Effective Web Page Design

We all know of sites (and I've built many myself) that just don't seem to pickup enough traffic to justify keeping them around. If there had been a set of clear instructions to follow, I would have put more time and effort into optimizing the content. However, some of these sites were built many years ago and the term "SEO" didn't even exist. Now, things are just as bad because everyone is an SEO expert and its difficult to separate the gems from the stones. Giving up on those old sites and letting them die would be more like turning off the respirator of a loved one.

Any new site that I build, although taking much longer to get online, follows some clear steps for researching, planning, building, optimizing and marketing. Here is a straight forward plan for an effective web page design that I use on my own web site projects.

Research the Keywords

Keyword research is essential and can mean the difference between a site receiving no traffic and a site getting a healthy amount of traffic. Being the content experts that we think we are, often the keywords and phrases we choose are just too industry specific. People looking for our products and services more often than not don't know what our industry terms are, and will use keywords and phrases that make the most sense. Big name brand stores can dominate the more "generic" terms, and to try and compete with them is just foolish. Finding less competitive search terms and phrases makes more sense for us to use to start building traffic in the beginning. Over time, these less competitive terms start to add up and several months from now will begin to start ranking for more general terms that drive more traffic. This is ok to do and is a good strategy overall because it has been proven many times that more specific terms have better conversion rates than the more "generic" terms anyway. Using more specific terms with less traffic is a way for your site to start building authority.

Determine Keyword Competitiveness

The next step is to determine the level of competition for selected keywords and phrases. In other words, the more sites competiting for them the more difficult it is rank high enough to attract traffic to your site. There are several tools available to determine keyword competition but one way to manually evaluate competition is to go to Google and enter your keyword phrase in quotes to find related sites that use exactly that phrase. A useful rule of thumb is that if there are more than 50,000 results then is just too much competition.

Adding modifiers to the phrase is a way to compete for a term, even if it isn't the exact term you wanted. For instance, adding "professional", "effective", etc., can be a way to start ranking for a low traffic phrase to begin with. An existing site with a pagerank of "3" should be able to compete for keyphrases in the 150,000 to 350,000 competitive range. If your site has a pagerank less than "3", you'll need more link strength to effectively compete for the phrase.

On-page Factors

The next step in creating your new page once you've decided on the search phrase being targeted is to add the important keyword into the filename you create and add your phrase in the page title tag in the form of a mini-description that will have terms that would be searched. Also include the keyword phrase in the H1 tag and H2 tags that are used.

Update your XML sitemap and your HTML sitemap with a link to the new page. Use a variation of the link text in the HTML sitemap and create a link to the new page. Include at least 4-8 links from your other pages to this new page using variations of the keyword phrase.

Build Incoming Links

Now that you've taken care of all the factors that you have immediate control of, you want to start getting outside links pointing to your new page. Inbound links are important to determine your relevance and also important to compete for the phrase. You can get an idea of how many incoming links you need to the page to rank well by searching the phrase in Google and then taking the URL of the top pages and putting them through the Yahoo Site Explorer (select the link tab and check the number of incoming links to the URL).

Another good way to start creating incoming links is to setup a business blog from which you create optimized links to your new page. Use Social sites such as Facebook and Squidoo to do the same.

Promote Your Page

Now it is time to start pulling traffic to your new page. One popular approach is to write an article or two and in the resource box, create a link back to new page using the keyword phrase that you've optimized the page for.