Steven J Hagen

I have been studying for several years about how the internet or more how search engines work and I have been actively involved as an interface designer in studying how people use the internet. I have been a member of the Google Webmaster community for over 4 years. My area of study for master degree is interface design. And I have done seven major design studies for how to improve traffic results for city, state and the army corps of engineers.

When I say good web page content I mean that the content helps the site and helping the site provides better search engines results. Search engines provide most people with a path to what content we provide.

It is a common myth that people use site navigation to get to the information that they desire. When site navigation systems are normally used by people that are experienced with a site and know the navigation or site map of the site and have a relationship with the information. They learn the site and find it faster to self navigate vs. going to a search engine getting the results and going to the page.

Often site designer often put the cart before the horse in that the worry about how the customer will get to the content when they should be first thinking about how to structure the content that they do have.

Most visitors to a modern website go directly or very close to the information that they need by the use of an outside search engine and they only need to travel to one or two other pages to get their answer they need and then they leave.

In a review of the traffic for the City of Richmond we can start to see how this is true.
• We have 518 landing pages over the last 2 weeks (landing page is the first page a person request from us.)
• 50% of the visitor leave the site after reaching the first page. 20% after 2 pages. 7% for three pages and 22% go to something more then three.
• The average pageviews of our site is 2.16 pages
• And the average time on the site is 1:31 minutes.

1. This would support the idea that people use a search engine
2. Find a result that they like
3. Come to the city’s site close to what they want.
4. Or they get frustrated and leave the site.

Google give best practice about how to write content and it goes something like this.

Make a page with a clear hierarchy and text links.

What does this mean – It means that you write in a fashion that would be easy to outline.

Example

Heading One: Title of My Page Or what the page talks about.
Heading Two: This Section will talk about (X)
CONTENT About the above Heading two
Heading Two: This section will talk about several lists of items
Heading 3 title of list one
List
Heading 3 title of list two
List

Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Including links like links to “Muni-Code” or other pages in the sites makes this page a referring page and promotes it higher then it would be as an ending page. Google I believe tries to tell the difference between site Navigation links and links in the content of the page.

Create a useful, information-rich page, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Google’s words not mine. The more information and more relative information that can be provided on a page the better it is received. This does not mean make a single page that is a mile long with all the divisions information on a single page. But a page of content should be more then 7 paragraphs and a paragraph should have more then 5 sentences.

Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

If someone has a question about what words users have Google analytics has a report for that.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.

This happens mostly in the heading 1 or title of the page people often want the name to be pretty be it works against the search engines.

Examples
http://www.richmondgov.com/departments/GeneralServices/animal.aspx
Here Department of General Service is not read as important on this page because it is a graphic.

Same thing here
http:// www.richmondgov.com /departments/DIT/

here
http://www.richmondgov.com /departments/budget/

and here

http://www.richmondgov.com /departments/presssecretary/

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Other Thoughts that are not in best practice but are still good ideas.

There’s no easy way around it. You can’t create a Web site and expect people to find it when you update it only once or twice a year or your put the bear minimum content into a page.

It is Important to use language that your audience can relate with. Ask your friends’ outside the organization to read your content and if their eyes glaze over or they are lost in three seconds then consider rewriting. People who are searching use key words that they understand and most likely excited about. Most people search with active language that engages them, not stuffy technical stats.

Know your audience. Know them well.

Proofread. (which I am most likely not doing well enough here.)

Use clear and simple language which means.

• Avoid slang or jargon – again let your grandmother and ten year old nephew to read the site - if both can understand the page content you've done well!
• Avoid complex sentence structures - Try to include just one idea or concept per sentence
• If you assign just one idea to each paragraph site visitors can:
o Easily scan through each paragraph
o Get the general gist of what the paragraph is about
o Then move on to the next paragraph

Front-loading content or put the conclusion first, followed by the what, how, where, when and why. The first line of each paragraph should contain the conclusion for that paragraph. This assumes that a search engine thinks that the first part of the page and the paragraph is the most important part and it also helps with the summaries that shown in the search pages.
Use “How To” phrases in the title of the page -- People often go online for quick, easy guidance. Headlines like How to…, 10 reasons why…, and 50 top tips for… promise the reader valuable tips, and they help you to highlight the key benefits.
Ask a tantalizing question -- By asking site visitors a direct question, you are creating a need for the information on the page. You are also engaging them at a personal level, so the message is more direct, arousing curiosity and drawing wandering eyes into the body copy.
Use a case study -- Case studies prove validity by showing how people have already benefited from the product in the past. They are particularly useful for highlighting success stories, before-and-afters, or for demonstrating the versatility and universality of the product.

Remember that the article is about the subject, not about the author or the division of that author.

Site Resource for your information – This create links and lends creditability to the writer.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/whoneedsheadlines
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/puttingourhotheadstogether
http://websearch.about.com/od/keywordsandphrases/a/goodcontent.htm