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July 18th, 2007 - by Bill Nixon
  
8 Steps to Writing Effective Web Pages

How to write a web page to be found on the search engines
  

Since I am asked so often how to get a website to be found on Search Engines, I decided to write a quick and easy recipe. This, by no means, is exhaustive. It serves as a great starting point. As I get time, I will explain the steps better and in more detail.

1. Write 250-700 words about a subject with one keyword phrase. That phrase for our purposes today is going to be "photographer in Charleston, SC." You will want to use the phrase between 2-5% in the body of the text for the page that you write. Thus, if you write a 300 word article, then you may use that exact phrase from 6 to 15 times. Always make sure first and foremost to make the text for humans and not search engines though. If it sounds goofy when you read it out loud, then re-write it. Once you have a great article written that includes your keyword phrase the appropriate amount of times, move on to the next step. (If you are having trouble with this step, you might find investing in a web copywriter worthwhile.)
2. Add at least one .jpg or .gif file to the page and add alttext to describe that image using your keyword phrase.  You should add at least one image file to your text to enhance your points you are making in the content. When you add that image, be sure that the alttext information in the html is the same as the keyword phrase you are writing about. Thus, you will have "photographer in Charleston, SC" as the alttext for the image in our example.
3. Publish your page to the world wide web. When you are ready to publish, be sure that your meta description, title, and keywords correspond to your keyword phrase in the body of text. It is true that less weight is given to these tags by Google, but some search engines still use them and they are valuable for building traffic through those engines.
4. Write about your new article on your blog network. You should write 5-6 unique blurbs about the new article you just wrote and publish them to your high page rank blogs on which you are an author or have full control. Each blog that you post on should be a Page Rank 3 or above to be really effective. If you have a network of blogs that you post to, then that is great.
5. Now, do aGoogle search for your keyword phrase. On a separate spreadsheet, list the sites who rank 1 - 10 for your keyword phrase. For example, I will Google "photographer in Charleston, SC" and find which site is ranked #1, #2 and so forth through #10 which is the last site listed on the first page of the results.
6. Find the pages that link to the sites ranked 1 - 10 on Google. This step will help you find possible link partners for your new page that you have created. To find the sites that link to those sites that you found in Step 5, simply type this into the Google search bar: link:www.example.com. This will list for you all of the sites that link to the site that you enter. Thus, if you want to find the sites that link to www.kellinixon.com you would type link:www.kellinixon.com.
7. List the sites that you find on a separate spreadsheet. Now that you have the sites that link to your competitors, start investigating those sites to see which of them offer link exchanges and to see where they link to your competitor. Once you figure out how they are linking to your competitors, you can understand how you might be able to get a link from them as well.
8. Contact the webmasters of the sites that link to your competitors and ask them to link to you as well. The whole idea here is that you are investing time into building up your incoming links, which are the very most important thing in establishing you (your site) as the authority on your subject. This is by far the longest part of the process. Building links, though, offers you the very most benefit in first ranking your site highly on the Search Engines and keeping it there.

Now, you understand the very basics in creating findable pages for your website. If you follow these steps for each page that you add to your site, you will undoubtedly start to see some results. You must, however not forget the rules you must follow in the design process. These rules will keep you from getting blacklisted. If you are blacklisted, you simply cannot be ranked until you fix the problems.