or about page
• Video clips collection to allow viewing of any particular clip
• Longer movies should indicate their file size and length so the visitor can decide if they have enough time (or fast enough internet connection)
• Humorous video can entertain while explaining your message
• Include link to download (free) movie player in case visitor does not have one installed.  Never make assumptions about your visitors.

A good video can convey your ideas and demonstrate your product much more quickly and effectively than lengthy paragraphs of text.  Search Engines may reward sites with higher rankings, knowing that you’re more likely to please visitors. 
An excellent resource for online video marketing tips is http://www.ReelSEO.com

Flash presentations are fancy
Flash movies can contain a multitude of effects and can integrate video, graphics, still photos and text on a server-side platform, to be independent from the visitor’s computer configuration.  But costs can be greater to create and to change. Some web designers specialize in these sites or can create an individual flash movie for inclusion on “non-Flash” sites.