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Just wondering about this subject. Has anyone got any articles i can read or tips they have. My site when 1st put on the search engines was in the top few for all my important keywords but now it is low. Mighty low. So any tips will help me thanks.
Also anyone who read my picture rating post i am currently in the process of setting that up and have figured out all the code :D so thanks nimco and others who helped!
AJ
Also anyone who read my picture rating post i am currently in the process of setting that up and have figured out all the code :D so thanks nimco and others who helped!
AJ
Fairly nice article covering the basics
[URL]http://www.mediacollege.com/internet/search-engines/seo/basics.html[/URL]
[URL]http://www.mediacollege.com/internet/search-engines/seo/basics.html[/URL]
OK, this is an article I wrote ages ago on the subject of how to write good content for web pages. Some of the references to my own web site may now not be correct since I've redesigned my site since then. On the whole though, it should all be correct. Also, it's not all relevant, since the original title of the article was "Writing web page content". Sorry it's so long:
For the purpose of this article, it is assumed that you are preparing a page to advertise your company or organisation as opposed to just giving completely unbiased information. Therefore, the text you will be creating should encourage a visitor to your site to stay on the site and have a look around.
However, before a visitor even reads your page, they must first visit your site. A huge proportion of web site visitors come from search engines, and as such, it is essential that the web page ranks highly on the major search engines. There are five main ways in which a search engine will rank pages:
o By finding how many other pages link to your site – e.g. a page with a lot of links coming in will rank highly.
o Looking at the domain name and filenames for keywords – see the article ‘Choosing a domain name’ produced by Knight-Sites.co.uk for more information about this.
o Looking at your META tags for keywords and a description – many use these to index your site.
o Using a robot (computerised web site crawler) to look at the text of the page for keywords.
o Sending a real person to look at the site and pass an unbiased judgement on the site based on the content they find.
The latter two ways detailed can therefore be affected by the text of the page.
When a robot visits your site, it will index the entire page based upon what it finds. Should somebody search their database, the search engine will scan through all the pages it has indexed, looking for keywords that match the search term. The more matches it finds on a page, the higher ranked your page will be.
Do NOT however be tempted to fill your home page with a list of keywords, and repeat the same keyword over and over again. This will NOT get you a high ranking, because the robots are intelligent enough to detect this. If they do find this, they will leave your site, and sometimes even ban your web site from their database.
So how do you get enough keywords in then? Well, the trick is to ensure that the keywords are integrated into your web page, in such a way that they would make sense to a real visitor to your site. For example, rather than writing: “Knight-Sites.co.uk is a web site designer which designs web sites for people wanting web sites designed,” you would write: “Knight-Sites.co.uk is a professional UK web site designer, specialising in web sites for SMEs.”
Clearly the second one reads much more fluently than the first, and it also manages to get many more keywords in (professional, UK, SMEs). A robot would visit the first site, and may reject it because it considers the same keyword appears too many times in a short passage, whereas it would visit the second site and find many more keywords to index. This is the key to writing text for a web site to get it picked up by robots.
The second way we said search rankings could be addressed via the content of the page was with regards to search engines which use human operators to visit the site (e.g. Dmoz.org – this uses editors to visit sites and give an unbiased view of what they find).
The key to writing good content here is to ensure that the text reads well, and gives a clear message. If we use our previous example (“Knight-Sites.co.uk is a web site designer which designs web sites for people wanting web sites designed,” against “Knight-Sites.co.uk is a professional UK web site designer, specialising in web sites for SMEs”) we can see that the latter is much more fluent than the first. Not only does it make more sense than the first one, but it also gives the reader more information – and the more they know, the better assessment of the quality of your site they will be able to give.
Therefore, think carefully when you are writing the content for your pages about what you are telling them. People do not want to read an entire web page, only to think to themselves at the end of it, ‘What did I find out?’ or ‘I’m confused…’.
Now that you have thought about how you will write the page to rank highly on search engines, it is time to think about how to keep visitors on your site once they have first arrived there. According to statistics, you have 11 seconds to impress visitors before they move on. In reality, this is closer to 3 seconds, so it is essential that you show something interesting to the user as soon as the page starts loading. You may notice on the Knight-Sites.co.uk home page (http://www.knight-sites.co.uk), there is a small subtitle line reading, “Great value UK web site designer, offering high quality, low cost web site design, and site promotion.”
This line serves two main purposes. It contains many keywords and key phrases to ensure that the site ranks highly on search engines, and it also introduces the visitor to the company. We would hope that anyone visiting the site is interested in this, and that it meets their requirements. By the time the have finished reading this, on a standard connection, the rest of the page will have loaded.
Elsewhere in the page, we have used phrases to show that we can sympathise with their requirements (“help your business survive in the 21st century”), and then told them what we can do to help, “We will design for you the best possible site.” Now that they have read this, we can start to give a little more detail about what we offer. If they had read the first few lines and not been interested, then it would seem that we cannot help them.
Reading on in the page, we talk about offering services that others do not, to suggest we are unique. However, perhaps one of the most critical things when writing content for a web page is to constantly assure the visitor that you can meet ALL of their needs. This is often a great way to help get key words and phrases into your page, as often people will search for their needs – e.g. “low cost high quality web designer”.
------------------------------------------
Hope that helps!
As well as this, try to ensure you have TARGETTED meta keywords and description on ALL your pages. Don't put generic words in like "pictures" but put phrases in. Try to think what you want people to search for to find your site. E.g. with my site, I was targetting people who might have been searching for "UK web designer" or whatever.
Just use your imagination - I am sure people will have many more comments.
For the purpose of this article, it is assumed that you are preparing a page to advertise your company or organisation as opposed to just giving completely unbiased information. Therefore, the text you will be creating should encourage a visitor to your site to stay on the site and have a look around.
However, before a visitor even reads your page, they must first visit your site. A huge proportion of web site visitors come from search engines, and as such, it is essential that the web page ranks highly on the major search engines. There are five main ways in which a search engine will rank pages:
o By finding how many other pages link to your site – e.g. a page with a lot of links coming in will rank highly.
o Looking at the domain name and filenames for keywords – see the article ‘Choosing a domain name’ produced by Knight-Sites.co.uk for more information about this.
o Looking at your META tags for keywords and a description – many use these to index your site.
o Using a robot (computerised web site crawler) to look at the text of the page for keywords.
o Sending a real person to look at the site and pass an unbiased judgement on the site based on the content they find.
The latter two ways detailed can therefore be affected by the text of the page.
When a robot visits your site, it will index the entire page based upon what it finds. Should somebody search their database, the search engine will scan through all the pages it has indexed, looking for keywords that match the search term. The more matches it finds on a page, the higher ranked your page will be.
Do NOT however be tempted to fill your home page with a list of keywords, and repeat the same keyword over and over again. This will NOT get you a high ranking, because the robots are intelligent enough to detect this. If they do find this, they will leave your site, and sometimes even ban your web site from their database.
So how do you get enough keywords in then? Well, the trick is to ensure that the keywords are integrated into your web page, in such a way that they would make sense to a real visitor to your site. For example, rather than writing: “Knight-Sites.co.uk is a web site designer which designs web sites for people wanting web sites designed,” you would write: “Knight-Sites.co.uk is a professional UK web site designer, specialising in web sites for SMEs.”
Clearly the second one reads much more fluently than the first, and it also manages to get many more keywords in (professional, UK, SMEs). A robot would visit the first site, and may reject it because it considers the same keyword appears too many times in a short passage, whereas it would visit the second site and find many more keywords to index. This is the key to writing text for a web site to get it picked up by robots.
The second way we said search rankings could be addressed via the content of the page was with regards to search engines which use human operators to visit the site (e.g. Dmoz.org – this uses editors to visit sites and give an unbiased view of what they find).
The key to writing good content here is to ensure that the text reads well, and gives a clear message. If we use our previous example (“Knight-Sites.co.uk is a web site designer which designs web sites for people wanting web sites designed,” against “Knight-Sites.co.uk is a professional UK web site designer, specialising in web sites for SMEs”) we can see that the latter is much more fluent than the first. Not only does it make more sense than the first one, but it also gives the reader more information – and the more they know, the better assessment of the quality of your site they will be able to give.
Therefore, think carefully when you are writing the content for your pages about what you are telling them. People do not want to read an entire web page, only to think to themselves at the end of it, ‘What did I find out?’ or ‘I’m confused…’.
Now that you have thought about how you will write the page to rank highly on search engines, it is time to think about how to keep visitors on your site once they have first arrived there. According to statistics, you have 11 seconds to impress visitors before they move on. In reality, this is closer to 3 seconds, so it is essential that you show something interesting to the user as soon as the page starts loading. You may notice on the Knight-Sites.co.uk home page (http://www.knight-sites.co.uk), there is a small subtitle line reading, “Great value UK web site designer, offering high quality, low cost web site design, and site promotion.”
This line serves two main purposes. It contains many keywords and key phrases to ensure that the site ranks highly on search engines, and it also introduces the visitor to the company. We would hope that anyone visiting the site is interested in this, and that it meets their requirements. By the time the have finished reading this, on a standard connection, the rest of the page will have loaded.
Elsewhere in the page, we have used phrases to show that we can sympathise with their requirements (“help your business survive in the 21st century”), and then told them what we can do to help, “We will design for you the best possible site.” Now that they have read this, we can start to give a little more detail about what we offer. If they had read the first few lines and not been interested, then it would seem that we cannot help them.
Reading on in the page, we talk about offering services that others do not, to suggest we are unique. However, perhaps one of the most critical things when writing content for a web page is to constantly assure the visitor that you can meet ALL of their needs. This is often a great way to help get key words and phrases into your page, as often people will search for their needs – e.g. “low cost high quality web designer”.
------------------------------------------
Hope that helps!
As well as this, try to ensure you have TARGETTED meta keywords and description on ALL your pages. Don't put generic words in like "pictures" but put phrases in. Try to think what you want people to search for to find your site. E.g. with my site, I was targetting people who might have been searching for "UK web designer" or whatever.
Just use your imagination - I am sure people will have many more comments.
Just wondering about this subject. Has anyone got any articles i can read or tips they have. My site when 1st put on the search engines was in the top few for all my important keywords but now it is low. Mighty low. So any tips will help me thanks.
Also anyone who read my picture rating post i am currently in the process of setting that up and have figured out all the code :D so thanks nimco and others who helped!
AJ
Also anyone who read my picture rating post i am currently in the process of setting that up and have figured out all the code :D so thanks nimco and others who helped!
AJ