This Way Please – This Is What You Are Looking For

Everyone wants a great website. Usually when they think about their new website they’ll think about nice, shiny images and a great layout. What are often forgotten are the user and the search engines. Putting a website out there is no guarantee that people or search engines will find you. And without them, your shiny new website is as good for your business as bad breath is for speed dating.

There are some basics that you need to consider when designing and building your website. There is no magic involved here, just simple structure, a thought for your visitor, and some easy to understand wording.

Think about the person who’s out there now, searching for your services or product on Google. They’re thinking simply about the product they need – “sumo suit”, “French polisher” or “organic sausages”. Now imagine that your website provides one (or all!) of these products or services. Your new website selling organic meats needs to speak clearly to this person.

We need to consider the following content on the website to make sure it’s indexed properly and clearly so that Joe Bloggs will consider clicking through:

• Page Title – keep this simple, unique to each page, include the product or service and your company name
• Headings – use headings to structure your content. Think about the primary heading “Organic Sausage”, sub headings “Leek and apple” and sub headings “Leek and apple ingredients”
• Paragraphs – make your content easy to read without taking a huge breath

If this is a category page for example, the first heading will be the category name, the second could be a category description (if applicable) and third level headings could be links to products.

Content Relevancy

When your pages are indexed, key information will be used in the search engine results pages (SERPS) so make sure your page is highlighting the correct content to search engines and that the wording used is clear. It’s no use the first heading on the page being “Category” or “Home”. It needs to read “Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Experts in Newcastle” or “Newcastle’s Award Winning Sausages Secret Recipe”, something relative that can be understood and that helps the user make an informed decision. Users clicking on a relative link are a far more qualified visitor than someone who visiting your site after clicking on a blind link.

This structure, known as semantic HTML, has a number of benefits, mostly obvious. It’s not rocket science, just simple formatting that, when used well attracts visitors to your site. Additionally, you’re future proofing your website, making it compatible with future releases of popular browsers rather than having to recode, and hack, with each release.

In summary, be clear:

• Think about your site content’s relevancy to search queries – what are your potential customers searching for and how can your site content be tailored to suit this?
• Be readable, understandable – display information in a clear, concise way, provide links to other related content on your site but stuffing keywords into your content doesn’t make for easy reading by your customers
• Use structure (semantic HTML) to help search engines – they can’t see and they don’t have a mouse so make their life easy by providing structural clues (titles, headings etc) and they’ll return the favour
• Provide text alternatives to images – remember, not all of your visitors can see you site
• Get links into your site from other websites – use social bookmarking sites, post content on other sites relative to yours and encourage other to link to you, it all persuades the search engines that you’re a worthwhile site and they’ll look favourably on you

Of course, understanding the principles of good content and being able to put it into practice for your business can be two, very separate things. If you would like to know more about how this or other Internet marketing solutions can be used to develop your business then call, email or fax Mancala, the Online Marketing Experts.