How to Create a Good Web page #1

How to Create a Good Web Page #1

How to Create a Good Web page I give you my tips from my 30 years of creating and maintaining 32 websites, thousands of pages.

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My Experience

First of all, let me just say that I only have WordPress websites. If you are familiar with WordPress, then fine. If you have some other software for your website, then about 95% of this post will still be helpful to you. My comments are not so much about WordPress as they are about page creation in general.

As a footnote, I started all of my website experience using MS Frontpage, then they dropped support for that, I kept using it until my computer died and I bought a new one, and I couldn’t find the installation files for Microsoft Frontpage, so I went to HTML which was a bust, and then WordPress.

To date, I have probably made some 3000 to 7000 web pages. I haven’t kept count, but I have several websites that have over a thousand or even 2000 pages on them, I am doing almost exclusively all the web page creation myself. I have created them, but I am learning as I go along, and I having to reformat and fix them as far as SEO as time allows. It is not easy task to fix SEO in 1000 pages.

Moreover, to create a web page takes me 15 minutes to an hour depending on how much material I am putting in it, and how much is totally original or I am commenting on and reworking material from something else. But once I finish the content of the page, it takes me from 10 to 20 minutes to create the SEO and fix things with that SEO so that I get a Green SEO light with Yoast.

What are you trying to do with the Page?

Before you design a page, you need to get some basics clear in your mind. If you are a missionary and have a group of people who you have given or they have asked you and you have given them your website, then it doesn’t really matter that you write a good webpage. They will come periodically and see what you have and read it.

Besides what are good principles of writing, which you should be following, they are going to be informed. A simple, “doing good. Did something. Need money. End of page.” may work for you. It looks poor but may work. If that is your mindset, then why bother really bother?

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People finding your page

But if you are writing things that maybe somebody who DOESN’T KNOW AND FOLLOW YOU could possibly be interested in what you have to say, then you need to follow some rules. We who create webpages do so for them to be read, and we need to follow what the “Masters-of-the-Universe” say or else our pages won’t be found. “Masters-of-the-Universe” is Google and the other people who work search engines. We call this “having good SEO”. You can google that and send a year or more reading just a little of it.

Keywords on your page

The first thing is that Google wants you to have a keyword or keyword phrase, then secondly a brief description of the page. The keyword needs to be used in various places on the page, first in the title, in the URL, in the first paragraph, and in the SEO KEYWORD (check out Yoast for a way to get that into your page).

Simply put, this is what your page is about in a word or very short phrase (3-5 words) and this is how people are first of all going to decide whether they want to visit your page or not.

Look at the image above of a webpage. What does it tell you? (1) It is a missions help page. But really nothing more than that. Do they give you contact information for possible supporters or are they a mission board trying to get you to join them? The website and the page’s purpose is completely out of sight in this small snippet of information that Google gives. Google gets the snippet (a small portion of text) FROM YOUR PAGE! It was poorly written.

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Why click on my page?

The snippet is a very short 156 or so character text which should every time answer the question of the possible visitor, “Why should I visit your page?” If the page creator does not understand this, then they will just jump into their text, and the snippet will not give the possible visitor a clue about what is in the page.

For lack of a snippet, Google grabs the first 150 characters of text off of your page. (Most search engines follow Google’s principles for the most part, so you are out of luck all around if you disobey and break their rules).

For example, the present page has a descriptive snippet explaining why a potential visitor should click on it.

In How to Create a Good Web page I give you my opinions from my years of creating and maintaining 32 websites.

Here is where I put this on a sample WordPress post entry page.

First at the top of the page.

---

This is where Google grabs your text to show up in the Google results listing on a Google search.  What calls out to people to click on the page and read it? I say, I have 32 websites. This would mean that I have written a lot of web pages. I have made thousands of web pages., and I have been doing this for 30 years.

But let me clarify, if you have this info in the SEO snippet, then Google will not take the first 156 letters of the page content. But some other people like Yahoo, or others may ignore the SEO snippet, and just take the first paragraph. So always have a very clear reason to read the page as the first paragraph.

Then in the Google Snippet field (Yoast Plugin)

 

Then in the Excerpt Box

It is my understanding that Google ignores your excerpt entry, but in your tags pages for your website, it will appear there under each page.

Now compare these principles to this Google search entry (it is a Mormon page, and I don’t endorse them, but the snippet is excellent).

What is good about this snippet?

1.  Any number in the SEO Keyword is good. “5 talks”
2. The snippet actually is interesting and could very possibly provoke people viewing search results to click on it.

What is bad about this snippet?

1.  They were not using Yoast or did not notice that the title is too long and is cut off.
2. The snippet has “Holland” which gives me no information about anything. Should be removed.
3.  The snippet is too long and is cut off, leaving us having.
4. The seo keyword is not repeated within the snippet.

So every snippet should begin with the SEO keyword or phrase. Note that Google only accepts 4 words in the SEO keyword. All stop words are thrown out and not considered. In the example of this page, the title, “5 Talks that Helped me on my Mission (And Could Help you…” is interpreted by Google (as I understand things…) as the following…

1. ) Take out stop words
“5 Talks Helped Mission Help”
-I don’t think numbers are counted either.

2.) limit keywords to 4 max
“Talks Helped Mission Help”

So that is what Google is looking for. If I were to rewrite this page snippet and title, I would make it something like this
Title: “5 Talks that Helped me on my Mission”
Snippet: “Talks that Helped me on my Mission helps missionaries  forget their inadequacies, difficulties of language, and other trials.” (about 124 characters)

My Take Away on SEO Snippet

This is extremely important and essential in every webpage. Let’s put it like this.

(1) People only view 1-3 pages of Google results. I use these search results a lot in looking for books. Google results will list 350,000 results on 50,000 pages, but after about page 10, they won’t show you any more. They just don’t. So out of 10 pages Google does show you, if you are not in the first page or second page, nobody will find you.

(2) You will never get in the first nor the first 3 pages of Google results if you do not have a keyword and a keyword snippet, and an image, and a offsite link. I am doing this a lot, and none of my pages show up as being Yoast Green SEO light without them.

(3) You will not get into the top of Google search results if you do not have something good to offer people. Google search results puts up what a person is searching for. But just imagine this, your search is a poll, and people vote by clicking on a page. The more people vote for a page (even 2-3 pages down in the search results) the more that particular page will move up and up in their presentation for that search.

Personal Note

I understand that Google has greatly clouded what we see. They are presenting to us (1) what they want us to see, and (2) what they think we want to see. If you search for your own website and pages, then they will move up in their results presentation for you, but they are looking at if you are logged in with a Google ID, and then they twist results towards what you want to see (as they understand it).

But in general, my pages get on the first page of Google results or within the first three pages. In searching for Christian books, there are hundreds perhaps thousands of Christian Online bookstores with offerings of the same books on my websites. But many times I have 3-4 hits on the first page. I have different websites for different formats, pdf, kindle, theWord, mysword, esword, etc.

Another factor here is if you are a newssite, as they define it. Their definition is that you post 3 to 5 posts per week in an ongoing basis. They will push you to the top of search results. This is logical though.

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