What makes for a great webpage?
I bet you’d like to know the formula for creating a superior webpage? I am also sure you would love to hear the secrets we have acquired over years of experience of what it takes to make a webpage that will stand out and be noticed by your visitors. One that keeps your visitors returning to your site, again and again. One that is indexed by the major Search Engines and appears within the first 5 pages of the search results. And finally what it takes to design a page that is 95% better than all the rest on the web.

Because it makes for great reading, and against the wishes of my partners, I will tell all in this three part article.

Keywords, Designs, and Optimization

1. Never Enough Said About Good Keywords
The foundation of any really good website is picking the right keywords or keyword phrases. It is, believe it or not, the ultimate factor that will determine the success or failure of your webpage. You must do some serious research on keywords or keyword phrases that will draw attention to your website. You must ensure that you can construct good informative content using those keywords or keyword phrases.

It is vital and the single most important ingredient of a your website. Do your homework assignment very carefully. Check the competition to see what keywords or phrases, they are using. Check the number of searches made each month for your keywords. Also check the keyword density of your page to see if it will register in the search engines. This last one requires some piece of software or an online solution.

2. Professional Design
Build a professional looking design. Make sure your site is readable, free of both spelling and grammar mistakes. Also check what your webpage looks like in all types of browsers.

Keep the topic of your website in mind, stay focused on your keywords and use them throughout your content. Use the header tag to draw attention. Make sure you include your primary keyword or phrase in that header. Place headers as close to the top of the page as possible. Use the bold tag to highlight a point. Use bullet lists to itemize.

Another point that is always omitted by many SEO experts and website designers is the ratio of code vs readable text. A 50% split is awesome but not easy to achieve if you want some sort of design. We can accomplish this feat but that information will cost you! No I’m just kidding I will tell you all about how to do it in my next article, I promise.

Keep your sentences short and the number of words on a page between 450 to 900. Many sites break up longer descriptions into multiple pages, this will be of some inconvenience for your visitors but you will have more room for advertising. We don’t like that too much and think it is a waste of time for the visitor. Instead make each page topic related, start and finish it on the same page. Don’t make the users run around. A well built page will always have room for ads. And Ads should be content related. Don’t offer adds to children’s books when you sell auto parts.

The Content on your website will be an important factor to firstly, attract and the keep visitors coming back. So learn what it takes to become an authority in your field. Act like an expert by writing rich engaging content. Optimize that content with the keywords and keyword phrases you have selected. A trick we use is that we prepare content for each page and we focus on three or four keywords or keyword phrases, only. So if the guts of our site has only 5 pages we will have around 15 keywords or keyword phrases. Make sure that you read your content. Ensure that it is clear. Re-write it several times if need be then choose the best version. Being known as an expert in a field has some amazing results and puts you above the rest, so get informed.

A great webpage will always have fresh content. Make sure you update your webpage often. Technology changes rapidly, make sure your material is current and still relevant. Remember, 90% of the time, the only reason a visitor is on your page is for information. Make sure you deliver. Make sure that information is recent and accurate. Besides, there is nothing like fresh content to keep your visitors interested and coming back for more.

You are about to embark on a journey into SEO hell. I have tried my best to keep this as simple as I can but it is about to get confusing. We’ll try to cover three major points today. Enjoy the reading!

3. Your Menu System
Forget the Flash, JavaScript, PHP, and ASP stuff you have gone out to learn to create flashy drop down or glittering menus or image swaps. That’s far too much coding. We want to keep the page’s code down to a minimum. Beside you could create most of that with CSS.

A great webpage will have an easy and simple menu system. Make sure you link your pages to and from your main index page. and don’t forget about linking to and from your sitemap page. Expert web designers usually put all their main links on their site at the top or the bottom of all their web pages, so that a visitor can freely move around and find what they’re looking for. Sidebar menu systems are passé. Besides that space can be used for something else, like more good content.

Ok now this point we can’t stress enough, check that all your links work! Check every single page, especially if you link out to other sites. Search Engines hate broken links, so do your visitors, and it gives off the appearance that you are a Mickey Mouse operation.

Verify if all images on your page display properly. Nothing brings down the quality of a site faster than images that don’t load. or images that come out blank.

4. Code vs Content
Whenever we get a client who is having a problem getting ranked, the first thing we check is the ration between code and content. Search Engines truly despise code heavy sites. Their spiders have to dig too deep and they waste too much CPU power. After a while and nothing to show for it the spider pulls away. Expect a drop in ranking or worse be accused of being a spammer. So go back to basics write simple HTML code. Use an externally linked style sheet. Don’t add to many tables in tables in tables…That’s just too much code. Get online instead and learn good CSS.

Cascading Style Sheets are an excellent way to create some WOW factor. Learn the ways of the Pros. Your content to code ratio should be better than 30% text. Shoot for 50%. Never accept 10-25%. If you find yourself close to that 30% mark but can’t cut any more code out, add text silly. But don’t add junk text, add good enjoyable reading. If you have run out of ideas for content and now I’m going to share something with you that I shouldn’t, get an RSS feed on the topic of your site. I will tell you a lot more about that in my final chapter, but RSS Feeds are a great way to add fresh content to your site, and balance that code vs text ratio.

5. The WOW Factor
We have been asked about this so many times that i think most people just don’t get the point. Using intense graphics and Flash animations is great if you are IBM and or have a billion dollar ad budget. To be perfectly honest I used to design sites all in Flash at one time. The looks awesome and soon my reputation as a web designer sky rocketed. Thing is sites like those are not Search Engine friendly.

So how do you create a WOW factor when you can’t use fancy menu’s and super flashy graphics? It is all in the layout. Good planning and careful programming can render some pretty impressive layouts. Add to that an easy to use menu system and incredible content and voila you have a WOW factor. The real professional look is simply awesome. Choose a neutral color scheme. Or if you are flamboyant choose a scheme which at least is easy on the eyes. Stick to browser safe colors. And most of all check the scheme out on several monitors. Not all are calibrated the same.

Our experience shows that almost 70% of our clients go with earth tones. Simple and clean with lots of white space. For text Black on white is still popular but we like dark grey on off-white. It is a lot easier on the eyes. A little known fact is that the average visitor reads less on the net and usually chooses to print out a long article. It is just a simple case of it being to hard on the eyes. So make your content printable too.

Professional websites are easily bookmarked. If your site contains useful information and keeps fresh content visitors will want to bookmark it or add it to their favorites. Using a small bookmark script and a favicon (a small logo you place on your site and it will be automatically picked up and displayed in your visitor’s bookmarks), usually helps visitors add tour site to there bookmarks. Remember every little edge you can take is useful.

One more wow factor before I call it a day. Make sure you validate your site. Check the coding carefully. Broken code usually displays the stuff on the page poorly and you don’t want that. At the same time badly coded pages are ignored by Search Engine Robots. Also when you have validated your site take the gif file from W3C to show everyone you are using Valid HTML code. It is a sign of professionalism and is highly regarded.

So later I’ll share with you some little known secrets. Maybe a snippet of code here and a little there just to get you on your way.