Stages of development

Developing a successful site is seldom a one-shot deal, but an ongoing process of revision, expansion, and refinement.   A web site goes through many stages of development, of which the initial design and publishing is just the first.

If you let it go at that, you may achieve some results, but you'll never derive the full benefit of what your site can really do for you. 

In fact, the second stage of development can be more important than the first.  Unless yours is a special-purpose, semi-private site meant only for those who already know its URL, getting traffic from search engines is essential.  No matter how well designed it may be, and no matter how irresistible what it has to offer, a web site doesn't have a ghost of a chance without attracting traffic.

That's what the second stage is all about- getting traffic to your site, particularly from search engines.  Second stage development depends upon interpreting (and responding to) your web site's statistics.

Site Statistics

Whether you see results or not, your web's host server always does.  It maintains a detailed log of every visit to your site, every file requested, each clicked link within your site and all  referring pages.  Most web hosts make this log available to owners or webmasters, enabling a detailed analysis of the site's performance via web site statistics.

The server log itself is just raw data.  To make sense of it, you need a log analyzer- special software that reads, sorts, and calculates statistics from the information it contains.  Most of the better hosts provide this software as part of their hosting package.  One of the more common ones is called the Webalizer.

To learn more about this log analysis program, and to see some screen-shots of its reports, you may want to pay a visit to this site: http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/.  Even if you have a different program, the output will probably be similar to what you see here.

Statistics reports like those created by the Webalizer and similar programs can be more than a bit confusing, even for those familiar with their contents. There's a brief explanation of the terms and concepts here: http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/webalizer_help.html.

Although it may seem like a lot of work, learning to interpret site statistics is an important, necessary part of web site development.  It provides the information required to make intelligent decisions with regard to your site, instead of just blindly guessing.


Analyzing search results

When you're just starting out, the most useful stats are revealed in the sections called "referrers" and "search strings". These show the main sources of traffic and search terms that drew visitors.

If the report shows insufficient traffic being sent to your site via searches (and it probably will), the first thing you'll have to do, before you even consider anything else, is to find a way to improve your site's responsiveness to searches at Google, MSN, AOL, Yahoo, Alta Vista, and other search facilities.

It takes a lot of traffic

For your web site to achieve results, it must be seen by large numbers of visitors- and not just any visitors, but those with an interest in what your site is offering.  Among the people who arrive at your site,

• Some will have arrived in search of something else, and have no interest in your site at all.  These will click away, sometimes before the first page has loaded.
   

• Some will have moderate interest in your site, but will (for one reason or another) lose interest fairly rapidly.  These may glance around a bit, but won't stay very long, and aren't very likely to return.
   

• Even among visitors who are favorably impressed by your site, and who maintain very high levels of interest, only a small percentage will take action, and do what you want them to.
   

• To achieve results, your pages must draw large numbers of the third type of visitor, enough to overcome the odds against you.  Since these are just a fraction of the overall numbers, a few thousand "hits" aren't enough to begin to meet your needs.

If you're not drawing adequate numbers of visitors, the situation has to be addressed.  You can throw money at it in the form of online advertising and paid search listings, but it's more cost-effective to increase your traffic, especially at first, through the addition of more verbal content.

Improving search results

Your site will achieve improved results for you by drawing more search engine traffic. To do this effectively, you need lots of verbal content- content incorporating terms people use to find the kinds of things you offer. This is best accomplished with special verbal content pages. Verbal content pages aren't necessarily meant to be read by your site's visitors. Their function is to be read and indexed by search engines, which will in turn send traffic to your site. They are absolutely necessary for drawing sufficient amounts of search engine traffic. Whatever you do, however, don't confuse legitimate verbal content pages for the sometimes recommended "doorway" pages designed to trick search engines into sending random or unrelated traffic to your site.  Such shenanigans as these can wind up getting your pages dropped from the indexes altogether, and in extreme cases banned forever.

How search engines work... Search engines work by "reading" and indexing verbal content- the words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that appear on your pages.  If your pages lack sufficient verbal content, the mechanical indexers will assume they contain no useful information and ignore them in returning search results. Invisible content Graphic contents in the form of photographs, drawings, charts or diagrams, Flash animations, and graphical text are invisible to search engine robots, and pages that consist mainly of this kind of content won't have any impact in searches. When it's best to be verbose Presentation pages work best with brief, concise, and to the point content, but verbal content pages designed for drawing search engine traffic work better when they tend toward verbosity. Play by the rules An experienced web designer with knowledge of search site mechanics can take steps to decrease the likelihood of these pages being read while abiding by the sometimes strict rules imposed by search engine robots.

What you want is real information related to the content of your site, carefully composed and arranged to respond to searches and draw traffic to your site.  Then, if the pages do their job, they'll direct incoming traffic to the main content of your site, ideally without even being read.

Effective verbal content

Putting together effective verbal content pages is something of an art in itself, but there is a method to it.

The first step is to determine what words and phrases people actually use in searching for content similar to yours. 

Select words or phrases you believe are most likely to be used as search criteria (See Help for finding keywords, right). Unlike the other pages of your site, the verbal content pages you create for indexing by search engines should attempt to cover as much ground as possible. In composing the content for these pages, try to repeat your key words and phrases often within your text, and prioritized by relative importance. It's important to repeat them, not just once but many times.  The more often you can use them, the better. You can't just list them one after another, though, or simply repeat them out of context.  Search engine robots are smart enough to determine whether keywords appear in sentences, and to recognize when they're too densely packed for a page to make any sense to a human reader. In other words, don't try to fool the robots, cause you'll just tick them off when they catch you at it.  Instead, try to cater to them by composing real content that incorporates your key words and phrases, repeating them early and often, but not to the point that your pages would make no sense to a human reader. If you can work your keywords into a sensible page title of approximately ten words, so much the better. The page title generally functions as a one-line "teaser" to attract attention and encourage click-through to your site.

Help for finding keywords and phrases The link below will provide a list of search terms actually used by actual people searching for things online. It shows terms used and how many times they were used in the preceding month. This information can be used to create verbal content for pages specifically designed to respond to specific terms. Help for finding keywords and phrases How to use this tool Type in your search term, i.e. art prints. The results will show variations on that term and how often each was used. Choose one or more terms from the list to weave (repeatedly!) into your verbal content pages. Tip 1 The more popular a search term is, the more difficult it will be to achieve a high page rank with it. Achieving a first page result with the term art prints would be extremely difficult, since there's so much competition for it. It can be done, but it would require a considerable amount of fairly sophisticated work, including advanced SEO (search engine optimization) techniques. The more specific terms, though less sought after, are likely be more productive in achieving results with less specialized techniques. Tip 2 You can also use results from the list to see how or whether your existing pages respond to searches using them. Simply enter each into the box at Google and see what you get. Tip 3 Avoid skewing your web site statistics with meaningless hits. Don't visit your own pages, especially from search results. It's sufficient just to know they're listed.

It's important to understand that these specially designed verbal content pages aren't necessarily a part of your web site's presentation, and you really don't want people to read them.  An experienced web site designer with knowledge of search engine mechanics will know how to arrange this kind of page to create the desired effect without the kinds of tricks that will cause trouble for you with the search engine robots.


Targeted verbal content

Adding one or more verbal content pages of the type described above will help you to attract more traffic to your site at very little cost. These pages will be more effective if they're targeted for the visitors you want to attract to your site, people with an interest in what you have to offer.

To do this effectively, you have to answer some questions:

• Who would be interested in what you have to offer?
  Presumably, you have some idea of who buys stuff like this, a "typical customer" who's likely to do business with you.
   

• What would these people search for on the web?
  If you can profile your potential buyers, you're in position to cater to them with verbal content specifically designed to draw their attention by addressing their specific interests.
   

• What content can you provide that will respond to their searches and serve to draw them to your site?
  Create verbal content pages that will show up in their searches and lead them into your site, following the guidelines above.

Repeat as required

Once your new verbal content is online and indexed, give it some time to have some effect- at least a couple of weeks, and preferably a month or so.  Then, review your site logs to see what it's accomplished.  If you've followed our instructions, you should see a substantial increase in traffic coming to your site via search results.

The second stage of web site development is never really done- traffic can always be improved, both in terms of quantity and focus (drawing more specific traffic with more likely interest in your site).  Creating verbal content is a cost-effective way of gaining targeted search engine traffic.

It's a simple process: create new verbal content, post it to your web, and, at least until your traffic's up to par, repeat the procedure as required...