Create,
Maintain and Validate a Website
Richard Langley
Introduction
This website is developed as part of a TAFE project. One of the main purposes is to create a site which will be effectively indexed by the most common and strategic search engines and the aim is to be well placed in their searches.
The following report will include proposed design changes and modifications to the site, followed by a statistical analysis of the preliminary prototype that was uploaded in July 2003.
The Design Process
The first stage in designing for Search Engine Optimisation is to decide
on the keywords. The ones that have been currently listed in the home
pages meta tags are "Langley Music Tuition, richardjlangley, music
tuition, guitar, violin, Kingscliff Tafe,".
The keywords had several musical references because I initially assumed the site would have a large musical content. To observe how the site is progressing in the search engines a keyword was chosen that had a relatively few "hits". This was so that the entry of the site into the search results could be easily noticed and monitored. The words, Langley “Music teaching” came up with 38 results in July 2003.
The revised site will include the word “TAFE, Web Design, Web development and RJL Web Development” as I plan to maintain the site as a portfolio of the work completed this year at Kingscliff Campus.
Part of the Design Plan is to incorporate the keywords in the titles, document titles, metatags (keywords and description), at top of page in h1 tags, folder titles, body text, and linked text where practical.
In the body text there is to be a paragraph of 200 to 300 words including the keywords for no more than 8% of the text.(Refer "About This Site" page)
The code is to comply with xhtml coding conventions as much as possible and to be checked on Validator.w3.org.
After the site has been loaded links are to be established to sites ranking high in the search engines. Entries will be made in the guest books of appropriate sites and forums on education and music can be joined.
To validate this strategy
I intend to monitor the search engines and check the site statistics.
On the preliminary site I observed the following statistics and visitor
profiles;
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The Page Views Report indicates that August 2003 was the month with the highest viewings followed by September. |
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Time Frame for Indexing
With the modification of the site I expect the time frame may be sightly extended before my site is indexed on the search engines. I expect the preliminary site to appear within the next few days as many of the other students are beginning to be indexed and the sites have links to each other.
It is uncertain why the preliminary site has not appeared yet although many of the proposals outlined in above design plan have yet to be implemented. Because the site has been in the conceptual stage for some time and the content of the site was still being formulated, the keywords have not been relevant to the site and therefore not prolific enough.