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Girl Geek Speaks Newsletter

Welcome to the August 2003 issue of our newsletter for the technically challenged and web site wannabe's. We feature articles to help guide you through the process of designing, building, and promoting your business or personal web site. If you know someone who may like getting these newsletters, feel free to forward it to them in its entirety, or have them sign up for their own copy below.

In This Issue:
Writing Well for the Web
Ask Girl Geek: What's the best strategy for selecting keywords for your website?
Website of the Week

Writing Well for the Web

Sure, you use your website to communicate with clients, lure potential customers, and inform site visitors about your products and services, but do you also realize there are at least 2 "hidden" audiences reading your website? And one of these audiences is not even human!!! Shocking!

"No, say it ain't so! Tell me, Girl Geek, who are these mysterious visitors?"

Well, the 2 invisible audiences to your website are
1. Human Internet directory editors - who review your site and decide whether it gets listed in their directory.
2. Search Engine Spiders (aka "bots' or "robots") who electronically read your site and determine it's relevancy and ranking in search engines

Therefore, to write well for the web you need to be mindful of what all 3 potential audiences are looking to find on your site.

What are your basic web-surfing site visitors (humans) looking for?

1. Relevant content - just like realtors say "location, location, location"…the web-surfer's mantra is "content, content, content." Site visitors are looking for information that is relevant to a question, need, or interest and you must provide that quickly and easily or as Dr. Phil says, visitor "buh-bye."

2. Site visitors don't read lots of words online: they scan or skim. They want their content "byte-sized." This means bullet points, lists, or if you must write full sentences, keep your paragraphs to no more than 3 sentences. Marketers know this truth: White space sells. So, don't cram a lot of text into a tight space.

3. Benefits and Results -Instead of long descriptions describing your products or services (which I'm sure are wonderful!) tell the site visitor what problem or pain they have that you can solve. People buy solutions, not products. People by intangibles like "peace of mind, " even if it comes in the form of a Michelin tire or life insurance policy.

What are human Internet directory editors looking for?

1. Interesting and relevant content - online directories want to provide their clients with useful information, not junk or spam. When you submit your site to a directory you are asked to be specific in choosing your category and keywords for inclusion in the directory. Otherwise, the editor will see that your site is not relevant to the category and you will not be included. So don't just have your website be an online advertisement, but include some valuable content to educate the visitor.

2. If you have a spellchecker use it! It's human editors after all and bad spelling, grammar, and punctuation may be why you site gets omitted.

What a search engine spiders looking for?

1. Text - Search engine spiders can't read image files, dynamic script, Flash, or javascript. They rely on text to determine what you site is about and how to rank it.

2. Keywords - Keywords are not just for meta-tags anymore. For any hope of a decent ranking in search engines, your keyword phrases MUST be in your title tag, headings, and sprinkled throughout your site content (some say at a frequency of 3-7%, but I've seen higher). It also helps to have them in your text navigation, site map, alt-tags, and meta-description tag. (See article below for a strategy for choosing relevant keywords for your site.)

Ask Girl Geek (Actual questions from people just like you.)

"What's the best strategy for selecting keywords for your website?"

This takes some research and strategy and here's how to do it.

1. Make a list of all the 2-3 word phrases you could imagine that would define your site content and which your ideal client would enter into a search engine.

2. Then go to WordTracker and see if anyone actually searches them. Pick the most popular terms and/or most descriptive of your work. Look for additional phrases from the list to include too.

2a. Another place you can find out what keywords to use, if you already have a website, is to go to the control panel of your web hosting company and look at your statistics. There you should find a list of search terms that people are already using to find your site. Use those deliberately as keywords in your text.

3. Next go to Google, Yahoo and MSN and enter each search term into it and see how many other sites pop up with the same search term. That defines your competition for that search term. The idea is to find a keyword that people search at a high rate, and that has a relatively low level of competitors. You will see the number of sites competing for that keyword on a bar at the top of the search results. I consider anything under 3 million websites as low.

3a. You can also view the html of the sites that rank at the top of that search and see what keywords they are using to see if you want to include any of those. To do this, if you are using Internet Explorer as your browser, click on :View" then "Source" in the browser menu. Look for the keyword list metatag that should appear somewhere after the <head> tag. It looks like this <meta name="keywords" content="web design firm, search engine optimization, seo, Girl Geek Web Designs">

4. Do this process over until you identify the best keyword phrases to use on your site. Remember, we will most likely want to optimize each page within your website for 2-3 different keywords each.

5. Then you pick no more than 3 keyword phrases to include in your page title, headings, meta-tags, alt-text, text navigation, and most importantly to include in your content (at a 3-7% frequency, thought I have seen some as high as 11%.

6. Then and only then do you start writing content for your site. The content on the homepage is most important. Guidelines I've read say have at least 250-400 words of content on your homepage and all pages of your site.

Whew! That's enough for now! Now you know why you want to pay a professional to design your site, not have your brother-in-law to do it.

Website of the Week: http://www.bravenet.com/
For the do-it-yourself web developer. Lotsa tools, scripts and stuff!

DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS:

The above material is copyrighted, but you may retransmit or distribute it as long as not a single word is changed, added, or deleted, including the contact information. However, you may not copy it to a web site. Copyright 2003. All rights reserved.

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