How to build search engine friendly pages
General
The first rule of writing good website content for search engines is .... don't try and write good content for the search engines, concentrate on writing your copy for your customers ! If your website is clearly laid out and well written the sophisticated search engine algorithms will pick up on this and grade your site accordingly. So the real question then is how you should write good copy for a website.How to write good copy for a website
1. Identify the key phrases that your potential customers will use to find you
Key phrase research involves trying to establish which phrases users are
going to use to bring you business. To be effective you
should aim to get your phrases into the top 10 on Google. The different
factors top consider are:
Which phrases get found ?
If you are offering self catering accomodation in Ramsgate there is no point trying to compete for the phrase 'self catering', as this is far too difficult. A good exercise is to go to enter search terms into google.co.uk (pages from the UK) in quote marks and see how many pages are competing for this exact phrase. Try it and you will see there are 1.4 million pages, and you need to be in the top 10 !
I have one customer (www.royalroad.co.uk)who has a small website doing exactly this, and we have chosen less competitive phrases which have more chance such as 'self catering Ramsgate' - if you click on this you will see the site comes a respectable 7th. With only 157 competing pages on Google.co.uk we have far more of a chance.
You need to have a range of phrases to spread your net as wide as possible. Try and think of as many phrases as you can that people might use. Certain words that are difficult to spell it could be worthwhile putting in a mis-spelling, depressingly some of these sometimes work better than the correct spelling !
Try and think of anything that makes your product or service more niche. Location is an obvious one, but another is the type of product, or who you are selling to. Another customer sells kimonos (www.japanesekimonos.co.uk) and here we are doing well across the board. We started with 'japanese kimonos uk' which we got to number 1, and with the success of the site we soon became 1st for just 'Japanese kimonos', and 3rd for 'kimonos' on its own.
Which phrases bring me business ?
If you are getting found but your visitors aren't interested in what you are offering this can either be due to location, or the fact that the key phrase is too generic. In the former case one example is of a website we did for a retail lighting company in South Wimbledon which was top of the search engines, but despite a high number of visitors no one wanted to travel there since the shop did not offer anything they felt they could not get locally, and they could not buy by mail order.
A phrase that is too generic could be 'lights' for instance, which is too vague, and will attract a wide audience interested in all different sorts of lights. Instead you need specific phrases that more accurately describe your product or service, in this case possibly 'table lamps south west london', or 'lighting shops in London' etc.
It is also worthwhile thinking outside the box - for the www.royalroad.co.uk site mentioned above we are promoting adjacent phrases such as 'Ramsgate holidays' which you will see is currently coming top in Google. A lot of people interested in holidaying in Ramsgate will need accomodation, we just need a few to come our way.
This site also gives useful information about local places of interest and activities, and of course we are promoting these key phrases as well. Try clicking on Monkton nature reserve and you'll see the site appears 3rd, or 'Spitfire and Hurricane Museum' and the site is 5th. Once again the hope is that people visiting these attractions might be interested in somewhere to stay.
Importantly, when you yourself search the Internet make a note of what you do, it's likely others will do the same.
Once you have compiled a list of key phrases list them in order of priority - which ones are most important to your business, what do you want to be selling most. Make sure your website reflects the priority shown by your key phrases.
2. Match your key phrases to your web pages
As a rule of thumb, small to medium websites should have 15 to 30 key phrases. Once you have compliled a list of key phrases group them together as naturally as you can. An obvious example from above would be that of the lighting shop where you would have different categories such as table lamps, floor lamps, wall lamps etc. Each category would be likely to have sub categories such as Table lamps (main category) - Tiffany lamps, childrens' lamps etc (sub categories), so you would group the sub categories with their main category.
If you have an existing website then allocate your groups of key phrases to your web pages. If the key phrases are not represented on your pages then something has gone wrong ! Either you've forgotten to tell your visitors about what your key products and services, or you are trying to attract vistors with key phrases which are not representative of your company. More usually it is just that you have not applied this type of discipline to your website, and can quite simply provide extra pages for the key phrases which you are finding difficulty in placing.
You don't want to overload pages with long scroll down information so its best to split pages up if they have more than say 3 or 4 sub categories, and this happens to be about the ideal number of key phrases you can usefully promote on one page. After this number your key phrases tend to get diluted. Each category should also be one of the key phrases that you are promoting, or at least close to it. As an example you might be trying to promote the phrase 'web marketing london', but find it difficult to get this exact phrase into your text which is talking about web marketing, but not necessarily in London. Don't worry about it, it is better to write clearly and naturally than try and force words in just for the sake of it.
Remember - the search engines are on your side, they are trying to make the web a better place ! If you try and be too clever you risk getting caught out.
3. Page layout
You should now have an infrastructure, or if you like skeleton navigation, for your website. The pages should ideally have 400 to 500 words, but in reality there are only a few information sites that are able to do this. Text may be what the search engines like to get their teeth into but it is not pretty, so you may be better off creating separate information pages for each product or group of products, and link to them from secondary navigation that does not intefer with the main flow of your website. You don't want to create any barriers to impede your sale!
The layout we suggest is a classic one of Headings and Sub Headings, that way viewers can quickly identify what your paragraphs are about and read the secion that interests them.
We have previously identified key phrases, prioritised and grouped them, and allocated them to pages, so you should now have your Headings and Sub Headings in place. These should be coded by the web designer as headings so the search engines can prioritise these and help the search process by giving these headings prominence in the rankings.
An example of how to format your page using headings can be seen on this page, where my main heading <h1> is " How to build search engine friendly pages ", my heading 2 (<h2>) is "How to write good copy for a website", and then there are a series of Heading 3s (<h3>) in light blue listed 1 to 5. I am not actually trying to promote these as key phrases, but it serves as an example of how it should be done.
Heading 1 (<h1>) is given more weight by the search engines than h2 which has more weight than h3 (etc) which has more than ordinary text. Similarly phrases in bold are rated higher, but use this with care ! Text should look natural, not as if it has been written for the search engines.
Your home page should have your 3 or 4 most important key phrases included in it, and your most important one should be as near the top of the page as possible (strapline ?), in the middle, and at the end.
4. Link to different parts of your site.
If you are talking about products or services in one part of your site that are described more fully on another part of your site then it is helpful to provide your visitors with a text link so they can easily navigate to that page. It also helps the search engines evaluate what is most important on your site.
5. Naming your web page files
Why not name your web pages according to the principle "It does what it says on the tin" ! Very often you see pages named in what appears to be some secret code known only to the web developer, such as : www.vancouver.craigslist.org/dmg/236574740.html (with apologies to this website !)
All pages should ideally be called by the main keyphrase of the page with underscore where appropriate, i.e. personal_counselling.html.
6. General advice:
- All your links should if possible be text links rather than graphic
links.
- All text should be readable, not graphic.
- Your home page is important and should have keyword rich text to attract
the search engines.
- You should have a links pages, called anything but 'links'
- You should have a site map page
- You should have a link back to the home page from all pages
- You should have title and alt tags for your pics.