Before you start building your Web site, I need to mention one point that commercial Web site builders tend to
neglect. Businesses and organizations expect a Web site to look a certain way. That fashion may change over time, but
the usual things that you may see at a large corporation or organization Web site are:
- Very little text or links on the main page or any page.
- Lots of graphics - especially flash graphics.
- a fancy JavaScript menu
- a log of fancy formatting, done using fancy formatting code.
All of the above are bad for Search Engine Optimization. You know what business you are in, and whether you need to
impress customers with a stylish Web site or not. The trade-off is up to you.
It is probably a mistake to ask a graphic artist to design a Web page, just as it is a mistake to ask a coding
engineer to design the graphics. The graphic artist will make pretty graphics. People, including you, may like them. But
the search engines can't see the graphics at all. They can only read text.
For reasons we won't get into right now, an optimized Web site should have, on the front page:
- A minimum of simple graphics (probably three or 4 is optimal).
- At least 500 - 1000 words of text, about 1-5% of which are the "key word" or phrase that should tell the search
engines and the visitors what your site and page are about.
- Direct html links to all the major pages on your Web site. Search engines cannot follow Javascript. For a search
engine, Javascript menu code is just "junk" that lowers your optimization score.
Ideally, for overall search engine optimization, the main page should have a lot of links to pages in your Web site.
The reason is that search engines are going to pay the most attention to main page links - that is often the fastest way
to ensure that a page is indexed in the search engine. However, all links and no regular text can make your page less
competitive for the key word of the web site and it can also may make the page very very ugly and confusing for
visitors.
