Web Design Discussion

Part 1

One highly effective method for attracting more web traffic
is to first optimize the design of your web site. This will
increase your Google page rank because search engines love sites
that have clean code, are fast loading and contain lots of
well written content. This ultimately results in gaining
traffic which leads to more sales, a sign you have
developed a profitable web site.

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Google’s Toolbar Page Rank feature is used to determine the quantity and quality of the sites pointing to your own. If there are no other sites that point to your own site it’ll be difficult to get high rankings in the search engines. The toughest competition will be in the top 20 sites for the search term you use in your web copy.

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After researching all the keywords related to T-Shirts I found “custom t-shirts” received the most searches for the site Wild Lily Designs. However I will also include “spanish t-shirts” and “spanish shirts” in the web copy even though they these keywords don’t get as many searches. This is because these keywords most clearly reflect what I am selling.

How to analyze competing web sites.

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The previous post showed you how to research the best keywords to optimize the web content for your site.

The list below analyzes how competitive my keywords are when I do further research for the keyword “T-Shirts” in WordTracker.

No. Keyword KEI Count 24Hrs Competing
1 “japanese t-shirt” 2.884 145 23 7290
2 “rolling stones t-shirts” 2.263 102 16 4597
3 “funny t-shirts” 1.138 622 99 339914
4 “blank t-shirts” 0.687 147 23 31447
5 “custom t-shirts” 0.596 375 60 236011
6 “christian t-shirts” 0.395 185 29 86677
7 “wholesale t-shirts” 0.311 139 22 62111
8 “vintage t-shirts” 0.201 123 20 75319
9 “t-shirt designs” 0.167 180 29 194300
10 “white t-shirts” 0.131 111 18 94000
11 “cool t-shirts” 0.100 102 16 103571
12 “t-shirt design” 0.078 146 23 273077
13 “t-shirts” 0.070 1146 182 18860941
14 “t-shirt” 0.041 805 128 15841709
15 “white t-shirt” 0.023 126 20 679095

Note: These figures were generated from the free trial Msn gets 9.0000% of all search engine traffic (approx. 52 million a day).

Let me explain what these figures mean:

Keyword

Why are the keywords put in quotes?

This is called exact matching. Exact match searching means that a search engine searches for only those sites which use the keyword exactly as typed in by the visitor. So if someone types “custom t-shirts” it only returns web sites that contain that specific phrase. Exact match searching gives a truer representation of your competition.

Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)

The KEI compares the Count result (number of times a keyword has appeared in the data) with the number of competing web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are most effective for marketing campaign.

The keywords near the top of the list above have a higher KEI. The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition they have. This means you have a better chance of getting higher rankings in the search engines for that keyword phrase.

Count

This is the number of times a particular keyword has appeared in the WordTracker database. It indicates the number of searches
generated for that keyword phrase.

24 hours

This is the predicted daily traffic for each keyword in this search engine only. This may not apply to your site because there are a number of other factors that determine how closely your site matches what people are looking for ie optimized title tags, well written web copy.

Competing

This is the number of competing web pages produced for that term. The lower the number of competing sites the easier it will be to reach the top of the search engines for that keyword.

Here is the formula WT uses to estimate daily search volume for any keyword.

What is the optimum number of competing web pages?

This will vary for different search engines. Generally speaking, if a keyword has just 50 competing web pages, you have a better
chance of getting to the top than if a keyword has 50000 pages. Getting high rankings for that keyword will also depend how well you optimized your web site’s design.

Generally you will find the most success with competition under 1000 pages.

Conclusion

Looking at the keyword list above “japanese t-shirt” has the highest KEI index because it has the lowest number of competing sites. Since I am not selling these types of t-shirts I would choose “custom t-shirts” as it still has a high KEI index even though is has high competition.

Tip

If you wanted to attract visitors that enter “japanese t-shirt” in the search engines, write an article that incorporates those keywords then place it on your web site. The search engines will spider the content which ultimately will give you a little extra traffic and possibly boost your sales.

Ok, you’ve created your keyword list and found related keywords using the keyword research tool WordTracker. The best keywords to use for content on your web site are ones that are very popular (high number of searches) and have low competition (small number of competing sites).

To illustrate how this works I’ll enter the general keyword “T-Shirts” into WordTracker. It produces a count of 1146. This means there were 1146 searches for this term over the last 90 days from the major search engines. The predict number is 2021. This is the maximum total predicted traffic for all of the major search engines/pay per bids and directories for this day.

Here’s the list WordTracker produced when doing a deeper search:

t-shirts 1146 2021
t-shirt 805 1420
funny t-shirts 622 1097
custom t-shirts 375 661
christian t-shirts 185 326
t-shirt designs 180 317
blank t-shirts 147 259
t-shirt design 146 257
japanese t-shirt 145 256
wholesale t-shirts 139 245
white t-shirt 126 222
vintage t-shirts 123 217
white t-shirts 111 196
cool t-shirts 102 180
rolling stones t-shirts 102 180

The keyword “custom t-shirts” would be a good choice because the web site I am optimizing “Wild Lily Designs” sells custom t-shirts.

This is the most popular and effective SEO tool used by search engine marketers.
WordTracker allows you to do a comprehensive search for related keywords, provides the number of searches for your keywords, then compares their popularity in the search engines with how competitive they are. Ideally you want to use keywords that receive a high number of searches but don’t have many competing web sites for the same keyword.

Using the free trial at WordTracker my comprehensive search for Spanish Shirts generates this list:

1. spanish shirts
2. spanish clubs
3. football shirts
4. overseas clubs
5. ebay
6. online shopping
7. online auction
8. apparel
9. spanish
10. t-shirts
11. sports memorabilia
12. ebay.co.uk
13. Spanish
14. real madrid
15. tshirt

The enhanced version would display 285 keywords here. If I click on Spanish Shirts I get a table showing keywords taken from all Dogpile & Metacrawler queries over the last 90 days.

Count = 4
This refers to the number of times a particular keyword appeared in the database.

E.g. The database currently holds 327967786 words. A count of 4 tells you that this particular word has appeared 4 times (this is over 90 days). The keywords are taken from major metacrawlers (a service that queries all the main search engines simultaneously).

Predict = 7
This is the maximum total predicted traffic for all of the major search engines/pay per bids and directories today.

Since Spanish Shirts generates a small number of searches, I will search on a broader term ie Spanish or T-Shirts

Spanish

spanish 3407 6009
spanish dictionary 3183 5614
spanish translator 2295 4048
spanish music lyrics 2114 3728
spanish translation 1892 3337
spanish english dictionary 1352 2384
english to spanish 1049 1850 dig
spanish to english dictionary 1040 1834
spanish to english 1033 1822
spanish babes 990 1746
learn spanish 989 1744
spanish american war 987 1741
english to spanish translation 778 1372
spanish to english translation 747 1317
english to spanish dictionary 745 1314

The first number beside each keyword is the count, the second is the predicted number.
The list above generates a higher number of keywords than Spanish Shirts because of their popularity. This is useful because it gives you another angle to attract traffic to your web site. For example you could create a page on how to learn spanish by integrating the keywords “learn spanish” in your article. The traffic this page receives may help sell more Spanish Shirts because the visitors will visit the rest of the site.

T-Shirts

Here are the related words for the keyword T-Shirts generated by WordTracker.

1. t-shirts
2. funny t-shirts
3. tshirts
4. t-shirt
5. tee shirts
6. tshirt
7. shirts
8. tees
9. funny t-shirt
10. funny shirts
11. cool t-shirts
12. tee
13. funny t shirts
14. funny
15. humorous

If you do a deeper search on t-shirts you get:

t-shirts 1146 2021
t-shirt 805 1420
funny t-shirts 622 1097
custom t-shirts 375 661
christian t-shirts 185 326
t-shirt designs 180 317
blank t-shirts 147 259
t-shirt design 146 257
japanese t-shirt 145 256
wholesale t-shirts 139 245
white t-shirt 126 222
vintage t-shirts 123 217
white t-shirts 111 196
cool t-shirts 102 180
rolling stones t-shirts 102 180

If you subscribe to the paid version of wordtracker you will get another 85 words.You also have the choice
of digging deeper on each of the keywords above if you want to view words related to the one you chose.

Conclusion.

Doing keyword research before you write the content for your web site will help you to identify what angles you can use to attract the search engine spiders. You can create different pages that include these keywords which will attract traffic because they receive a high number of searches.

Even though “Spanish Shirts” is one of the main keywords, there are not many people doing searches for that term, therefore you need to expand and include broader search terms.

Recently I was asked to optimize a site selling Spanish T-Shirts to attract lots of traffic from the search engines. Without traffic your site won’t make any sales. Of the other hand getting lots of traffic does not guarantee sale if your web copy is lousy. There are many factors that should be considered when you optimize your web site. My example site will be Wild Lily Designs, a site that specializes in selling Spanish Shirts.

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When designing your site for web accessibility try to make it as accessible as possible.

It will help your site comply with the disability law in the United States (a legal requirement for government web sites) plus receive the added benefit of reaching a wider audience and having a site that is easily indexed by the search engines and loads fast.

Here are a couple of tools to check how accessible your web site is:

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Priority 1 - covers basic web accessibility requirements.

* Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element (e.g., via “alt”, “longdesc”, or in element content). This includes: images, graphical representations of text (including symbols), image map regions, animations (e.g., animated GIFs), applets and programmatic objects, ascii art, frames, scripts, images used as list bullets, spacers, graphical buttons, sounds (played with or without user interaction), stand-alone audio files, audio tracks of video, and video.

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Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web. This includes people that have visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities. It also includes older people with changing abilities due to aging ie visual impairment.

A web accessible site allows people with disabilities to perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web. Sites that have not been designed to accommodate these people will miss out on gaining these extra visitors.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

These are guidelines to help web designers and web content developers build accessible web sites. Following these guidelines will help you to reach a larger audience.

Here are some of the issues related to people with disabilities:

* They may not be able to see, hear, move, or may not be able to process some types of information easily or at all.
* They may have difficulty reading or comprehending text.
* They may not have or be able to use a keyboard or mouse.
* They may have a text-only screen, a small screen, or a slow Internet connection.
* They may not speak or understand fluently the language in which the document is written.
* They may be in a situation where their eyes, ears, or hands are busy.
* They may have an early version of a browser, a different browser entirely, a voice browser, or a different operating system.