Intelligent Website Planning
How will you attract readers and clients?
First of all, put links to your website in appropriate places, where you know your public will see them. Join forums, take advantage of appropriate free advertising. Make sure the search engines know about you. But don't do any of this until your website is ready to be seen.
Many things about a website will affect its placement by a search engine. Even if you manage to nail top placement for a word or phrase, let us say with Google, it will not likely be a permanent spot.
Search engines use algorhythms to weigh the importance of websites. These formulas are like recipes for Swiss chocolates. The ingredients may be listed generically, but the method is kept secret.
There are too many known ranking factors to list here, but here are some things to consider as you develop your business and website plan:
- Business or product name - If your name is too common, it may be hard to find you in the fray.
- Business name and Domain name - If your name is too hard to spell or remember, a potential client may not find your site a second time.
- Domain name - If you want to attract people searching, in English, for spoons to feed giraffes, the best site name will probably be giraffespoons.com. No mystery there. If giraffe spoons happen to be a hot item, that domain name will most likely be taken, even if it's not being used to talk about giraffe spoons. However, you can overcome the placement by domain name issue. If you have a number of original articles on giraffe spoons on your site, and, if people like your site and link to it, you will probably win the high placement you want.
- Proper use of layout and code to indicate what is important on a page:
- Metatags, page titles, descriptions and keywords - Keywords are not as important as they once were; however, keywords must correspond to the material on the page or this will count against you in ratings.
- Parts of the page - Proper use of page codes: headers, footers, banners, menus, etc., play a part of page rank.
- The Trust Factor - Linking to blacklisted sites, even in a round-about way, can hurt your "trust factor," which in turn can hurt your rating. In some online communities, people offer link exchanges with colleagues. If one of the related sites has questionable links, this can reflect on all the sites. One bad apple can spoil the lot.
How will you get your readers past the first page?
If a page doesn't load in under five seconds, most readers will give up. Unless there is a strong reason for a site to behave like a carnaval, the use of movement, or background music, is an undesirable distraction. This does not mean you can't have a single animation on a page, but it should either be short or fabulous. Trailing cursors and background music will chase people away before the page is even loaded. So, even if they make you smile, no unnecessary doodads please.
Useability
The path from the main page of your site to all the other pages should be easy. All the general topics should be accessible from each page. These trails through your website make it user friendly and also improve your ranking.
It is important that the site be coded without errors. Certain errors can shut down some browsers or show Error messages in the reader's toolbar. We want solid code, accessible to all, and no security flaws which can make your site available to hackers. There's nothing quite as disarming as visiting your site to find a hacker's message in place of your main page.
Interactivity
Anything that gives the reader the opportunity to interact can benefit your site, whether it is simply your contact information, a file to download, a membership or newsletter sign-up form, a poll or a questionaire.
At the same time, you do not want to provide security problems by adding on chatrooms or allowing the public to directly upload to your site. Even guestbooks are losing their popularity. There are many ways to improperly use guestbook codes. I have seen one instance where a code in one site's guestbook was used to hack into another site. Guestbooks also give spammers the opportunity to advertise on your site. You don't want to find nasty or illegal offerings on your pages.