Development Strategy
Introduction to developing an optimised web site.
Use our tried and tested method to quickly build a web site with the foundations in place to have a optimised and professional web business.
Before you start developing your website some important decisions need to be made. I cant stress enough be decisive, eye on the prize and so forth the biggest mistake you can make is overcomplicating your web site putting irrelevant material in and straying from the point not only is this a waste of your time it will negatively affect your rankings and destroy your chances of those very important visitors ever returning to your pages, always build it up around a central theme.
With this in mind put a lot of thought in choosing your subject and sticking to it, its always a bonus to choose something that your familiar with, this will give you unique content and cut down on your research.
Know your objectives and target audience even the mood you want to purvey not only will it make this stage a lot easier, it could also provide you with your niche.
If your a novice dont despair, although it helps to have the skills to Develop all the aspects your site yourself, there are many resources available that will help you get a head start, saving you time and thus money by getting you straight into business.
Picking your domain name:
The trick is to be patient and persistent think of appropriate preferred titles based on your choosen theme and research on keyword trends then list them. Afterwards use a domain name availability checker to confirm which domains are in fact available. Put off buying a domain name until you have written your basic content and developed the structure of your website as this is a work in progress and you may find your concepts have evolved and an alternative name may be more suitable after you got more involved in your project. This said many developers are known to build a website around a domain name they feel shows potential.
If you have an option try pick a domain name that has a 'good' history as search engines will favour an exsisting name when it comes to ranking (a brand thats stood the test of time would be the thinking behind this). you can use the Domain Age Tool to check this.
You will be lucky if you get what you want and you may even have to pay a premium, however alternatives are usually listing and you should be able find something suitable.
Check the availablity and whois information on a Url
Writing content.
We recommend writing your base content before you actually start developing your web pages, making use of a flow chart to link your subject matter this will give you the basic web structure. Try and keep it within three navigational levels (these are the pages that will carry the most ranking and traffic). If your not developing the website yourself this will also give the designer a good idea of what you require.
Write the content as you would a book, honesty is the best policy avoid plagiarism however do research other sites this will familiarise yourself with the opposition and give you fresh idea's to increase your contents worth.
Only edit your script once completed for key word optimisation this will ensure your pages worth as an article rather than just another 'Web pamphlet' as these pages are known. Make sure your punctuation and spelling is one hundred percent. Space out you page for visual clarity and use terminology that is easy to understand. Confusing and badly laid out text will annoy visitors. A well presented page will give your visitors a professional feel and some search engine spiders are also designed to to take punctuation and grammar into account.
Put in as much content as you can, as long as its not repetitive and maintains a structured format.
Blogs can be added to increase content once your set up. This may create more work in the form of monitoring for abuse and editing. At this stage identify which pages you would be likely to edit regulary for 'newsworthy' status, these would include blogs newsletters and Q A sections.
Many writers can be contracted to write content for you page at quite reasonable rates and there are many ways of getting readers to add to the content.
Developing and Designing your layout.
For the less experienced there are many free templates and layouts available. Quite often this is an available option provided by some hosting providers. For those who have more of a development budget made to order options can be sourced. However if you can, for the sake of individuality and more control over the functions, building your own is always the best and there is plenty of good free and paid for options and HTML editors for you to consider. This is a choice you should make based on your own experience and preferences. Remember its always an advantage to have a little knowledge in development if you want to get into this business
If your wanting to learn HTML code there are plenty of good HTML programming guides available (Resources link) , a common technique is to find a web page on the Internet that you like and save it to your directory. Open the Index file with word pad or your notebook to see how the code is laid out try making a few changes and before you know it you will be an expert.
Making use and designing your css (Cascading style Sheets for a formatted presentation) asp (active server pages for dynamically generating web pages) xml (Extensible Mark-up Language for managing data) prior to developing your HTML pages and content will make the whole process go a lot faster.
A good template should look simple and attractive taking into mind allowances for advertising and content.
Complementary and relevant images could be used although sparingly over the page, again original is better. Free image Databases can be used or even stock Photo sites again artwork can be outsourced. You may want to incorporate some of this artwork logo into a banner that you can use for marketing at a later stage, in order to create an 'Image' for your website.
Rename your clipart using keywords if you want your site to attract additional visitors from the image searches on google and yahoo.
To many Images will increase your pages download time and chase away your visitors.
Avoid using frames on any pages you want the search engines to pick up on they don't like them.
Do not use the same or similar colour font as the background colour even if its visible to you the spiders tend to recognise this a attempt at camouflaging and spamming keywords then penalize you.
Clear and visible access and mobility should be present to allow your visitors ease of navigating clearly through your pages.
Dont loose those visitors create a missing page that redirects all those miss typed, Deleted or moved URL's be carefull not to use an existing page to avoid duplicate content negitive score on your rankings.
Developing to optimize your Website
Choosing a Keyword: Ok Now you¡¯ve got your content You need to decide which Keywords you are going to target. Try running a keyword position checker on an example high ranking website to see how they have achieved there top listing on a popular keyword, a keyword density cloud presents a visual representation of this.
Once youve choosen a suitable keyword and have a general idea of how to lay it out you can start manipulating your pages for optimisation and keyword placement for those search spiders, Its important to do this at this stage to ensure that your content will not be compromised and if anything can be enhanced by keyword placement, kill two bird's with one stone by using this time to edit and proof read your pages.
Choose relevant kewords with a high bidding value by doing some research with the help in our marketing section of this tutorial.
Density: The key phrase should be found often on the page, Google seems to tolerate and even like very high keyword densities however do not destroy the integrity of your site for this purpose the consequences outway the benefits repetitive keywords can be interpreted by the spiders as spamming and you pages could be skipped and denied listings try not to exceed three uses per paragraph if you worried about doing this unintentionally you could for example even switch from US to UK spelling to capture a wider audience. The page should front-heavy with the first instance of the keyword somewhere very near to the beginning of the page and make it appear once or twice fairly close to this first keyword thereafter scattering the rest across the page.
In General you will find having good content gives you a good range of keywords the real trick here is wording according to the latest search trends.
Optimisation within the HTML code of your publication:
To optimise the HTML code of the pages to match Google's algorithm Lets start with the Title: The keyword or phrase should be included in the title of the page. However, it is probably best to include other words in addition to the keyword as well. For single keywords or two word phrases, preferably consider a title of 3-5 words in length.
Headings: Placing the key phrase in a H1 or H2 heading at the very beginning of the page seems to work well. For the heading use just the keyword or key phrase without adding any other words into it. If the page in question is a very long one, using a H3 heading with the keyword in it every now and then to retain the focus doesn't seem to hurt.
There are two meta tags you should include the meta description tag limited it to 250 characters and your keywords tag limited this to about 1,000 characters or less. Although you wont be penalised exceeding these limits it may result in certain search engines ignoring them. Do note that mega tags do not carry the same weight in ranking as what they used to.
These codes are available in our html code examples.
Special words: Including the keyword in link text or in bold text does seem to give a slight advantage. If I would have to choose between the two, I'd see using the keyword in link text as more important than using it in bold. Meta tags always help but are not a big factor in the ranking.
Link popularity, point back as many links from you pages back to at the page you're optimising this can be done discretely using key word hyperlinks.
END OF PART 1 By now you should have created a decent publication time to get it Established - in Part 2 of our Tutorial