Many web site designers don’t design their sites for the search engines. This is a huge mistake because they miss out on attracting lots of f-r-e-e traffic. Your beautifully designed web site may have cost you thousands of dollars but it still needs to attract visitors to be profitable.

Here are 12 highly effective strategies for designing a search engine friendly web site:

1. Research highly targeted keywords - do this even before you begin designing otherwise you may have to go back and clean up some of your web site design. Use the keyword research tool, Wordtracker (wordtracker.com) to research the most popular keywords that pertain to the subject matter of your web site. Wordtracker will show how many people have searched for that particular keyword over several search engines within the last 60 days.

2. Create a list of approximately 100 keywords or keyword phrases that you can include within your web pages. After having completed the above research, you should have found the keywords that were searched on most frequently, but only produce a small number of competing web sites.

3. Write a paragraph of 250 - 500 words of text for the top of each web page. Weave your keywords within this text being careful not have them so close together that your copy reads strange for your visitors. Aim to please the search engines as well as your web site visitors.

4. Optimize meta tags - the most significant meta tags are the title and description meta tags. The keyword meta tag has lost its effectiveness due to people spamming it, however include it anyway as some search engines still use it. Include your keywords within each of these meta tags. The title meta tag should be a short sentence about the purpose of your site. In your description meta tag, write a sentence on the greatest benefit of your site. Your keyword meta tag should include the most frequently used keywords contained within your web page.

5. Include Heading Tags - these can range form H1-H6 most designers will only use H1-H3. These tags separate each section of your web page with subheadings. The H1 tag contains the largest font and is the most significant. Within the descriptive text of these header tags you should include the keyword phrases placed in the same order as your keyword phrases that are within your keyword meta tags.

6. Optimize images using the alt tag - write a short description for the alt tag of your image.
The alt tag has 2 purposes:
a) Visitors can read the description if they can’t see the image.
b) Search engines only spider text (not images), therefore this could help your site’s rankings.

7. Reduce image size - too many images or very large images on your web page will slow down the loading time of your web site. Make sure your images have a resolution of 72ppi. Slice large images into smaller pieces with your graphics editor.

8. Find incoming links (backward links) � web sites that link to yours raise your link popularity. Search for web sites that are compatible with yours and have a PR 4 or more to do a link exchange. Write optimized articles and include them on your web site. This means your site has a greater chance of being indexed quickly as well as getting a boost in its rankings.

Create absolute links (ie http://www.domainname.com) from all your internal pages to your home page. This will increase the number of links pointing to your home page.

9. Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to implement a clean design throughout your web site. This will reduce the time to implement a consistent text (or layout) style for your web site. It will also enable you to easily update your whole site should you wish to make any future changes.

10. Place any script code into external files - when using javascript (ie for swapping images on your navigation bar) it creates a lot of code between the header tags, pushing down the text that search, engines would spider first. Placing the script code in an external file reduces the code to just one line.

11. Insert the DOC TYPE tag at the top of every web page. A DOCTYPE ( “document type declaration”) informs the validator which version of HTML you’re using for your web pages. DOCTYPEs are a key component of compliant web pages: your markup and CSS won’t validate without them. i.e. [!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01
Transitional//EN” http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd]

DOCTYPES are also essential to the proper rendering and functioning of web documents in compliant browsers like Mozilla, IE5/Mac, and IE6/Win.

12. Write clean html code - web site editors often write extra code. This can increase the loading time of your web pages. Check your html code by running it through a html validator
(http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator).

Once you have implemented all the strategies above, submit your site to the search engines and get ready for lots of targeted traffic.

You now have built a profitable search engine friendly website.

By Herman Drost

I came home last night to a rather sad sight. Lying on the stoop of my Brooklyn brownstone was a plastic bag full of new yellow pages books. It was late, but no one seemed to have been interested enough to take any inside. My bet is the books went straight into the recycling bin.

It was an appropriate image to conclude my day. I’d spent the day with yellow pages and newspaper folks at the Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media conference. At one point, conference organizers screened a videotape of a focus group. The leader asked participants how many times that year they’d used the yellow pages. Most said about once a year, but one guy asked what type of usage the leader meant. After all, he said, there are times when, “my cousin’s baby comes over and she needs something to sit on.”

Between anecdotes like that and data showing 74 percent of Internet users search for local information online, it’s pretty clear where things are headed. Whether yellow pages companies will suffer the same fate as those print books (left out in the cold) remains to be seen. As yesterday’s BellSouth/SBC deal to buy YellowPages.com shows, they’re not going down without a fight.

Make no mistake, there’s big business in yellow pages. Simba Information actually expects the yellow pages industry to grow in 2004, to $15.5 billion, from $14.9 billion in 2003. Some growth is undoubtedly from the electronic versions. The research firm said it expects Internet yellow pages advertising to grow 50 percent in 2004.

Given all the money at stake, it’s no surprise companies are duking it out for those dollars. The last few weeks have brought a tremendous number of developments in the area. Let me share a few trends I’ve been watching.

The Consumer and/or Broadband Comes First
People have been talking about local search for years, but only now that Internet access, specifically broadband access, has become like another utility, is consumer behaviour catching up. It only makes sense that when the computer and connection are always on, people use them more.

Consumers in the abovementioned focus group appeared to think search is the answer to all product or service research needs. When it came to local products and services, however, the Internet isn’t always top-of-mind. Many simply weren’t aware of some of the offerings out there. Yahoo!’s current consumer campaign, running online, on radio and outdoor, is a great move — when consumers become aware of the existence of local search, they’ll associate it with Yahoo! I think it’s about time Google thought about doing some marketing (at least, as soon as their local offering is out of beta).

Slowly/National
Where consumers go, advertisers follow… eventually. And when it comes to small- and medium-sized businesses, at least one financial analyst at the conference said he expected change to be generational. In other words, the current crop of mom and pops must first hand their businesses over to their kids.

That idea is borne out by a recent Jupiter Research report, which concludes local search advertising will be dominated by national advertisers in the foreseeable future.

Small- and medium-sized businesses have gotten more serious about the Internet. In June of this year, the Kelsey Group found 61 percent of such small businesses viewed the Internet as “a big opportunity for my business to target and acquire new customers.” A year earlier, only 51 percent showed such enthusiasm. Over the same period, the percentage of businesses actually using the Internet as a substitute for traditional advertising went down a point, from 37 to 36 percent.

Social/User-Generated
I expect social networking and user-generated content to play a significant role in local search. Yahoo! Local’s consumer ratings; Citysearch and Evite; and start-ups like Judy’s Book and Insider Pages are doing really interesting things to add value for consumers. For these companies, getting users and their friends involved, and getting them to provide ratings and reviews, is key. That will result in a big battle for consumer mindshare.

Local-i, another start-up, has a different approach. It bypasses the need to develop a robust community by crawling a variety of user-generated content sites and aggregating reviews in one place. Given the growth of the blogging phenomenon, an ability to tap into disaggregated content sources may prove to be the way to go.

Wireless
If the launches of Google SMS and Yahoo! Mobile Local search hadn’t convinced you, let me tell you wireless is the hot new local search distribution method. After all, when better to search locally when you’re out there in a local environment. Advances in mobile phone technology and consumer adoption of SMS messaging drive this trend from the user side.

So far, I haven’t seen much of an ad model around these offerings, but combine the pay-per-call model with the clickable phone numbers in Yahoo!’s mobile results, and it could be a winner.

By Pamela Parker