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Girl
Geek Speaks Newsletter
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Welcome to the August 2003 issue of our newsletter for the
technically challenged and web site wannabe's. We
feature articles to help guide you through the process
of designing, building, and promoting your business or
personal web site. If you know someone who may like
getting these newsletters, feel free to forward it to
them in its entirety, or have them sign up for their own
copy
below.
In This Issue:
Feature Article: Writing Well for the Web
Ask Girl Geek: What's the best strategy for selecting
keywords for your website?
Website of the Week
Writing Well for the Web
Sure, you use your website to communicate with clients,
lure potential customers, and inform site visitors about
your products and services, but do you also realize
there are at least 2 "hidden" audiences reading your
website? And one of these audiences is not even human!!!
Shocking!
"No, say it ain't so! Tell me, Girl Geek, who are these
mysterious visitors?"
Well, the 2 invisible audiences to your website are
1. Human Internet directory editors - who review
your site and decide whether it gets listed in their
directory.
2. Search Engine Spiders (aka "bots' or "robots")
who electronically read your site and determine it's
relevancy and ranking in search engines
Therefore, to write well for the web you need to be
mindful of what all 3 potential audiences are
looking to find on your site.
What are your basic web-surfing site visitors
(humans) looking for?
1. Relevant content - just like realtors say
"location, location, location"…the web-surfer's mantra
is "content, content, content." Site visitors are
looking for information that is relevant to a question,
need, or interest and you must provide that quickly and
easily or as Dr. Phil says, visitor "buh-bye."
2. Site visitors don't read lots of words online: they
scan or skim. They want their content "byte-sized."
This means bullet points, lists, or if you must write
full sentences, keep your paragraphs to no more than 3
sentences. Marketers know this truth: White space
sells. So, don't cram a lot of text into a tight space.
3. Benefits and Results -Instead of long
descriptions describing your products or services
(which I'm sure are wonderful!) tell the site visitor
what problem or pain they have that you can solve.
People buy solutions, not products. People by
intangibles like "peace of mind, " even if it comes in
the form of a Michelin tire or life insurance policy.
What are human Internet directory editors looking
for?
1. Interesting and relevant content - online
directories want to provide their clients with useful
information, not junk or spam. When you submit your
site to a directory you are asked to be specific in
choosing your category and keywords for inclusion in the
directory. Otherwise, the editor will see that your
site is not relevant to the category and you will not be
included. So don't just have your website be an online
advertisement, but include some valuable content to
educate the visitor.
2. If you have a spellchecker use it! It's human
editors after all and bad spelling, grammar, and
punctuation may be why you site gets omitted.
What a search engine spiders looking for?
1. Text - Search engine spiders can't read image
files, dynamic script, Flash, or javascript. They rely
on text to determine what you site is about and how to
rank it.
2. Keywords - Keywords are not just for meta-tags
anymore. For any hope of a decent ranking in search
engines, your keyword phrases MUST be in your title tag,
headings, and sprinkled throughout your site content
(some say at a frequency of 3-7%, but I've seen
higher). It also helps to have them in your text
navigation, site map, alt-tags, and meta-description
tag. (See article below for a strategy for choosing
relevant keywords for your site.)
Ask Girl Geek (Actual questions from people just
like you.)
"What's the best
strategy for selecting keywords for your website?"
This takes some research and strategy and here's how to
do it.
1. Make a list of all the 2-3 word phrases you could
imagine that would define your site content and which
your ideal client would enter into a search engine.
2. Then go to
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
and see if anyone actually searches them. Pick the most
popular terms and/or most descriptive of your work. Look
for additional phrases from the list to include too.
2a. Another place you can find out what keywords to use,
if you already have a website, is to go to the control
panel of your web hosting company and look at your
statistics. There you should find a list of search terms
that people are already using to find your site. Use
those deliberately as keywords in your text.
3. Next go to Google, Yahoo and MSN and enter each
search term into it and see how many other sites pop up
with the same search term. That defines your competition
for that search term. The idea is to find a keyword
that people search at a high rate, and that has a
relatively low level of competitors. You will see the
number of sites competing for that keyword on a bar at
the top of the search results. I consider anything
under 3 million websites as low.
3a. You can also view the html of the sites that rank at
the top of that search and see what keywords they are
using to see if you want to include any of those. To do
this, if you are using Internet Explorer as your
browser, click on :View" then "Source" in the browser
menu. Look for the keyword list metatag that should
appear somewhere after the <head> tag. It looks like
this <meta name="keywords" content="web design firm,
search engine optimization, seo, girl geek web designs">
4. Do this process over until you identify the best
keyword phrases to use on your site. Remember, we will
most likely want to optimize each page within your
website for 2-3 different keywords each.
5. Then you pick no more than 3 keyword phrases
to include in your page title, headings, meta-tags,
alt-text, text navigation, and most importantly to
include in your content (at a 3-7% frequency, thought I
have seen some as high as 11%.
6. Then and only then do you start writing content for
your site. The content on the homepage is most
important. Guidelines I've read say have at least
250-400 words of content on your homepage and all pages
of your site.
Whew! That's enough for now! Now you know why you
want to pay a professional to design your site, not have
your brother-in-law to do it.
Revised 8/25/07
Website of the Week:
http://www.bravenet.com/
For the do-it-yourself web developer. Lotsa tools,
scripts and stuff!
Shameless Self Promotion: Email or Call now
(well, maybe wait until next week as I'm kinda swamped)
for your FREE initial web design consultation and NO
OBLIGATION bid for new websites or old website
revamping.
Girl Geek Web Designs -ask for Annette
(618)
457-8103
1-877-225-9997 toll-free
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Copyright 2003. All rights reserved.
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