Constructing Professional Search Engine Friendly Web Pages Part II

What makes for a great webpage? Part II

You are about to embark on a journey into SEO hell. I have tried my best to keep this as simple as I can but it is about to get confusing. Welcome to Part II. We'll try to cover three major points today. Enjoy the reading!

3. Your Menu System

Forget the Flash, JavaScript, PHP, and ASP stuff you have gone out to learn to create flashy drop down or glittering menus or image swaps. That's far too much coding. We want to keep the page's code down to a minimum. Beside you could create most of that with CSS.

A great webpage will have an easy and simple menu system. Make sure you link your pages to and from your main index page. and don't forget about linking to and from your sitemap page. Expert web designers usually put all their main links on their site at the top or the bottom of all their web pages, so that a visitor can freely move around and find what they're looking for. Sidebar menu systems are passé. Besides that space can be used for something else, like more good content.

Ok now this point we can't stress enough, CHEACK THAT ALL YOUR LINKS WORK! Check every single page, especially if you link out to other sites. Search Engines hate broken links, so do your visitors, and it gives off the appearance that you are a Mickey Mouse operation.

Verify if all images on your page display properly. Nothing brings down the quality of a site faster than images that don't load. or images that come out blank.

4. Code vs Content

Whenever we get a client who is having a problem getting ranked, the first thing we check is the ration between code and content. Search Engines truly despise code heavy sites. Their spiders have to dig too deep and they waste too much CPU power. After a while and nothing to show for it the spider pulls away. Expect a drop in ranking or worse be accused of being a spammer. So go back to basics write simple HTML code. Use an externally linked style sheet. Don't add to many tables in tables in tables...That's just too much code. Get online instead and learn good CSS.

Cascading Style Sheets are an excellent way to create some WOW factor. Learn the ways of the Pros. Your content to code ratio should be better than 30% text. Shoot for 50%. Never accept 10-25%. If you find yourself close to that 30% mark but can't cut any more code out, add text silly. But don't add junk text, add good enjoyable reading. If you have run out of ideas for content and now I'm going to share something with you that I shouldn't, get an RSS feed on the topic of your site. I will tell you a lot more about that in my final chapter, but RSS Feeds are a great way to add fresh content to your site, and balance that code vs text ratio. 5. The WOW Factor

We have been asked about this so many times that i think most people just don't get the point. Using intense graphics and Flash animations is great if you are IBM and or have a billion dollar ad budget. To be perfectly honest I used to design sites all in Flash at one time. The looks awesome and soon my reputation as a web designer sky rocketed. Thing is sites like those are not Search Engine friendly.

So how do you create a WOW factor when you can't use fancy menu's and super flashy graphics? It is all in the layout. Good planning and careful programming can render some pretty impressive layouts. Add to that an easy to use menu system and incredible content and voila you have a WOW factor. The real professional look is simply awesome. Choose a neutral color scheme. Or if you are flamboyant choose a scheme which at least is easy on the eyes. Stick to browser safe colors. And most of all check the scheme out on several monitors. Not all are calibrated the same.

Our experience shows that almost 70% of our clients go with earth tones. Simple and clean with lots of white space. For text Black on white is still popular but we like dark grey on off-white. It is a lot easier on the eyes. A little known fact is that the average visitor reads less on the net and usually chooses to print out a long article. It is just a simple case of it being to hard on the eyes. So make your content printable too.

Professional websites are easily bookmarked. If your site contains useful information and keeps fresh content visitors will want to bookmark it or add it to their favorites. Using a small bookmark script and a favicon (a small logo you place on your site and it will be automatically picked up and displayed in your visitor's bookmarks), usually helps visitors add tour site to there bookmarks. Remember every little edge you can take is useful.

One more wow factor before I call it a day. Make sure you validate your site. Check the coding carefully. Broken code usually displays the stuff on the page poorly and you don't want that. At the same time badly coded pages are ignored by Search Engine Robots. Also when you have validated your site take the gif file from W3C to show everyone you are using Valid HTML code. It is a sign of professionalism and is highly regarded.

So next time I'll share with you some little known secrets. Maybe a snippet of code here and a little there just to get you on your way. See you next time.