We now arrive at the easy and fun part of the guide – designing a website. There are a few things to take into account when designing a website, the SEO factor, layout, content and linking. This section will cover each of these points.
Search Engine Optimization
When optimizing a website, we need to address the basic requirements of a good seo page.
The Title Tags
It’s important that the <title></title> tags contain the title of the article and the website name. So if your website is called Holy Slots A Rama, the title tags should be
<title>Holy Slots A Rama</title>
If you are writing an article about “How to play Slots”, your title tags should be
<title>How to Play Slots</title>
The Meta Tags
Meta Tags, these are located between the <head> </head> tags of your websites source code. The Meta tags tell search engine bots (they are spiders which crawl your website and send data about the information you have, back to the search engine databases) what the page is basically about.
Tags you should have on every webpage you build are
Meta Description: a sentence about what is on this page.
<meta name="description" content="learning everything you need to about slot machines online, how to play slot machines, winning at them, and choosing the right ones" />
Meta Keywords: keywords which describe the contents of the page.
<meta name="keywords" content="slots machines online, slots machines, slots machine internet" />
The Content
Make sure your article has a title. It’s probably a good idea to have the title of your article the same as the title within the <title> </title> tags. Why? Well when your website gets listed in the search engines for the articles you have written, and a user searches for something that gives a result which contains one of your articles, they will see what is within the <title></title> tags. When the user clicks on that searched item, they will be sent to your website, where they will see an article with the same title, and its content underneath. This helps to reassure the user, that they haven’t been sent to some bogus site, and that they have reached and found the destination they were looking for. It adds continuity from the search results, to the location of what they have searched for.
Menu
Users to your website should be able to navigate your website easily. Information should be at their fingertips, and the menu options, should be relevant to the niche, or topic of your website. The front page of your website should have between 4-9 menu options/links to sub pages of your website. These sub pages, can have more menu options to other sections. But the menu tree should not go any deeper.
It’s a great idea to use your keywords also as your menu options.
Directory Structure, Links and Filenames
Having the right directory structure, links and filenames will ensure that your websites get listed faster than most websites in the search engines. A directory structure should look something like this
http://www.mydomainname.com ßyour menu is here, as well as the first page of the site
http://www.mydomainname.com/online-bonus/ ß The menu option “online bonus” has its own directory name. Why? Well each menu option should be a keyword. We want to give that keyword as much exposure as we can to the search engines.
http://www.mydomainname.com/online-bonus/best-uk-casino.html ß Here the article name is “Best UK Casino”, which is also the name of the file where the spaces are replaced with dashes. The Article “Best UK Casino” is part of category “Online Bonus”,
so it is located under the “online-bonus” directory.
Be careful not to overdo the link structure with excessive use of keywords. The search engine will see this as spam, and may penalize you. Eg
http://www.mydomainame.com/online-casino-bonus/top-online-casino-bonus.html
So when it comes to a menu option, a new directory should be created. If it is an article under that category, a new file should be created using the title of the article as the filename. All spaces in filenames and directories should be replaced with dashes.
To get a better idea of the elements of a website, as well as the structure and layout, please look at image “seolayoutpage.gif”.