Web Development Blog

In the majority of site visits the Home Page is the first impression a visitor has of you, much like how you would view a store front and make your decision if you would like to shop, eat or drink at their establishment. The decision to investigate further into your site is made within about the first 10 seconds of their visit.  It reflects your product, personality and style.  Different sites use styles to project an image that would attract a particular audience and to captivate that persons attention.  Some examples would be, to catch a childlike mind you want it colorful, with fun music and lots of flash content, where as professionals may want to use strong, bold colors with a sleek, straight line and clean approach.  Most people are not very patient when it takes a long period of time to open a page, and will move on.  You don’t want your visitor to wait too long before being able to see what you have to offer.

The wording, known as content, needs to captivate their interest, making them curious to find out more.  It can be geared toward presenting them with a problem that you have the answer to, and they can access this information by clicking on a link, or a list of catchy titles that link you to pages that go further into the information they are seeking.  The ideas are limitless and all have a common goal, to get visitors to your site and keep them there.  Regardless of your style, the words used in the lists, content, links, graphics, etc…, need to be full of keywords.  Not too wordy, but still rich in words used for searching.  These keywords are what brought them to your site in the first place.  Your site was in the list because Search Engines have crawled through your Home/Index page for keywords.  Search Engines in turn use this information, to return a list of sites that contain the words submitted.   Where you are in that list of results depends on well placed your keywords are within your Home Page.

How should my content look?  What criteria should my content contain?  These questions and many more are legitimate and important.  Web site content is one of the most important elements to optimize SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  Search Engines, like Ask, Google, Yahoo, etc…, use the content in a site to determine the rankings in the results list.  Using keywords and phrases in the content throughout the site can determine a higher ranking within the results of searches.

Well written content will not only help your search engine rankings, it will keep the viewer from moving on to another site.  Content that is enlightening and compelling piques the interest of your readers, keeping them browsing thru your site.  Be persuasive, aim for making the reader believe that the service or product you have to offer is the best to suit their needs.

When putting together enlightening and compelling content full of keywords and phrases, there are some other criteria that need to be met.  Uniqueness has an important role. Content that is copied or wording that is too similar to another site will be recognized by Search Engines as duplicate content.  If plagiarism is suspected and/or found by the Search Engines they will penalize your ranking.  All pages, elements, content, styles, etc., need to be as unique as you are, insuring that your web site rankings are not punished.

Check back frequently for more articles about effective content development for the different pages of your web site.