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Beginner's Guide to Writing your Web Pages


Creating your Web Pages

Writing web pages may seem to come far down the pecking order after all the work you did finding keywords to describe your web site in the earlier lessons. All the searching and brainstorming for words and phrases will now go into generating the content for your pages. If you can add 100 different phrases which define your product, you have 100 different chances of being found through the search engines. With many of those phrases, you may be competing against millions of sites: for others there may be very few competing pages. All phrases can bring you traffic - some more motivated than others.

There are two possible styles: you can write a journal or novel to impress your human reader with your writing style or write so that the search engines can process and determine the content of your web site. There are many programs to help you write in a search engine friendly way. WebPosition offers a free trial and contains many pages of valuable advice.

Keep each page of your site focused on only one subject using the keywords and keyword phrases that you researched in the analysis stage. Cover each new topic / sub-topic on a new page. If subjects are very diverse, consider having separate web sites for each topic so that each site follows a similar theme.

Writing your pages using a web page design package will not help to make your page search engine friendly. Do not use a WYSIWYG editor for pages that are to be optimised for search engines. Use a text editor: hand coding has a wonderful influence on keeping your code simple and clean. The search engines use a crawler 'robot' program which 'reads' and analyses your written words: they can not see graphics, flash, video, sound or java script. It is up to you to write in a format that the robot can read and process. This is your goal when optimising your web pages. Once you have that part of your page written, then make it pretty for the human reader, adding colour and images.

Every search engine looks at your page slightly differently. Read what each search engine tells you they look for in a page and make sure that your pages fit into their formulae. If your site has multiple pages you can write different pages for different engines, thereby giving yourself more chance of being indexed by multiple search engines.

All web pages are written in a language called html. If they are not structured correctly the search engines will have difficulty indexing your pages. For those who are new to writing web pages, you can get a free trial of WebPosition to help you with designing and writing pages which are search engine friendly. These pages were written using WebPosition for the initial draft.

There are two main elements to a web page:

HEAD
This area includes the Title for your page and the META tags. It is also used for style and script tags.
For help with writing the HEAD area I can recommend ScrubTheWeb's free META tag builder.
The minimum code you need to include in the HEAD is:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<title>Title text goes here</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1,keyword2,keyword phrase,etc">
<meta name="description" content="Description of the page goes here">
</head>
BODY
This is where you write the visible text; to be seen by the human readers of your page and indexed by search engines. The minimum content recommended is:
<body>
<h1>Title text goes here</h1>
<p>Description of the page goes here</p>
<p>More content goes here</p>
<h2>Sub-title text goes here</h2>
<p>More content goes here</p>
.....
</body>
</html>
Some search engines take the meta descriptions or first few sentances and display these in the search results. Other search engines will display words which appear near to or with the keywords used in the search query.
The content of the BODY area can be short or long. It is here that you sell your product using visible words. Later you can add colour, graphics, flash, sound and video to enhance your text. Not all browsers display graphics or flash, so use the ALT tag to add content and meaning. This ALT tag can also be used to include words which will re-inforce the theme of your page. If possible, view your page using different browsers before you publish.
 

Choosing web page content

Write your content for your human visitors. This helps to keep the search engine optimisation (SEO) very simple and the more simple you keep it, the easier it is to succeed.

  • Each page should be focused on one key phrase and secondary phrases - alternative phrases for the key phrase - the richer the language the better.
     
  • For the main secondary phrases, you then build another page focused on that phrase and its secondary phrases.
     
  • Etc. - people search for information by topic (key phrase) so give it to them topic by topic with as much or as little depth as they want to find.

On all pages you use the TITLE and H1 tag to emphasise the key phrase and Hn and STRONG tags to emphasise the secondary phrases. Rather than lengthy menus, use the phrase within the text to link to its 'expanded' page plus site map pages - maximum 80 links per site map page - so that human visitors and search engines don't have to follow too deep a link tree to find all the site.

This ends up with a site where you have pages which are highly focused, covering all the major search possibilities, PLUS another 800 - 1500 secondary phrases which may only bring you in one or two visitors a month.

For some niches this means only 5 pages, others 50 pages and for others many 100s of pages. You know the 'right' number when you find you can't write another page without duplicating what has already been written. Avoid duplication.
 

Bring visitors to your web pages

Make your site visible to the internet world. Add links from your site to other sites which complement your business without competing with it. Write to the webmaster of the site to advise them that you are adding a link so that they can have a say in how you link to them. Many will offer a reciprocal link back to your site. Again, here you need to give them direction as to how you would like the link to appear: Offer keyword rich text written in html that they can copy and paste to their site. Many sites are listed in the search engine results purely because the keywords have been included in the inwards link.

web site marketing

If this all seems rather above your abilities or does not fit in with your time constraints, find someone to write your site for you. Check other sites that they have written to satisfy yourself that you are getting value for money. Look at the source code and satisfy yourself that they are not breaking any rules: is there text on the page which is not visible to the human reader that has only been placed there to boost search engine ratings? Do they use invisible links to enhance the value of other web sites?

If you need help with finding someone to write your site for you, you are welcome to send the Beginner's Guide an email. Please give a brief description of what you require from your web site and what budget you have in mind. There are budgets to fit all pockets, from the small home based business through to the multinational. (It is much cheaper to write a site from scratch than to try to fix a badly written site.)

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