In This Chapter

• Designing your website to be SEO-friendly
• Creating a style that attracts your targeted audience
• Planning your site navigation
• Implementing a search within your website
• Incorporating interactive media to enhance your search engine rankings
• Creating pages that convert

In this chapter, you find out how to design websites with search engine marketing in mind. For many sites, search engine ranking is viewed as a part of the launch, but not as a part of the design. If you are fortunate enough to be newly building your website, you can construct it with search engine friendliness from the ground up. It’s more likely, however, that your site already resides on the web. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a new phase of your site’s development, but it’s better late than never. This chapter contains many rules of thumb that can help you design — or retrofit — a site to be SEO-friendly.

Preplanning and Organizing Your Site

Start your SEO planning by inventorying your assets (which we cover in Chapter 1 of this minibook). What do you have that can possibly enhance your website? List all your potential assets, not just those that are already online. Be creative and very open-minded at this point. Take stock of all the following:

• Written materials you or your company has produced — such as brochures, catalogs, articles, user manuals, tutorials, online help, and customer correspondence
• Videos of interviews, television spots, commercials, award acceptances, speeches, and company events
• Audio recordings of radio interviews, and original music
• Photos of products, people, events, and buildings, properties
• Images that go along with your products and services, such as logos, statistical charts, diagrams, and illustrations

The items you gather may become site assets, but for now they’re just ingredients waiting to be used. Looking to the materials your business produces outside your current website, you can probably find a lot of original content that, with a small amount of reformatting or updating, could enrich your online site.

To help you decide which elements to put on which pages, you need a combination of research and planning. The research half involves keyword research (covered in Book II) and competitor research (covered in Book III) — activities that give you lots of guidelines for your SEO work. The types of guidelines you may come up with through research include

• Your site’s main purpose (research, e-commerce, or a mix of both)
• Your site’s main keywords
• How much content you need to be competitive
• What kinds of content you need
• Which existing pages already rank well (you don’t want to change them)
• How your site should be organized to best compete in your Internet market

Armed with this research, you are ready to enter the planning stage. Based on the guidelines you developed, you can determine what areas of your website need work. Or if you’re building your site from scratch, you can lay out a big-picture site plan like a storyboard or a flow chart. Put your ideas for each page on paper. This organized approach lets you pair up items from your inventory of available content with your site’s needs and move through the planning stage.

Designing Spider-Friendly Code

Whether you’re writing your own HTML or hiring a webmaster to do it for you, you want to keep your site’s underlying code spider-friendly. Basically, you need to streamline your site’s code so that the search engine spiders have an easy time crawling your pages and figuring out what the pages are about. You do this by keeping the code as clean as possible. We cover cleaning your code in Chapter 1 of this minibook, but just as a reminder, for search engine optimization (SEO), here are some coding best practices:

• Use an external Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) file to define the look of your website.
• Use an external JS file to hold any JavaScript code you plan to use.
• Use as little inline markup (formatting and other types of on-the-fly HTML codes, such as Font tags to define the font style, and so on) as possible.

Creating a CSS file gives you a source from which to control the look of your entire website. In your CSS file, you can define, for instance, that all H1 headings should be Arial font, size 3, bold, navy blue, and centered. Next week, if you change your mind and decide to make your headings purple instead, you can simply edit the definitions for your H1 style in your CSS file and voilà — every H1 heading throughout your entire site is now purple. That’s a lot more efficient than going page by page through your site, manually updating every instance of an H1 tag, and it eliminates the risk that you’ll miss one.

Not only is an external CSS file efficient, but it also provides a few other big advantages. Having a CSS file allows you to remove inline formatting such as Font tags from your page content and instead insert a CSS tag identifying what style to apply. The result is much less HTML code cluttering your pages and significantly less page complexity. Less code means smaller file sizes. Smaller file sizes means your pages load faster for your site visitors and the search engine spiders have less junk to wade through as they read your text. It’s a win/win/win for all involved!

If your site incorporates JavaScript, you want to externalize it as well, for similar reasons. Move the JavaScript off your individual web pages and into a separate JS file. Then your pages can include a single line of code that calls (that is, instructs the browser and spiders that the information in the file should be used in reference to the content on the page) the JavaScript file, rather than having tons of code on the page. Because JavaScript code can get really long and cumbersome, this decision alone may cut the size of a web page in half. Less code makes for spider-friendly pages with uncluttered text and clear themes.

One online business implemented just these two best practices on its website, creating external files for its JavaScript and using CSS, and the business reduced 20,000 lines of code to just 1,500. The keyword-rich content rose to the top of the page, and along with it the site's rankings rose for the keyword terms in search engine results.

Creating a Theme and Style

When it comes to design styles, people tend to have certain expectations about what's appropriate. Elegant restaurants don’t seat people at tables with plastic chairs and red, yellow, and blue toy blocks for decoration. Neither do preschools decorate their rooms with Persian rugs and neutral colors. A typical business designs for its intended audience, so assessing who makes up its target audience is one of the first things the business has to do. Online businesses should be no different, but many websites overlook this step in their creators’ zeal to just “attract visitors, lots of visitors!”

Knowing what kind of visitor you want to attract influences many style decisions. It helps you make these types of design decisions:

• A color palette for the site
• The kinds of photos and graphics to include
• An appropriate reading level for your audience, including the complexity of the words and sentence structures
• The best tone to use when writing
• Font and layout choices that appeal to your target audience
• The complexity (or simplicity) of information to include
• The number of fun or interactive elements your site needs
• How “flashy” your site needs to be to attract and hold your audience

If you know the type of visitor you want, you can design your website to attract and hold those people’s interest once they arrive. When we say design, we don’t just mean the cosmetic look and feel, we also mean the site’s voice and themes. Your site’s main theme should be a focused idea of what your site is all about, using terms and keywords that match how your audience searches. For instance, if you have a business that customizes classic cars, your main site theme is classic car customization. We cover assigning keywords and themes more in Book II, Chapter 4, but basically, after you determine your main site theme, you can organize your content into categories and subcategories (that is, topics and sub-topics under the main site theme) and choose a specific primary keyword for each one. Every category-plus-keyword pair should have its own landing page within your website so that people searching for those keywords can click your listing and arrive at a page that’s specifically relevant to their search query. (A landing page is the particular web page a user comes to when clicking a link.)

So far in this section, we’ve talked about theme in reference to the keywords and information your website provides. The site’s theme is what the whole site is about; each page’s theme is a subtopic and has content and keywords focused on that subtopic. Frequently, the word theme also applies to the design theme, or the look and feel of a website. Keep in mind that the design theme a web designer creates must integrate with the site’s main content theme and be right for the target audience. They’re all interrelated.

A design theme for a website needs to support the site’s main theme. For example, if you have a website that offers dog kennel franchises, the design theme needs to include dog-related graphics in the same way the text talks about dogs. Similarly, the overall look needs to appeal to your target audience, just as the text should be tailored to dog-loving entrepreneurial adults. If you do market research to further narrow your target audience, you can make the site even better. Look at your current customers to determine what type of person tends to convert from a window-shopper to a customer. For instance, if it’s usually women who become dog kennel franchisees, you can modify your site theme to appeal more to women. If it’s usually married couples who go into the dog kennel business, by all means, include text references to marriage, as well as images of happy couples watching over lots of tail-wagging pooches.

Writing Rich Text Content

People do read, especially online. “Content is king” is a frequently stated maxim of Internet marketing experts because it’s true. To have a successful website, you need lots and lots of content on your pages. How much content do you need? The answer depends somewhat on what is normal for your industry. When you research the sites that rank well for your keywords, some of the things you want to find out are how many indexed pages they have, as well as the quantity, quality, and structure of the keyword content on the high-ranking pages competing with yours. (Note that Book III explains how to do competitive research in detail.) When you know what level of content is currently succeeding in the search results pages for your keywords as an average, you get an idea of how many pages and words you need in order to play in their league.

We recommend that you have a minimum of 450 words of text content per page. That’s a general rule, based on all our experience helping companies do SEO. If that sounds like a lot to write per page, think about it this way: The page that you’re reading right now has about 450 words on it. Having fewer than 450 words on a page makes it hard to convince the engines that you’re a subject-matter expert. In fact, depending on the industry and keyword, 450 words might still be too few. The SEO industry averages around 1,000 words per page, and this is true of other industries as well. Still, 450 is a good initial target number before you do competitive research.

Writing that much text for every page might sound like a daunting task, but keep in mind how it can help you:

• Expertise goes up. Search engines look for a site’s expertise about a subject, and having a greater amount of relevant text signals that your web page is a subject-matter expert.
• Trust factor goes up. Users coming to your landing pages stay longer and trust it as more of an expert source if there’s more content for them to read that matches their query.
• Keyword relevancy goes up. Long pages give you more opportunities to use your keywords without overusing them and creating spam.
• Depth of content. Multiple pages built around the same theme allow you to capitalize on niche and long-tail keywords that support your main keywords. For more on long-tail keywords, see Book I, Chapter 5.

The second main principle you should know about text content is this: In addition to needing lots of text on your site, you also want that text to be focused. Search engines (and users, for that matter) come to a web page seeking something specific. You want the content of each page to be focused on its keyword theme. This makes the page relevant to the user’s search query.

Making each page’s content relevant and focused helps the page rise in the search engine rankings. This concept ties into siloing, which is the process of organizing your site themes and content into categories and subcategories, each with its own main keyword. (You can read a full explanation of siloing in Book VI, Chapters 1 and 2.) For example, in your dog kennel franchise website, you might have a page focused on how much expected revenue a franchise can generate. In your more than 450 words of content, you wouldn’t want to include a discussion of different dog food brands or grooming techniques. Including non-keyword-focused content like that would only dilute the information about your page’s theme. Instead, you want to have lots of information about kennel rates, expected monthly revenues, and revenue-related content.

For many more in-depth recommendations, tips, and guidelines on writing good content, see Book V.

Planning Your Navigation Elements

Navigation elements make up the roads and highways of your website. They’re the transportation system that can help people move smoothly from place to place, following clear signposts through well-marked paths. On the other hand, a website’s navigation can make people frustrated and hopelessly lost, causing them to press the first Back button and get out of town.

If you create a good navigation plan right from the start, it’s easy for site visitors and search engine spiders alike to move around your site. In fact, if your site doesn't have a good navigation system, it’s unlikely that the search engines can thoroughly index your site. Sites with a clear directory structure, siloed content, and easy-to-follow navigation are at an advantage over sites without these foundational elements.

For maximum readability to the search engines, you want to format your navigation elements as text links. That said, there are ways to help the search engines read non-text navigation elements (such as Flash or image mapping), which we get into in Chapter 5 of this minibook. Nevertheless, you’re going to get the cleanest, best read from simple text link navigation.

Figure 2-1 shows a sketch of a typical web page's navigation plan: It has three basic areas for navigation links: top, bottom, and side (either right or left, with left being more common than right). We explain what the differences are at an initial design level, so you can evaluate what you’re currently doing for site navigation if your site is already in public use. If your site is still in the design phase, you can start planning how you’ll build your navigation. (Note that we go into depth on navigation in Chapter 5 of this minibook.)

Use frames only to create your navigation, unless you don’t want the spiders following those links. When you put content inside a frame, spiders see it as its own separate page, so it can’t be indexed as part of the current page’s content. For search engines, frames split up a page and remove all the associations of your navigation and the rest of your content.

Side navigation

Side navigation elements typically include category-specific links and are most commonly seen on e-commerce sites. Side navigation is context sensitive: The links vary from page to page. This helps with siloing because you can reinforce the landing page’s theme by including links to supporting pages that help the user refine and dig deeper into the main category. For example, see in Figure 2-2 how the L.L.Bean website uses a side navigation with deeper, category-specific links to support its main top-navigation category?

Implementing a Site Search

Many sites offer a Search text box right on their web pages that lets users search for information within the website (see the example below in Figure 2-3).

Site searches are essential if your website has tons of pages, such as for a magazine with years of archived issues, a large store with thousands of products, or a business with other extensive amounts of content. Smaller sites might also want a site search, but this decision should be made carefully. If you’re thinking of adding a site search, consider the benefits and the potential drawbacks, and be sure to implement a site search that’s effectively customized for your site.

The two major benefits of implementing a site search are:

• Improving usability: Ideally, a site search should improve usability and user retention. If your site search helps people find what they’re looking for after coming to your site, it’s doing good. For example, a site search is essential for a shopping site such as the Target website (www.target.com), which tries to keep users within the store after they arrive. Say a user comes to the Target site after running a Google search for [snow shovels]. If the user next wants to find [tire chains], Target’s handy search function offers a quick way to find more products, add them to the same cart, and check out one time. The user gets better convenience, and the website keeps a customer and increases its revenue.
• Providing direct user feedback: A site search provides you with a cache of valuable information. Your visitors leave a trail that tells you what they want in their own words. It’s perfect as a feedback tool — users come to you and type in exactly what they’re looking for. By tracking all these searches and the user experience following each one, you can identify weaknesses in your site processes, keywords you may have overlooked, pages of content you need to add, and also what’s working successfully or not working at all.

The main drawback of a site search occurs when it does not improve usability. Many site searches fail to provide what the user is looking for and become a side door where many visitors exit. You don’t want to confuse and lose your site visitors by giving them a technical tool that doesn’t perform as expected. So examine your website carefully in order to determine whether the risk is worth it. If you have clear navigation and well-organized content, you might be better off letting users find their way around rather than giving them a shortcut to nowhere.

If you do decide to implement a site search, be sure to do it right. You want your site search to control the selection and presentation of results to make sure you’ve maximized the opportunity to give users what they need. When done well, an effective site search can prevent site abandonment and eliminate the multitude of brief, one-time visitors. It can guide users along the conversion path, getting them hooked along the way and encouraging them to explore. To make sure, watch your site analytics closely after you deploy a site search to see whether it’s routing people well or causing them to take the nearest exit.

To be effective, your site search must be paired with good navigation and a well-siloed site. This combination is key to giving the user a good experience and developing the relationship between your brand and the customer. Here are some tips for maximizing your site search on an e-commerce site:

• List all major product categories and subcategories on your home page for easy navigation.
• Put a free-form site-search text box on every page with content that can lead to further searches. Like the Google search text box, this is a box where anything can be typed to get a potential answer.
• Implement guided search queries, where a user selects from a rigid pre-determined list to help narrow their search:
  • Provide site search for items by brand, price, color, sale, and so on.
  • Provide site search for featured products in every category.
  • Include every brand in every category in your site search database.
  • Include bestsellers in every category.

In some cases, your site may require separate search capabilities, or you may have to choose which kind of search to offer. The same underlying principles apply to non–e-commerce sites. Allow the site search to find your information in a variety of ways, broken down by lots of different categories, subcategories, and cross-categories. You want to give users many ways to get results, and you want to avoid search failure.

There are many free or inexpensive site-search kits you can use to incorporate a vertical search into your website. One reliable resource is the Google site-search option available at www.google.com/sitesearch. Paired with the free Google Analytics tool, any site search offers a good way to track user queries. Check out Book VIII for more on analytics in general. Book VIII, Chapter 3 covers Google Analytics in more detail.

Incorporating Engagement Objects into Your Site

It’s a good practice to include Engagement Objects on your website. By Engagement Objects, we mean any type of interactive media object that gets users excited and offers them a way to connect to the content. The following sections specifically cover video and audio files. Including these types of rich media makes your website appear technically advanced to both users and search engines and engages your visitors.

Incorporating Engagement Objects into your website can also improve your search engine rankings. The reason is because of a concept called blended search, which is the mixing of different types of content in the search results. For instance, if you search on Google for [classic Ford Mustang], Google may include more than just web page links in your results. You might see photographs of restored Ford Mustangs at the top of your results page. Also mingled into the listings you might find a video link to a recent classic car show featuring Ford Mustangs. You might find a news article about a classic Ford Mustang that was the getaway car in a recent heist. Or you might find listings of classic car shops and other local businesses in your city that specialize in Ford Mustangs. Mixed in with these you would also see the top-ranked web pages for the keyword phrase that you entered. Now that there’s blended search, the search engines show whatever types of files they determine to be the most relevant results. (As a side note, Google calls its blended search product Universal Search, and many in the search engine marketing community use that name to refer to all engines' blended search offerings.)

The concept of blending different types of files within a single search results set has raised the value of putting media on your website. In fact, some ranking factors have to do with what interactive media you have on your site. You want your site to get in on this action! You may find that just by adding some Engagement Objects to your website, your rank increases, especially if your competitors aren’t currently using any on their sites. At the very least, you have an opportunity to satisfy your visitors better than your competition can.

Some sites offer video or audio files by displaying them in a separate pop-up window with no text. This has some value for visitors, but because search engines can’t do much to understand the contents of a video or audio file, and because the pop-up window doesn't provide the spiders with any context that would help them understand the media's contents, the site has missed a valuable opportunity to enhance its keyword relevance with this great content.

A better way to handle video and audio files is to embed them right into your web pages. Let the video play right on the web page that also includes descriptive text about the video. Give users a hyperlink to let them hear an audio clip of a Ford Mustang engine on your Ford Mustang landing page, and let the anchor text and the sentences in the code surrounding the image help to support your page’s keyword relevance. Some files, like a video transcript or an MP3 that contains clean narrative, can be indexed by the searches, but this process isn’t perfect. The key to including video and audio files effectively is to place them in proximity to on-topic text that the search engines can read.

Allowing for Expansion

When you’re building your website, remember to allow for future expansion. A website is never “finished” any more than a business can ever set itself in stone. To be successful, especially in online marketing, you must stay flexible and allow room for growth — including on your website.

Database engineers have to think about future growth when they create a new database structure. They do not want to be in a position where the entire database needs to be torn apart and rebuilt simply because it cannot accommodate adding another layer of storage. Similarly, you don’t want to box yourself in when it comes to your site design. To some extent, you can foresee future needs and plan ahead logically. Think about:

• New products or services: Try to predict what types of add-on product lines or services may come down the pike and need to be added to your site.
• Expanded content: You’ve read how important it is to have lots of content supporting your keyword themes, so try to identify where you have content holes that need to be filled with new pages of supporting information.
• Enhanced features: If you’d like to someday enrich your site by starting a blog or other interactive community feature, envision how this might fit into your site.

Despite your best efforts, however, you probably cannot predict all the changes coming in the future. For this reason, you want to keep your website design, navigation, structure, and even name somewhat open. For example, a business called George’s Ford-Only Customization Shop has prevented itself right away from ever being able to expand to Chevrolets. Similarly, you wouldn’t want your website’s domain name to be restrictively specific. Today, your business might be all about repairing truck fenders, but if you choose the domain name www.truckfenderwork.com, you’d be stuck having to create a new URL if you want to expand your business to work on all-body work or on cars as well as trucks.

Because constant growth is the rule, you want to make your website structure modular. We cover the concept of siloing in Book VI, Chapters 1 and 2, which involves breaking your website content into categories based on a keyword theme. A proper silo structure allows you to add new silos without breaking your site’s current linking architecture or navigation system. You can simply snap on another silo adjacent to the existing ones at the same structural level.

Developing an Update Procedure

You may be a one-person shop now or the only person in your company’s web development department, like the Lone Ranger working to save the day. Or you might be part of a large team developing a voluminous website. Whatever your situation is today, the fact is that it will change. People may leave the company, you could be transferred, and new people could be hired. To survive the personnel changes that inevitably happen, your website must have a documented update procedure.

In Chapter 1 of this minibook, we cover creating a design procedure that functions as a style guide for your website. In this section, we want to help you expand that document to cover an update procedure, as well. You’ve done the research to know what your site needs in terms of SEO. If you don’t write down guidelines related to search engine optimization and include them in a style guide that new webmasters, IT staff, marketing directors, and others can refer to, all your SEO progress could be lost. After all, without an education in SEO best practices, and without knowing how to do site analysis and competitive research (as you find out how to do in this book), people can make decisions about websites that drop the site right out of the search engine rankings. We’ve seen it happen.

Write down your update procedures, including your SEO do’s and don’ts, to lay out the blueprint for others to follow. Make your list as exhaustive as possible. To get you started, here are some items to cover in your style guide and site update procedure:

• File naming: Specify how you name new pages, images, videos, audio files, and so on. You probably have developed syntax for these things, so you want to write down those standards. (We cover good file naming in Chapter 1 of this minibook.)
• Directory structure: How you name and structure your file folders should also be documented so that when someone creates a new silo or wants to add a new picture, he or she knows how to do it.
• Redirects: Document what your procedure is for redirecting traffic away from a no-longer-needed page. Because there are several types of HTML redirect codes, but only a 301 Redirect is good practice for SEO, instructions could help prevent a costly mistake. (For more information on redirects, see Book VII, Chapter 3.)
• Linking: You want to be sure to cover your procedure for adding new links. Explain why anchor text must contain relevant keywords (never just Click Here), and give guidelines for linking within silos, not between them, as a general rule. You may want to cover linking very thoroughly because it’s so important to SEO — you can find lots more information on good linking strategies in Chapter 5 of this minibook, as well as in Book VI.
• New pages: Your procedure for adding a new page to your site should ask some critical questions, such as: What goal does this page meet? Does it fit into the silo? What are its main keywords? Whoever sets up the new page should be able to write down answers to these questions. In addition, because there are a number of things that must be carefully reviewed before a new page goes live, a checklist is helpful. Your new-page checklist should contain all the steps needed to make sure that the page is SEO-friendly and ready for the public. We suggest you start with the sample list we include in Book I, Chapter 1, and adapt it for your site.

Balancing Usability and Conversion

This chapter is all about building an SEO-friendly site. However, we aren’t recommending that you design a website just for the search engines. Your SEO goal must be balanced with the need to create a user-friendly site. Unless you balance SEO-friendliness (to help people find your site) with user-friendliness (to make people want to stay there), you won’t be able to achieve your true objective, which is conversion.

Conversion refers to whatever action you want your site visitors to take. That may be buying something, joining a group, signing up for a newsletter, registering for a seminar, filling out a survey, or just visiting more pages. Whatever your definition is for conversion, your real goal involves more than just generating traffic to your site’s front door. When those people arrive, you want them to do something: That “something” is your point of conversion.