SEO - Content Writing Advice - Web Design

Web site marketing is but one part of the process of developing and launching a web site. The web site development process contains many distinct steps that must be followed to ensure a high quality site. In fact, three objectives are being met when the web site is created: providing a professional appearance to clients, developing a reputation within the community, and converting leads from the visitors to your site. There are several different steps within the development process that are crucial to providing a web site that your clients will enjoy. When these steps are integrated successfully, they will coalesce into a fiery avalanche of ripple effects (to borrow a term from Back to the Future II) that provide significantly higher lead conversions than would be obtained otherwise.

While many of these points take search engine optimization into consideration, not all search engine optimization techniques will be introduced. The search engine optimization techniques will be introduced in later articles.

The first objective: Providing a professional appearance.

The web site development process is crucial to providing a second-to-none experience for your visitors. You don’t want your web site to provide a haphazard appearance that does nothing but sit there, do you? Think about it: would you buy a product from a web site that has default content that hasn’t been changed, looks like a template that hasn’t been customized, and where it doesn’t seem as if any thought or work has been put into the web site at all? If you answered honestly, you would say of course you wouldn’t. You’d go to a competitor that does do all of those things. That’s why it’s important to consider several things when developing your site: content, graphics, design, functionality, and most important of all: your user. Because while your audience may not think that technically, they’ll think more generally: if this site won’t provide what I’m looking for, I’m going to xyzsite dot com: they have a ton of stuff!

The second objective: Developing a positive reputation in the community.

This objective is two-fold and two steps in the development process will either help your reputation or destroy it: the design of the site, and its content. Think about it: would you buy a home theater television from Joe’s Home Theater Shack (this is a fictional business) if they never put any thought into customizing their web site’s template? What if their images are all blurry without any effort put into cropping and re-sizing them appropriately? What if they didn’t change their content from the default content that was provided with their shopping cart? Now, imagine that you visit a site like Pioneer.com. They have their own content, their own high quality photos, and everyone is familiar with their brand. That’s the kind of reputation that you want to develop within your own industry so that you have clients beating down the door of your office. So how do you develop such an online reputation through your web site? By writing your own content and paying strict attention to a few design rules.

Content

Developing content that is unique and centralizes itself around a specific subject is important. It’s not going to be very fruitful to steal content from someone else’s web site and call it your own. Not only is it wrong, it’s also against copyright laws. That’s why academia (and official job circles as well) not only frown upon plagiarism, one can also get punished severely for it. Intellectual content is the property of the owner that created it by default. If you’re not sure whether or not you have permission to add content to your web site, you probably do not have that permission. It’s better to leave the content off of the web site rather than get punished for having it on there without the owner’s permission. When in doubt, re-write it and make sure it’s all in your own words.

With the amount of information that’s on the World Wide Web today, it’s often difficult to develop unique content that you can add to your web site. But don’t fret! Think about the following questions and ask yourself how you can apply them to your industry: 1. Who am I targeting? 2. Why will they find this content important? 3. What is the purpose behind writing this content? 4. What do I want my visitors to do after reading this content? 5. Why is this content important to them? 6. Why would people want to buy from me after reading this content? 7. Which topics are the most important to people in my industry? 8. Which topics are the most interesting to people in my industry? Once these questions have been answered, you should be able to see the content ideas leaping out at you, and it will be easier to move on to developing better content.

Graphics and design

Another important aspect of web site development is its design and the coding behind the design. Do you have the proper H1 tags in place? Do the text links contrast enough with the background to be readable? Do you have the proper Meta title, description, and keywords in place on your web site? Does the code validate? Do you have an appropriate code to text ratio? Do you have appropriate anchor text? Do you have images that contain the appropriate alternate text so that search engines can read them? Are the images optimized for quick download speeds? Do you have locational Flash (much better for search engine optimization purposes) rather than a complete Flash web site? Do you have any dead links? Do you have any broken images? Are your images sized appropriately and are they free of any distortion? Do you have the necessary branding on your site? Is the color combination appealing? If not, why isn’t it appealing and what can be done to make it appealing?

The Third Objective: Actually converting leads through functionality.

Do you have appropriate navigation in place? Is it easy to navigate from page to page? Easy is defined as being able to reach every page on your web site from at least one text link on every page. One of the best ways to do this is to utilize text links for your navigation menu rather than image links. Image links will still be followed by the search engines, but search engines place much higher value on those sites that use text links with the appropriate anchor text to describe each page that the text link links to. Another aspect of functionality that’s often overlooked in navigation is: does my navigation fall victim to the “Mystery Meat” navigation?

Mystery meat navigation is a term coined by Vincent Flanders, author of the book “Web Pages That Suck: Learn Good Web Design by Looking at Bad Web Design”. Mystery meat navigation, in its simplicity, means that your navigation doesn’t tell the user anything about where they’re going when they click on each link from page to page. Consider the following scenario. You have snazzy looking animated buttons without text. The user moves their mouse over the buttons, with the graphics moving and revealing no text at all until the user clicks through to the page the button links to. Now how is that user friendly? It may look cool, but mystery meat navigation does not provide enough information about the link at the outset, and does not provide anything for the search engines to read (unless the designer happens to provide alternate text within the image tag). Get rid of mystery meat navigation if you have some, and use text links with accurate anchor text styled by CSS instead.

Another neat functional item that will help immensely is including a lead generation form on your home page (or on another appropriate page). The whole point here is to create a way for potential clients to easily send you their personal information. This form can be a generic form with standard contact information requested, or it can be more elaborate with specific information that you can request based on your industry. So, if you build web sites for a living, you might include an elaborate form that asks the potential client to provide everything from their company information to additional information about what they plan on including on their site.

While there are many other aspects that go into developing a web site (which this blog will cover in the future), the above are generalized technical implementations that will get you started in evaluating your own site for your market. Keep in mind the above points as the development process on the web site continues. Double check these points again and again. It will be helpful to have a trained eye go over the site as well. They can help you spot errors that you otherwise may not have caught.