How to improve your website before you start to build it! Part 2

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Getting it right, the first time - Part 2

Page titles

Page titles are used by search engine robots to identify what your site is about and in which search results it should appear.

These can be found at the top left hand side of the page. Your title should reflect the content (text) of the page as well as being an outline of what the company does. Each page should have its own title that reflects the page content. If these two do not correspond you will find that your rankings in search engine results will drop lower.

Keywords

Keywords are words hidden in your page code, usally at the top of the page and are used by some search engines to understand where your pages should be listed in the search results. Goggle no longer uses them, but most of the other search engines do so it is important to include them in your site. You can view them on an existing site (yours or a competitors) by right clicking anywhere on a webpage and then clicking on ‘view source’ from the menu.

This is a great way to see which phrases etc your competitors are using. I usually recommend that you use about 8 words per page. Each page can have different words and phrases dependant on the page content.

Content

Content is the main body of text on your page. It should be descriptive of your products and services. I have the contact details on every page of my site and I made sure that my details are part of the page content rather than an image as most of my customers are based in the surrounding areas.

If you put your contact details on your website in an image file the search engines will not recognise them. They cannot read image or flash files.

Site maps

A search engine that finds one of your web pages will not automatically find all of the other pages of your website. The way to ensure that this does happen is to have a sitemap.xml file. This is an invisible file to everyone except the search engine robots. All they do is list all of the pages in your website and directs the robots to them. A web developer or designer should be able make you one.

Contact
People may be interested in your services but not ready to commit, produce a newsletter and offer copies of potential clients, this way you can obtain their contact details and gently keep reminding them of your services.

You should be ready to start gathering information for your build now.