Shari Thurow, Webmaster & Marketing Director, Grantastic Designs, Inc.
Web Presence for Internet Librarians
- Goals
- define a search-engine friendly Web site desing
- what it is and is NOT
- why it is important
- search engine optimization essentials
- text component
- link component
- popularity component
- other design considerations
- home page desing
- Why care about the search engines
- people use them
- [showed slide of number of searches of day per engine]
- [number of searches by adults]
- [how adults use search engines i.e. search for what]
- Search engine friendly design is NOT
- design to obtain top search engine position
- [example of a doorway page]
- SE friends deisng is
- user-friendly that can be found on both crawler-based and human-bases search engines (directories)
- Importance of site design
- end users/site visitors/target audience (primary)
- human-based search engines (secondary)
- crawler-based search engines (secondary)
- how you place words, graphics, etc communicates the content that you feel is imortant to both engines and visitors
- 5 basic rules of Web design
- easy to read
- easy to navigate
- “sense of place”
- “scent of information”
- easy to find
- internal
- external
- consistent in layout and design
- quick to download
- 30 seconds or less on a 56k modem
- EASY TO USE
- Easy to find
- search engines, directories, industry-related sites
- go directly to the relevant page
- within 708 clicks, preferrable less, as long as…
- “scent of information”
- most importnat information “above the fold”
- contact information
- search engines:
- index text (all)
- follow links (all)
- measure popularity
- if you dont’ place text on the web pages and create a site navigation scheme that crawlers can follow, your site will not rank well in the search engines
- do your pages:
- match what target audience uses to search
- provide easy access to keyword-focused text
- contain enough high-quality content so that objective, 3rd party sites will link to it
- bring in a search engine specalist during the design/redesign process, not after the fact
- successful SE optomization depends on:
- text component (index text)
- link component (follow links)
- popularity component (measure popularity)
- Text component
- give people easy acess to your keywords
- does the content appear to be focused
- HTML title
- breadcrumb link
- headings
- intro paragraph
- calls-to-action
- conclusion paragraph
- graphic images
- examples…
- primary vs. secondary text
- primary (all SE)
- title
- visible body copy
- text at the top of the page
- in & around hyperlinks
- secondary (some SE)
- meta tags
- alt text
- doman and file names
- text component summary
- use words that people search on
- place keywords well
- focus on primary text
- place keywords prominently
- use keywords frequently enough
- link component / site & page architecture (follow links)
- link component
- site navigation
- cross-linking
- type of web page
- page layout and structure
- URL
- SE friendly (most to least)
- text links
- navigation buttons
- image maps
- menus (form and DHTML)
- flash
- if navigation scheme is not friendly, should you avoid using it in your deisgn
- no
- design is for the users not for the SE
- always have two forms of navigation
- target audience
- search engines
- they often compliment each other
- types of text links
- navigation scheme
- contextual links
- embedded links
- site map
- MPABS
- most people are basically stupid
- marketing term
- informational pages
- contain infor for target audience
- do not contain a lot of sales hype or jargon
- spider-friendly
- often have simpler layout
- visually match the rest of your site
- information vs. doorway pages
- [too much here for me to transcribe]
- example info pages
- FAQs
- press releases
- tips/how-to
- glossary & reference pages
- location
- category/gallery
- product
- crosslinking
- must have related cross links
- hierarchical
- breadcrumb
- contextual
- category > sub cat
- parent > child
- red flags
- doorway pages
- hallways
- envelope
- mini/micro sites
- sattelite sites
- many more…
- summary
- 2 forms of navigation
- know to use text links
- graphic links ok
- usability counts!
- popularity component
- nubmer and quality of links to your site
- clickthrough popularity
- how long on users on your site
- do they?
- continue to use
- link to you
- return to you
- [rushed through the last slides as she was over time. Sorry, I couldn’t keep up any more]
