Contact Us
Make it easy for people to contact you! If you are not selling items directly online, this is the most important page to drive traffic to. List all possible ways to contact your company, including phone, email, fax, Twitter, LinkedIn, mailing address, physical address and office hours. If you have several departments, provide instructions for contacting each to prevent confusion.

Contact Us page

• Email contact form – make it easy for visitors to “fill in the blanks” and select items they are interested in. Include fields for their phone number and required email address.
• Never ask for more information than you need – be careful not to turn off visitors. Once there is a commitment, you can request further details.
• Photo of owner or smiling staff members on the page again shows that you are real people who care about your customers.

Location or Directions
Make it easy for people to find you! If you want people to visit your main office or branches, display directions online.

Directions or Map page

• Driving directions from various points.  From north or south, from neighboring towns.  Use landmarks such as “turn left at the Exxon gas station”
• Map showing your location(s). Even an outside source such as Mapquest is handy to allow changing of a map’s scale.
• Photo of the facility or your signage so it can be recognized from the road or parking lot.
• Office hours and instructions on any sign-in procedures.
Include contact info or links for help in case of confusion.

Contact Webmaster Ray for more ideas related to your own website.

Products / Services Overview
Display a brief summary of each product or service line. Then link to the individual item detail pages. This page can help visitors quickly narrow down exactly what they are looking for while motivating them to learn more.  Give just enough details to lead prospects to the next step of the sales process.

Products page - restaurant menu

• Name, photo and brief description of each item.
• Lists of sample uses or top features for each item.
• Links to individual item pages.

Product / Service Details
Each item (or sub-category of items) can have it’s own sales page with photos, descriptions and specifications along with a call to action to purchase now, email for more info or call now!  Additional info can be included using links to it so that it’s optional to be bombarded by the specifics.

Services page

• Begin each page with a brief summary of the product/service. When people search for information, they want it immediately
• One or more photos or a video demonstration (it’s fine to use You-Tube)
• Description including any available options or choices (colors, sizes, package deals)
• Customer reviews specific to the item.
• List of sample uses, actual customers, features or benefits.
• Prices (specific or range), terms of use, warranty information.

Before / After or Case Histories
Besides a sales page for each product or service, you may want a page of real-world samples of your work for prospects to more easily identify with than generic descriptions and sales copy.

Before & After

• Before/after photos or slideshow or video of an example project
• Description of the problem, customer requirements, timeline, difficulties overcome, and final solution.
• Names of satisfied customers along with testimonial.

Always use a call to action to prompt visitors to next step of the sales process.

Contact Webmaster Ray for more ideas that relate to your project.

About Us
This page (aka “About Us” or “Our Company”) may include any kind of background information to make visitors more comfortable with you. Company history, mission statement, introduction of staff members, awards and honors, or explanation of what separates you from the competition. On the surface, you may provide similar products or services as others, but certain secondary facts displaying your unique qualities can close the deal. Maybe you assist a charity that’s important to some potential clients.  Maybe you’ve won an award.  Maybe you have a unique certification.

About page

• Photos of owners or employees – show that you are human beings and not just “brand x”
• Logos of industry affiliations, chambers of commerce, well-known vendors and even large customers
• Mission statement, warranty or guarantee, message from President
• Background of the company and certifications earned – use this page to brag about yourself! Include miscellaneous items that don’t fit on other pages.

News Page
News or “Announcements” pertaining to your products, industry or company can be a great way to show that you are active and conscious of keeping customers informed. Web surfers will often view to check for the latest information. It is another opportunity to tout your accomplishments or show involvement in the community.
Stay current, to prove that you’re on top of everything

News page

• Announce new products, product lines or improvements.
• Press releases, new testimonials from customers, related topics
• Sales, special deals, promotional offers
• Honors received, partnerships formed, new staff members

Events Calendar
Events list or ‘Upcoming Events’ or ‘Schedule’ can provide details of meetings, trade shows, seminars, or any type of events that occur on a regular or periodic basis. You may wish to include a page of past events as well, to possibly include photos and a recap of the activity.

Show people how involved you are in the community and how you provide great support.  Show people that you’re busy!

Events page

Contact Webmaster Ray for more ideas.

Social Bookmarking and Web 2.0
Join social media and bookmarking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Digg, MySpace and Del.icio.us, or for more convenience, use a service like http://www.AddThis.com to generate interest in your site. Create a list of useful sites including one or two of your own, and then publish them to your profile. Search engines are recognizing the merit of these portals and visitors can “vote” for the popularity of your site.

Blogging: Your Blog
Create a blog within your site or use a free blogging service that links back to it. Present your opinions and recommended solutions for your subject. Add comments regularly (daily, weekly or monthly). Besides building an audience of visitors who appreciate your thoughts or advice, you can constantly add backlinks to help in search results or just send readers to your site.

Blogging: Submit to directories
Add your Blog to directories such as http://www.Technorati.com and http://www.Digg.com for more exposure. It’s free advertising, just like getting listed in search engines.

Blogging: Post on others’
Find existing blogs that suit your purposes and sign up. Most blogs provide the opportunity to link to your site via your name when you add a comment. Pick a name that includes relevant keywords. Post relevant content and you’re reaching people who may not have found you otherwise. Add comments and links of value!

Don’t just say “Come over and visit my Blog”. Do not spam these sites or you risk having your site delisted.

Free Directory Submissions
Directories are the logical place to start your link building campaign. They are happy to post your site to build their list or relevant results. Submit your site to as many web directories as you can. You can later refresh your information by re-submitting it, especially if content has changed. Free directories can take weeks, or even months to include your site. It is only necessary to submit your home (index) page.
Start with Google, Yahoo, MSN and the Open Directory.

Specialized Directories
Besides general category directories, you should submit to industry and geographically specific directories. These will help your search engine ranking and they can also drive targeted traffíc to your site. If you are a member of an association, the association website may include a list of members.

The state, county, region or city you live in may have a directory of sites for that particular area. Many will offer a basic listing for free with the option of an enhanced listing for a fee. http://www.Craigslist.org allows free advertising as long as you follow their guidelines.

Paid Directory Submissions
Annual subscriptions can be purchased for directories such as Yahoo, BOTW, and http://www.Business.com. They will add your profile more quickly than their free counterparts and are more likely to allow you to choose the title of your link. This gives you the opportunity to build your links according to your targeted keywords instead of simply the site name.

For example if your site is ‘ABC Lawn Co.’, a better ‘title’ in a directory or any other website would be “Grass and Lawn Mowing Service” since it directly includes several applicable terms. Paid directories may also allow deep linking to individual pages of your website so that particular search terms will automatically lead visitors to pertinent information.

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.

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.’

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!

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).

SEO vs. SEM
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) includes any web design techniques used to achieve the best possible “natural” or “organic” search engine results.  These are the regular (main) listings on each page of results.  Some SEO methods are incorporated during site development and some can be added at any time or on an ongoing basis (such as link building).  Most methods don’t cost a lot of money, but some require a considerable investment of time.  The time commitment will prove to be worthwhile as it is amortized over the life of the site at no financial cost.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) basically includes any techniques to produce traffic that cost money. Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is the best example.  These “paid listings” or “sponsored results” appear alongside or on top of organic results for the same terms.  PPC terms are often sold through auctions.  More general or popular terms (such as “dogs”) are more expensive to bid for than targeted or less popular ones (such as “poodles” or “german shepards”).

Another SEM technique is inclusion in paid directories, either general (such as Yahoo Directory for $299), regional (state or city-specific)  or industry-specific organizations.

SEM is online advertising and requires an ongoing budget.  You can start, stop, or make changes to campaigns at any time and improve your results through analysis of traffic and sales.  SEO does not produce such instantaneous results.  It can take as long as 4-8 weeks to see “natural” effects.  To “cover all bases” a combination of SEO and SEM is often employed.
Broad (generic) terms vs. Targeted (specific) terms
From Wikipedia.org: “Not all sites have identical goals for search optimization. Some sites are seeking any and all traffic, and may be optimized to rank highly for common search phrases. A broad search optimization strategy can work for a site that has broad interest, such as a periodical, a directory, or site that displays advertising with a CPM [cost per thousand impressions] revenue model.

In contrast, many businesses try to optimize their sites for large numbers of highly specific keywords that indicate readiness to buy. Overly broad search optimization can hinder marketing strategy by generating a large volume of low-quality inquiries that cost money to handle, yet result in little business. Focusing on desirable traffic generates better quality sales leads, resulting in more sales. Search engine optimization
can be very effective when used as part of a smart niche marketing strategy.”

In other words, “drill down” to your particular specialty within your broader category, similar to the structure of directories.  Concentrate on these more specific terms:
Apparel > Footwear > Athletic Shoes > Running Shoes > Nike
Travel > Vacation Packages > Adventure Trips > Safaris > Kenya Safaris
Health > Nutrition > Dietitians > Vegan Dietitians > Chicago Vegan Dietitians

A page for each search term?
Create distinct pages for each search term so that any individual page might rank highly enough to appear within the first 3 pages of directory or S.E. results, even if it is not the 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 simply replace one possible keyword for another.  For example, you may use the word “car” on one page and “auto” on another page.

Concentrate on your company’s strengths and dominate your niche!