Tea Party Rookies Web Development Help Tips
by Michael Kinzie
August 31, 2010
Web Development Help Tips |
With the Tea Party Movement sweeping across the country, we are observing countless new websites popping up all over the internet. Here’s the problem: a vast majority of these new websites are created by first time rookies (no offense) who may not have a working knowledge of web development, SEO, or internet marketing. There is more to establishing a web presence than slapping a website together and throwing it on the internet. You may have the best looking site on the web, but if no one is able find it, what’s the point? Why hang a Picasso in the closet? In order for internet surfers to find your site through organic search engine results, there are some helpful tips you should be aware of in order to be successful. This article is designed for the Tea Party Rookies as well as any other first time web developer to help provide a blueprint of how to build, optimize, and promote your new website.
There are hundreds of search engines on the internet, but the two that will get you the lion’s share of internet traffic are Google and Yahoo!, so let’s focus our attention there. Yahoo! has now changed their results to use Bing, therefore when optimizing for Yahoo!, you should keep this in mind. Web development and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) go hand in hand; therefore we will discuss these topics together.
When developing your new site, you need to be thinking about the keyword phrases that people will use to find you organically on the search engines. I recently developed a website for the Lake Fork Tea Party Patriots, so we will use that as an example. If you know the name of the group, you can go directly to it, but what about those who do not know that your group exists? How will they find it on the internet? Lake Fork is near Emory, TX, so one page was optimized for “Emory Texas Tea Party”. It is also in Rains County, so another good keyword phrase is “Rains County Tea Party”. There are several other towns in the area so they should be included in the optimization plan as well. Think about the many ways in which you would search the internet if you were looking for a Tea Party group or event in your area. Phrases like “tea party group near Emory Texas”, “tea party in Rains County”, and “tea party meetings (in your area)” come to mind. With one or two keyword phrases to be included in your SEO plan per page, we then move on to optimizing a page for those phrases.
The key elements for optimizing a page are the head tags (including page title, description, and keywords), the heading tags (h1, h2, etc.), items in bold font, your image names and alt tags, link text, and of course your page content. Each page should have a unique page title, description, and keywords located between the <head> and </head> tags in your page code. It is best to include your keyword phrase as close to the front of each of these tags as possible, but your title and description must make sense for those searching for your site. Do not stuff your tags with an overabundance of keywords; this could actually hurt your search engine results. Include your keyword phrases in your section heading tags (h1, h2, etc.), but again, don’t overdo it. For your images, don’t simple name them 123 or abc, but give them actual names like “lake_fork_tea_party.jpg” and include your keyword phrase in the image alt tags as well. This will not only help raise your keyword relevance for that page, it will also help drive traffic to your site from those performing “image searches” on the internet. Link text on the page is also important. For example, you could link a particular page to a related page(s) that includes your keyword phrase or you might use a bullet list on the top of your page with each bullet item linked to a named anchor section on your page. Finally, we get to the king – page content.
Your keyword phrase should be used multiple times throughout your page content; and once again, don’t overdo it (roughly 5 to 8 times on a 750 word page). The first paragraph on your page could include your keyword phrase multiple times (2 or 3), but your content has to make sense to your readers. Also include your keyword phrase in the middle and at the end of your page. Your page content should flow and be designed with your readers in mind. Now that you have developed and optimized your page, surfers still need to find your page on the internet.
Promoting your new group on the internet is a multifaceted and sometimes boring task, but is necessary if you want to be found. There are countless ways to promote your site on the internet, but for the sake of time, we'll touch on only a few. Google and Bing love inbound links to your site. Therefore, you might think about exchanging links with other Tea Party groups and other closely related sites. Add your group to Tea Party group listings like the TeaPartyPatriots.org. Link building is a long and arduous task, but will increase your PageRank on Google if done effectively. You might also submit articles with info and a link to your site included in the “about the author” section. Build a FaceBook page for your group and set up a YouTube channel making sure to include links to your site in your video descriptions. Readers as well as search engines love fresh content, so update your site regularly.
These are all white-hat techniques that will help you build and promote your new website. If you follow these guidelines, the web traffic will surely follow. Good luck with your new site and with getting out the message of the Tea Party Movement; we WILL remember in November!
About the Author - Michael Kinzie is the organizer and web developer for the Lake Fork Tea Party Patriots.
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