The importance of keywords

When you create a website, you are creating it for a specific purpose.  This purpose is what you want the search engines to list you for.  If you are trying to get people interested in films, for example, and your page only mentions the keyword “film” once – it will be impossible to find your page listed in the search results for that keyword.

It is difficult to find a balance between making your website keyword rich, and overloading it with keywords so it becomes unreadable to the average user.  You need to maintain a balance so you don’t lose the purpose of your site in the first place.  Look at the examples below.

“Welcome to my film site.  I want to bring you upcoming news and stories from the red carpet, premiers and celebrities.”

What I have written above may be easy to read but the keyword “film” is only injected once.  Lets try again:

“Welcome to my film site.  I want to bring you upcoming film reviews, film news and stories from the red carpet, film premiers and celebrities.”

Now you see, with a couple of small changes I have managed to slot the keyword “film” 4 times into the same sentence.  It is still easily readable by the user, but yet gives the search engine crawlers a lot more to pick up on.

If you are having a problem picking out the keywords you want to be listed for then you can use various online tools to help you see how people search.  I use the keyword assistant on www.overture.com (under resource centre).  I did a check on the term “film” and 99,308 people in September alone search by that key term.  10,597 search for “film production” and so on.  This way you can build your list of keywords by the amount they are searched for rather than what you think people will use.

Another way to get your keywords into your site is to use the meta tags at the top of your coding.  You have to make sure that the keywords in there are the ones you are trying to optimise in the content on your page.  If each individual page is for a different, specific topic then tailor your keywords to that topic.  Each page is indexed individually and you really will be maximising the potential search engine traffic if each different page appears under different searches. 

So, again, substitute some of the prettiness of your site to give way to original, keyword rich content – because search engines love this, as will your users.

Why are site maps and site navigation necessary?

Imagine there is a locked door.  On the other side of the door is a nice freshly baked pie.  But you have no key to unlock the door, no axe to break the door down and no screwdriver to remove the lock.  You could attempt to find another way to enter the room with the pie – but is it worth the hassle?  No. The hard work makes it less interesting and less tempting, and most people would give up trying. 

This is the situation that commonly occurs when a site map or the navigational links on a website aren’t working, point in the wrong direction or your landing page is devoid of any directions at all.  Users get bored easily.  If your site offers something which the person can’t access, they will ultimately turn to one of your competitors to find it instead.  In the long run, the chances are you will have lost that customer for good and from such a basic faux pas.

I have seen several sites recently where this has occurred and its damn frustrating.  I just google what I want and expect to get the result, I don’t believe I should have to dig around to find it. 

So any of you budding web designers or webmasters please please check your navigational structure.  Make sure the hyperlinks are pointing in the right direction and are easy to follow.  Its not only necessary to do this from a user point of view but from a search engine point of view.  Search engines follow the links to find the pages which are then indexed individually.  If your links don’t work, the search engines will miss pages which could be of great importance to whatever service or product you are trying to sell. 

Also remember that search engines do not pick up links in images so having a website with a navigational structure purely made out of image links won’t help you much from a search engine point of view.  It may look pretty but either substitute pretty for sensible, or add another set of text links e.g. at the bottom of the page. 

A site map is a good way to let your users see the basic structure of the site if they are still finding it difficult to navigate around.  This will be made up of text links and it is vital that you make sure all the links point to the correct pages of the site. 

Last but not least, please remember that if you update or add a link to any of your pages, this will affect the navigation on each and every other page in your whole site.  It is NOT ok to change one page and leave the rest.  You must make sure that if you make changes, you make changes to everything.  Yes, this is a boring and arduous task but I PROMISE you that if you leave it, you will find something more fun to do and will never get around to it.  Then the next time you have to change more links, you will have double the amount of work to do.

Be organized, keep track of your jobs to do, and do them.  Once the basics are complete, the rest is easy as pie…or at least getting to it is…