Include the Right Stuff
The Webby Awards is the most prestigious and most recognized of all web awards. They first judge a site on content, listen to how they define their judging criteria for site content: "Content is the information provided on the site. It is not just text, but music, sound, animation, or video -- anything that communicates a sites body of knowledge. Good content should be engaging, relevant, and appropriate for the audience. You can tell it's been developed for the Web because it's clear and concise and it works in the medium. Good content takes a stand. It has a voice, a point of view. It may be informative, useful, or funny but it always leaves you wanting more."
Content can easily become stale and out of date. Maintaining your site content is more than just important, it is critical. The more often you publish and update your site's content, the higher you will be ranked with the Search Engines like Google and Yahoo. Besides higher search engine rankings, content that is fresh is important to your audience. If the last time you updated your web site was in the nineties, it may be time to get it updated. If your site has been built right, updating your site content should be quick and easy.
Be easy to find
A web site your audience can't find can be perfect-and perfectly useless. So, the question becomes, how to build a site that is visible and noticeable by the search engines? It is just as important to engage the people that visit in your content, leave them wanting more and provide them with a call to action on each page.
There are a great number of things you can to help your site show up, here is a list of good things you can do to get started on the right path:
- When writing your page content, write it with key phases you believe your audience would use to find your content in a search engine
- The more relevant content you have for your audience, the better
- Split large pages into several shorter pages provide more chances of getting hit by a search engines
- Studies have shown that people are more likely to click on another page than scroll to read text
- Each page on your site should have a topic
- Utilize Header tags (h1, h2, h3, etc) to emphasize the topic and sub-topics of each page
- Write a page title for the title tag of each page that reflects the topic of that page
Here are some dangers to be aware of:
- Flash is invisible to search engines, therefore pure Flash Sites are purely invisible to search engines.
- Presenting your page content with frames can produce poor and confusing search engine results.