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newsletter
June 06 ABCs of Web Design Newsletter
If you would like to opt-out of this newsletter, please send an email to
theresaw@columbus.rr.com.
Introductory comments
I have been interviewing for full-time jobs. And I accepted one for a
permanent (I have not had a permanent job since 2000) as a User Interface
Design Analyst. In this job, I will do a lot of work designing web
applications and I get to redesign the corporate web site and a few of their
in-house applications. I am pretty excited because they will pay for the
certification I would like to get. So onto the question.
Question: And in one of my many interviews – this one for a internet
marketing position -- they wanted me to take a look at their web site before the
interview. I looked it over quickly found several problems. Their question for
me: Why can’t the site rank well in Google?
Answer: When I first looked at the code for this web site, I thought the
navigation was in java script, which will deter some search engine spiders from
crawling it. But on closer inspection the site is done in CSS, which should not
affect the search engine rankings. And looking more closely at the site text, I
don’t think they were optimizing their keywords as effectively as they should.
They were using very general keywords, like “automobiles” or “dog food” (these
are not their keywords, just examples). The more general the keywords that you
use, the higher the chance that other sites are using those too – and you cannot
hope to get organic rankings on the term “automobile” or “car”.
Why use specific keywords?
The more specific your keywords or keyword phrases, like “german luxury car” or
“purina dog food,” the fewer search results they will display and the more
likely the user will actually look through those results. The term “dog food”
returned 106,000,000 pages on Google. Most people will not look through all
those search results. The term “eagle pack dog food” returned 2,460,000 results.
And the term “organic eagle pack dog food” returned 292,000 pages – still a lot
of pages to look through but considerably less than 106,000,000.
So I advised that company to target their keywords the use them all over their
pages – in headings, text, links, etc. I will have to check out their site in a
few weeks and see if they took my advice.
Recent Clients of W-edge design:
Moonhorse Art Studio
Nancy Paul and Associates
Cabella Creations
Compton Creative
Timary Lee Photography
Healing
Environments with Feng Shui
Wrap up
I am also the chapter leader of
DigitalEve Columbus and I recently redesigned the web site. The answer to
whether my pages on the DigitalEve Columbus web site that were ranking very well
is that they are not ranking anywhere now. I am not in any of the search results
for Google. So, if you want your site to rank well, don’t use ASP pages.
Feel free to email me any questions! Thanks for reading my newsletter.
Please send all questions to
theresaw@columbus.rr.com.
To see the articles from my print web column, go to
http://www.w-edge.com/articles.htm
Feel free to forward this email in its entirety to anyone you feel might be
interested in it.
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Email us
or call us at 614.850.9368 |
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"Theresa - I just wanted to let you know how much my business has increased since you took over my website. What I am delighted about is that I am
receiving good, solid business leads from my target audience. How do you do that?" Sylvia Watson, President, Healing Environments with Feng Shui |
"I wanted to let you know that our rankings on Google are now in the top 3, on almost every search we've conducted (most of them are in 1st place)—without using quotes to call out specific phrases.
This is in searches that result in over 20,000 pages per search. We're backlogged with orders until late June, possibly July. You ROCK!” Diana Holycross, Tiles with Style."
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