Having a great website really isn’t that difficult.
August 17, 2007 on 10:37 am
Filed Under:SEO, Web
Jonathan Hochman wrote an interesting article on Search Engine Watch, “How to Get More Pages into Google’s Index” which I read upon receiving via email, and then followed it up with a thread on a popular SEO forum, which I also read.
He’s hit upon something here, and I’m both excited and terrified that it seems like such a revelation to many of those that I know in the industry. The fact that good, clean code can help with the indexing of your site is something that seems so obvious to me that I almost worry about those that would overlook something like that.
If it all basically boils down to making you money or, in more markety terms, “having a successful website” then there are a few basics that, when done well, will ensure this. Clean coding is but one of them.
A successful website involves many things and differing viewpoints will tell you any manner of these things. From highly complex back-end programming to the just-plain -Harry-Potter-style magic of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
To me it’s a few simple things that are simply done well. Of course, that can technically be applied to almost any job, career, relationship, or Life for that matter, but I’m not going to bust out my incense and start chanting just yet.
- Make it a GOOD one.
- Make it pretty.
- Make it work well.
- Make it make sense to your visitors.
- Make it have things that they want.
- Make it attractive to Search Engines.
- Figure out ways to make it better.
Build a good site.
Make it visually appealing and send a message or create a mood that will ensure a quality user experience. Uffda, that was more markety jargon wasn’t it? Make a good site that people like being on. There you go. Make things easy to find and make them things that people want to find.
Start with a good design and then create good code.
Heavy <table> code and MS Word-created <img> tags that go on for miles are to be avoided like the plague. I would suggest nothing but a few JS includes and a couple of CSS includes at most with each of your design elements (menu, content, logo, etc) in <div> tags.
Optimise every image as much as you can, whether it’s with Photoshop’s “Save for Web” feature or whatever is handy, and try to keep each individual image file around 10K or under. Then, check that the whole page doesn’t “weigh” more than 40-50K or so. Do this by saving the page as a file and checking its size. I’m sure there are heaps of sites out there that will measure your page size and download speed for you as well.
Usability is key.
Now set up your architecture, making sure that all the pages you want are in the proper spot and under the right category. For SEO purposes, name them accordingly. If you’ve done your keyword research and you know what you’re shooting for, then name the page that exact phrase. If you’re selling magic beans, have a page whose filename, meta title, heading and menu text are ALL “Magic Beans”.
Set up your content. Content, in this case, is basically just text with some images. People LOVE images, so put pictures and graphs and such anywhere that they’re relevant, though not excessively. No more than 3 or so in any of your body copy provided you’ve got substantial body copy.
Information is everything.
Write, write, write. Use the marketing material from your brochures or from your copywriter or make it up on your own (have someone else edit it though, heh). Make it useful to your users and not just to yourself or your existing customers. Remember that that majority of your users will probably never have heard of you, though this doesn’t mean that they want your whole history on every page (or even the homepage). They want to know what YOU can do for THEM and they want to know it quick.
Get together your site content and stick it in there. Then, for optimisation and for usability’s sake, go through and find relevant mention of your other pages and/or topics and link to them. When you reference another skill or product of yours, link to that page using the text that matches it’s name. NEVER use “Like Giants that sing lumberingly retarded songs? Click here for some magic beans.” Use “Magic beans are what you need if you’re down with giants who sing and then snore.”
Remember, of course, to use the keywords that you are targeting throughout your body copy. A basic rule that I follow is to target only one keyword phrase per page. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t include the other targeted phrases on the same page (”Web Marketing” should be on it’s own page but definitely shows up on the “Search Engine Optimisation” page as well). Use your targeted phrase liberally but not manically. If you’re spamming, they will find out.
Get a blog going, on your site, and write in it as much as you can. At least once a week, but daily if at all possible. YOU are the one that wants to stand apart from your competitors right? Then sound like you stand apart. Sound like an expert in whatever you are selling and spread your knowledge across your site for your visitors to enjoy. This will bring more qualified traffic than a good Pay-Per-Click campaign, in my experience.
That’s basically it for the setup. The rest focuses on getting good, quality links from reputable sources, folks that think you are worthy enough to send their visitors to, and then making sure that they stick around long enough to become clients/customers.
Now… is it working?
This is where the Web Analytics and Web Consulting parts come in. Again, like most of this, you can do it yourself, but as with the plumber, the mechanic and my accountant, it’s just a better deal to pay someone else with the knowledge, tools, and experience to handle it.
Web Analysis will tell you if you’re actually making as much money as you can off the visitors that you have to your site (if you’re converting them into clients/customers). While for some, the answer will always be “you CAN’T make enough”, the idea is still to find areas that could use improvement and improve them.
Web Analytics will give the data and the analysis, and the Web Consulting will give you some solutions. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, it’s a good idea to ask someone else to have a look at things and use their fresh perspective, combined with their relative objectivity, to look for things that you can change (Hell, I’ve moved the “Add to Cart” button from one spot to another and almost doubled the Conversion Rate).
That’s really about it, or at least as much as I can think of right now and fit in this entry. You can see that having a successful site really isn’t that hard, though you’re probably thinking what I’m thinking:
Why don’t we ALL have them then?
Another post, another time.