June 06 ABCs of Web Design Newsletter

Your Moderator Theresa Wilkinson

(theresaw@columbus.rr.com)

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In this month’s newsletter –

*Introductory comments

*Question of the month

*Wrap up

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 of the month

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.

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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

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