By Pierre Leblanc and Elizabeth Coleman
Let us guess… you have a wonderful website that cost you four or five figures to produce, but no significant income has been generated through it since its launch.
What ’s the problem? Your website is visually perfect, with an amazing Flash intro, a dynamic menu and a huge database of your products and services. But it’s also a monthly expense and a hole in your pocket.
What do you really want to achieve with your website? First, you want your potential clients to find it. Second, you want them to stay on it. Third, you want them to contact you.
If they don’t know that your company exists, how will a potential client find your website? If they have a need you can fulfill, they will search for information about the service or product that you offer on a search engine, and hopefully, they will find your website.
But what if the search engines can’t find your website? Bingo! In such a case, your investment quickly turns into a liability.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your website should have been taken into account from the very beginning of its development. Unfortunately, many of today’s “web designers” are in fact graphic designers or computer-savvy people with an incomplete background in search engine marketing. Their intentions are good, but they lack the experience and knowledge of a true web designer.
In addition, if your website was produced several years ago, search engines then were very different than they are today. At that time, designers sometimes used questionable methods to get results - methods that now can get you banned by the search engines.
Using options such as Flash, Frames, and dynamic pages will enable a person to produce your website very easily. However, will your Website be a good marketing tool? Let’s find out.
Some website designers will offer to create things that are not really necessary. Even if it’s possible to do it, it doesn’t mean you should, just to impress a visitor. Flash intro animations are often used, but what if your potential client feels that the loading of the main page is taking too much time? He will move along to the next website, maybe one of your competitors. Remember your second goal: you want visitors to stay on your website.
Producing an entire website in Flash is not a good idea. It can produce beautiful results, but search engines cannot read Flash files.
Imagine a blind person with a computer that helps him read books. The computer translates what it reads to a computer-generated voice so that the person can listen to the book ’s contents. But if it encounters a book that uses images to tell a story – such as a comic book – how much of the story will he understand without the pictures?
That’s how search engines read your website. Search engines ignore images, videos, sound and Flash files. If the content of your pages is in an image or Flash file, no one will be able to find your website on search engines.
A “spider”, also called “crawler” or “robot”, is a piece of software used by search engines to visit your website. It is a fully automated program, with no human being behind it. When it gets to your main page, it will read it and follow the links you have on it to continue browsing the rest of your website.
Using frames in your design is also not a good idea. When it gets to the initial frame page, the spider will find no links. It will stop there and go back to its sender, indexing only the first page it encounters. The same thing happens if you have a navigation menu built completely in Flash, DHTML or JavaScript.
The more pages that you have in your website, the more content you have for the search engine to index your site. If you think you have dozens of pages to show because of your product catalog is displayed through a complex series of scripts that extract the information from a database, you are wrong. Dynamically generated pages created by programming scripts using languages such as ASP, PERL or PHP, will not be indexed. These pages do not really exist until the visitor invoked them through a browser. Search engine spiders will not try to generate all the possible pages your scripts can generate when used by a human visitor. Even if you put links for all the possibilities on a page, crawlers don’t recognize characters, like ?, & and =, used to send parameters to a script.
Having an online administration module for your website sounds interesting. After all, you can do the updates whenever you want, wherever you are, all by yourself. But be careful. Maintenance tools often put your content in databases and display the information through templates generated by programming scripts. Also, the templates will prevent you from adding new layouts to your structure. For example, you won’t be able to add an image where the designer of the tools didn’t think you would need to.
Do you know for sure what keywords you should be using on your site ? Or are you just guessing?
Selecting keywords (the words people use to search for information via search engines) is a critical component of search engine optimization. For a well optimized website, a detailed analysis is necessary to identify the best keywords for your web site – those that are relevant, targeted, popular, and have a minimum of competition.
You must choose carefully. If you choose keywords that no one is searching for, it won't matter how highly your site is ranked on the search engines. Alternatively, if your keyword choices are very popular, but too broad and competitive – such as “travel” – the competition may be too stiff for you to be able to rank highly.
Choosing good keywords is the first step. Next, you need keyword-rich website copy that places your keywords in the right places and at the right density. The keywords need to be repeated throughout your text – but you don’t want to overdo it. Web sites that have been overstuffed with keywords are a turnoff to visitors, and risk being labelled “spam” by the search engines. And spam is a category that no one wants to be in!
It’s a fact: search engines pay close attention to the links that point back to you from other websites. And they don’t just count the number of links - they also assess the quality of those links and what text they contain. This makes linking a critical component of a good SEO strategy.
To boost your link popularity, submitting your site to SEO-friendly directories such as JoeAnt can make a huge difference. Suppliers, clients, and business colleagues can also be a good source of quality links.
But be careful in your choices! A link created on what is known as a “link farm” – a set of web pages that have been built for the sole purpose of increasing the number of incoming links to a web site – can do your site more harm than good. Link farms are a known spam tactic, and sites that participate in them are very likely to be penalized by the major search engines.
To succeed in drawing potential clients to find your website, stay on it, and contact you to learn more, you need more than a visually attractive website. To generate quality traffic and turn that traffic into sales, your site needs to be valuable for both the search engines and your visitors.
A user-friendly structure and nice graphic design may help keep visitors on your website, but it should not provoke technical issues that block the visibility of your pages with search engines. On the other hand, you may have a flawless structure from an SEO point of view, but if you don’t have valuable, user-friendly content, you won’t be making sales.
You don ’t have to make a choice between search engine optimization and usability. A good website can successfully address both sides of the coin, drawing in – and keeping in – those visitors that can make a difference for your bottom line.
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Liz Coleman Communications
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liz@lizcoleman.com
Liz Coleman is a proud member of the Professional Writers Association of Canada and the Editors’ Association of Canada.
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© Liz Coleman Communications, Montreal, Canada 2005
Professional corporate writing, marketing copywriting, editing, and proofreading solutions
Did you know that...
If you built your web site using frames, flash, or javascript, search engines may not be able to navigate through your site?
Read Search engine optimization & usability in the Articles section to learn more!