The most important part of your website is the text content of your site. The major
search engines only index keyword text in your site content, making sure you have
optimized it for the search engines is the smartest thing you could do with your website.
This means having a minimum of 60% text to 40% graphics ratio on the majority of
your web pages. If you have a beautiful flash template showing only images with your
business name on the home page, you have absolutely wasted your money. The reason
most websites don’t get into the top 5 pages of the major search engine rankings is
because you have given the search engines no text to index. Big mistake!
The same goes with intro pages, the only thing you have done here is annoyed your
website visitors by making them wait while a flashy graphic loads by which time they
have already bounced out.
If you have an image only home page or flash template intro page there is very little
search engine optimization that can be done for your site except on other main web
pages. You will primarily have to rely on offsite marketing to get your website ranked
in the search engines.
Incorporate an editable footer which displays on all pages of your website with the
ability to add hyperlinks. Don’t put your contact details in the footer, leave that info for
the ‘Contact Us’ page. Instead load your footer with keywords for the search engines to
index, up to 10 maximum. If you are SEO savvy you can add keyword product pages
linked to the titles in the footer to give you another advantage over your competitors on
the search engines.
Another key point is to make sure the site navigation on your website is fast and user
friendly. Check that all of your links and navigation tabs work correctly otherwise the
search engines will penalize you with lower rankings for broken links.
The search engines like fresh new content so having a content management system
(CMS) where you can update the content of your site regularly is essential plus it saves
you $1000’s in programming fees. If you don’t yet have a website, check out this free
template software which includes web hosting, domain name registration, 10 email
addresses plus a robust content management system all for $39.95 AU/month inclusive.
Top ranking websites know that they have to offer their visitors something more than
just the ordinary to transform visits into online sales. Add resource pages or Article
pages that offer visitors related information to their topic of interest, rather than just a
sales pitch. Add live article feed to your web pages so that new interesting content is
available all the time to encourage repeat visitor traffic.
Designing Websites for Search Engine Success
