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Web Site Design Guide

Just start designing, host your site on one of the free services, hope the search engines find you, and hope that other web masters will think your site is so awsum they will automatically link to you and send traffic your way? - right?

If you are thinging any of these thoughts, you will want to read the search engine placement guide. and come back with a plan before you begin to design.

Planning before you act will same you time, money and lots of frusteration.

So do we design to get found, design to just have fun, design to teach, design to entertain, design to communicate? ---Read on

Doorway Page Design - Revised 6.20.02

A doorway page should be designed to rank very well under a keyword search using your primary keywords (PKW). Those PKW's will effectively structure the rest of the web page, and their are a lot of rules, tricks and tools to follow, WARNING - we will be very cautious about tricks for fear that our efforts will be viewed as Spam Indexing (spamdexing). Many of the search engines will ban your site from their index if that suspect it.

If you are serious about this, go to www.winfiles.com and download web position gold. It is a submission tool, position reporter and page critic. It is the page critic that comes in handy here.

Page Name & location - Revised 6.20.02

Put the doorway page in the root directory - root level pages are more important that subdirectory pages.

Name the page your keyword-phrase.htm - as a bonus put a link to this page from this page - and make it the first link in the page. Put the keyword phrase in the URL TEXT.

Page Size - Revised 6.20.02

Target 300 words of body text. Min 250 / Max 600. -
The number of words will effect the number of iterations of the keyword phrase.
WPG should reflect a 2% keyword weight - NO LESS!!!!!
Spiders may AUTOMATICALLY reject small and large pages - and pages with less than 2% KW weight. - WPG will give you a higher score in the page critic for lessor iterations, but this is an error in the critic.

META TAGS - Revised 6.20.02

<html>
<head>
<title>Web Site Design Guide - by JConline</title>
<meta name="description" content="Web Site Design Guide by JConline">
<meta name="keywords" content="web site design JConline Christian webmasters">

<body>

META Title Tag - Revised 6.20.02

Target 8 words starting with your PKWs.
Avoid stop words (the, and, or, but, etc. Never lead with "The") -
Max Size : 100 characters.
The title should solve a problem or intrigue
Cap the first word, and only proper nouns after that.

good	<title>anthropic principle - our fragile existance </title>
bad	<title>the anthropic principle and our fragile existance </title>
better	<title>Anthropic principle - our fragile existance here</title>

META Description Tag - Revised 6.20.02

Target 200 characters
Lead with your PKWP -
POSSIBLY TWO OCCURANCES
Make this your sales pitch, e.g. compelling and representative of what is inside.

good	<meta name="description" content="anthropic principle - our fragile existance - an article by JConline.">
better

META Keyword Tag - Revised 6.20.02

The average search is 2.3 words - so dont use commas.
Use the http-equiv tag here. SEA thinks it helps with Altavista -
Lead with your PKWs WITHOUT the commas in between, and keep it simple.
Dont have more than one occurence of a PWK in the TAG.
What the spiders are looking for is prominance. Keep the keywords relevant.

good	<meta content ="keywords" name="keywords" content="anthropic principle creation evolution origin life">
better	<meta http-equiv="keywords" name="keywords" content="anthropic principle creation evolution origin life">

META Author Tag - Revised 6.20.02

SEA recommends this tag for inktomi

good	<META name="author" content="insert keyword phrase here">

Graphics and the ALT TAG - Revised 6.20.02

Name one graphic the keyword phrase -
<img src="images/anthropic-principle-image.jpg" width="300" height="235" align="left" alt="anthropic principle - we exist !!!???">
Use one or two graphics, and plug your PKWs's in the ALT tag in the first one of them - it should make sence. and 3 or so of your obscure keywords in the other ALT tag.
Dont use a PKW on a background image ALT tag. It could be considered SPAM.
SEA recommends always adding alt tags.

Headers - Revised 6.20.02

Use one <H1> and only one per page.
Lead it with the PKW phrase and add 2- 3 more words.

Comment TAG - Revised 6.20.02

Use one comment tag
Lead it with the PKWs and add 2-3 more words - the description tag may work well.
Place it just after the body tag

Refresh Tag - Revised 6.20.02

As a rule, dont do it. The porn industry abused this tag so badley that the spiders now consider it spamming and will not index your site.

Robots Tag - Revised 6.20.02

Do use the robots META tag to tell the spiders what you do and dont want indexed, but some spiders dont look at this, so dont rely on it. Use it in conjunction with a robots.txt file

Domain	Two to three of your PWKs in the domain name helps.
Avoid	Large graphics, Flash, Tables. I still use tables, but I try to keep it simple. text inside flash doesnt get seen by the spiders, and spiders cant read graphics, only the ALT tag.
Dont use	frames, java, invisible text, small text (size=1)
robot.txt	The robot.txt file is a UNIX text file that tells the spiders what directories and files you DO NOT want indexed.