Content is King (old saying, but never fails you!)
If you are searching in the engines, you are looking for something specific usually, something that requires information given to you so thought should be given to the words users would type to find a specific topic. With search engine ranking each page must include appropriate words within it, but do not stuff the page with these words! Search engines are getting smarter, regardless if using the giant Google, or the more local Sensis, and will find related terms such as “hairdresser” for “barber” and word derivation like “play / playing” and usually cover typos / spelling errors also! Keyword stuffing will only hurt your search engine ranking.
Content Checklist
Create information that is useful. A content rich site that clearly and accurately describes your topics.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content or links. Search engines can’t read images, and neither can people with visual disabilities. (use alt in the img tag <img src=”myimage.jpg” alt=”My Keywords” /> )
Make your topics original, or atleast make the content itself original! Research first to make sure you are not duplicating!
If you offer a page that is lengthy, consider breaking it up into parts. The users will enjoy reading as they do not get overwhelmed with information. Search engines will also have a better chance of targeting each page more specifically!
Say what you need to say, and say no more! Don’t deviate from the topic at hand, if you need to, then make a seperate page and link to it!
Email… what you say? Email your content to be proof read (avoid printing, I like trees!). Getting another opinion can only benefit you. Newspapers won’t publish crap stories, search engines won’t rank crap high either (unless you search for it!).
By providing links to similar stories/web pages you not only offer your readers more quality content, but you are iterating to the search engines what it is about.
Referencing citations and sources indicates to search engines that the content is that of research quality.
Illegal content within a page will most likely result in that page’s omission from search engines and more than likely your web-host also!
Content Summary
Search engine ranking is not rocket science, and search engines will know this page is not about “rocket science”! Place your energy and time into creating content that is of use to people… the humans of the internet, not the robots of search engines! Search engines are made for humans to be the end users, not themselves!
Sometimes all your site needs is a little kick in the right direction. Often finding the right website promotion can be difficult, let alone a free website promotion. So here is a quick read on some tips to get Repeated Web Traffic Using Free Website Promotion
Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.
Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you as a free website promotion. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.
You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons. A free website promotion can be then itterated again at a later time!
Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.
Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.
Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.
Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.
Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.
Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.
Never spam a client, even those who hava opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.
Never fail to give them what they came for! If you encouraged, initiaited, offered, endoresed or simply begged them to come to your site for a reason, then fulfil that reason!
Having a free website promotion does not mean you need to give the farm away, just provide value for money (or in this case, value for time) and you will be rewarded in return.
When deciding on how you could improve search engine ranking within the major search engines (google, yahoo, bing, sensis and other Australian search engines), it would be easy to talk all day about design for search engine effectiveness… but I won’t. Let’s just make a few points for you to consider.
Design Checklist
Site maps! A page with links that point to important parts of your site. A note here is if you have a site map that contains more than 100 links, break it up into seperate pages so the major players don’t think you are some kind of link farm!
Always have at least one link to any page. If you have a page that has no internal link….. how do you expect the search engines to find it?
Frames really don’t serve much purpose for internal content and search engines really do struggle with them, still! They are still good for sponors/external promotions etc.
Macromedia flash as well as Java applets should be kept to a minimum. These really can add useful animations to a site, but they are not indexed by most search engines. (videos are great content though!)
URL’s must be neat and clean! Who can remember URL’s like www.stretch-it.net/index.php?id=234&cat=234vsd45&erf=abcdef&wtf-is-this=I-dont-know and how will search engines know what it means?
Site hierarchy. Make sure ANY PAGE is only 1 to 3 clicks away from your home page. Humans love this as it is easy, google loves this because it is good for humans!
Dynamic pages (pages that load content on each visit) can often cause the relevant keywords to, loose relevancy. By moving this content to static pages to improve indexing and lighten the load on the Web server will help maintain longevity.
A no brainer here, but often forgotton. A link to your home page from every internal page is a must!
Meta tags. The page TITLE is used by search engines to display link text as the result of a search. The description is used to display as search engine result content. Think of these two elements as advertising. (some search engines still use these for ranking also!)
By organising your content by topic, and then dividing the site into logical sections, with each section focusing on a given topic will allow search engines to better target specific information relevant to keyword searches.
Designing to improve search engine ranking
To summarise, have you ever read a book? Have you noticed that books are really, really, really easy to navigate? Well a website should be no different! Your home page reads like that of a table of contents, sending your visitors to the relevant content and having it organised into the before mentioned sections! Images, scripts and videos should be used only when text can not fulfill the needs, but making sure to maintain the value of the given page.
When thinking about your search engine positioning, you need to remember that search engines are robots! They are programmed with algorithms that are written by people… people who think information and content should be presented in a certain manner! These robots use web programming standards when searching for content.
As a business owner, this creates a huge issue as valid HTML is a term you are probably not familiar with! To web designers, it may be a challenge, but also a great opportunity to boost your search engine positioning! The main fight here is to ensure each page is written to comply with valid HTML so as it can be easily read and understood by both search engines and the humans that read it! Computers vary so much, and the software on each machine differs also, so maintaining a non-technical-biased website to suit and surfer, in any country on any platform is challening, but offers you the greatest audience and goto increasing that search engine positioning!
Tech Checklist
Using a text browser to view your site is a good idea! A lot of search engines ’spider’ your site very similar to how lynx does. If your site makes no sense in a text browser, search engines will be confused on how to search/index your site. A confused search engine will leave asap!
WYSIWYG Editors can often result in poorly formatted HTML. Software uch as Frontpage, Publisher, Word etc are big culprits here. The HTML created by these tools is virtually never valid and will frequently render improperly across multiple platforms.
If you move a page or rename it, be sure to redirect it using either a permanent redirect (HTTP 301) or a temporary redirect (307).
Provide Meta Elements (including title, kewords and description) that accurately describe the contents of a web page (this is your advert!).
Allow search bots to crawl sites without needing a session ID.
Avoid use of “&id=” as a parameter in URL’s. Some search Engines don’t index these pages.
Routinely check for broken links. There are services that cater for this.
Technical Summary
You know, if you are going spend the time to create content for the web, then make sure it complies technically otherwise you should consider not doing it in the first place and need not be concerned with your search engine position!
Don’t get caught up in the search engine optimisation! People need content, easy navigation and a secure place to buy!
Google LOVE natural websites, so start by giving the content, we can fake other natural stuff later!
Don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles.
The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. Now your customer is at your site, ensure that they get interested in your products or services and sticks around. Motivate them to buy the product or submit the form by providing clear and obvious information. Do you sell more than one product or service? Then provide all the necessary information about this, may be by keeping the information at a different page. By providing clearly tagged and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details with ease.
Understanding Your Target Customer
If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is highly unlikely you are going to make much money. Website business can be an extension or it can be a replacement for a standard (offline business) storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.
Does your website give enough contact information?
When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hours a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service. One thing must ensure you offer your customers, is that you provide a secure area for making their transactions. Buyers will exit faster than you can say “but wait, there’s more!” if they think it is not secure.
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