October 31, 2006 
If you use optimized website templates, your life as a website owner or webmaster becomes easy, because of the reduced time you'll need to spend on maintenance and because of the higher rankings for your websites!
I know, it's not the first time I mention website templates. But there's a good reason to do this again
Very often, while browsing forums, I see requests for a website critique.
When I occasionally take a look, I'm still surprised how bad these web sites are constructed.
Poor HTML, lots of redundant coding, poor navigation, bad anchors, no optimization and loads of coding in front of the most important part of the site: the content.
The same applies to almost every sales page of products that come with resell rights.
Yes, these pages are build to sell, but for the same money and effort you can reach much higher rankings in the search engines.
That's why I devote this newsletter issue to optimized website templates that
- rank higher
- take less maintenance time.
Read on. Get a life.
Enjoy!
Case
Optimized Website Templates Make Your Life Easier
Life as a website owner will be so much easier when you use optimized website templates that score high in the search engines and take a minimum of time in maintenance.Because these two features will turn into great benefits: more traffic (and sales if your sales page is good) and an abundance of time left for other interesting activities!
So why aren't many people using optimized website templates?
I guess the answer is, that it takes a lot of time before you know exactly how to create one. Because you have to know a a couple of things about web design, HTML, CSS and a bit of somewhat 'technical' stuff.
You see, all of your pages should focus on a keyword or keyphrase (more than one keyword) that is closely related to your website theme.
To do so, you have emphasize the most important element in your pages, the content. That means, that your content has to be as close to the top of the page as possible. That makes it easy for search engines to spider your content and index it well.
The only thing separating it from the top are the Meta Tags. These are not that important anymore, except for the Title-tag, but I always use the Description and the Keyword tags. First, because the 'Description'-tag can be used by the search engines in their result pages (SERP's) and second, because you never know if SE's won't change the rules again.
Many people struggle with good coding to get their content close to the top. If you look at the page source, you'll see a lot of garbage put in front of the content. That's definitely not the way to do it.
Also, you'll often find table after table, font after font and color after color before the content can be found. Very often such coding leads to a lot of errors like misplaced or switched end tags (e.g. <font><b>-content-</font></b>).
Ah ah, wrong again. We want to avoid redundant information and we absolutely want to avoid errors, because that will be taken into account too by the search engines when they rank your website.
Nice, clean and crisp coding makes it a lot easier for the SE spiders to discover what your page is all about and how that relates to your website theme. Because that's what the search engines are looking for: closely related high-value content.
There are great tools available to check your coding and find errors. Some of them let you test 'on-the-fly', as you are looking at your website! Also they allow you to validate the HTML of every page of your web site.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an outstanding resource!
You can completely avoid having table-, font- and color-coding by using CSS, Cascading Style Sheets. That's a separate file where you put all the lay-out items in. You call that file from within the Meta-tags. But the browser (and the search engines) will only see some crisp coding and lots and lots of content!
That's exactly what they are looking for.
Search the web for CSS tutorials and learn it. Again, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has tons of information.
Then create your own standard CSS files. Yes, it takes time, but it's worth while.
Then there's these website elements that are always the same on every page. That is, they better should be, otherwise the lay-out of your website wouldn't be consistent and visually appealing to website visitors.
Such elements are headers, navigation menu and footers. Why code that on every page, while you could easily put them in separate files that you include at the exact spot where you need them? A great, optimized website template will accomplish just that.
You can achieve that by implementing Server Side Includes, but it can also be done with little bit of PHP. Nothing technical, just one very short line of coding.
And don't be afraid to change your page extension from .html to .php, because that's all there is to it.
So, yes, creating an optimized website template takes time, because you have to:
- prepare your web design very well,
- have to learn to write flawless HTML,
- have to study and implement proper CSS,
- have to include files for frequently used website parts.
If you don't feel like putting so much time in developing a great website template, then maybe the new Ace Website Template is for you. It comes with all the elements mentioned in this article, usefull resources, a great instruction guide (pdf), a sitemap generator and some extra bonuses.
But whatever you decide, I suggest you start using a well structured, optimized website template. It saves time and generates more free traffic!
Wishing you success,
P.S.
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