When planning a website your web pages should be relevant to your business or organisation and should be information rich, (i.e. try to avoid writing for the sake of writing) make it interesting, factual and accurate.
Writing information rich content pages can value for different reasons.
- To supply interesting and helpful information.
- To add relevant content to help with search engine optimisation (SEO),
- To try to supply good content for customers to bookmark or link to
- To show that you understand the market in which you operate
- To create a more connective and personal side to your company
If your website has a lot of content pages it might be advisable to hide them from your navigation menu to enable your visitors a more intuitive experience. A site map is often a suitable location for links to webpages such as these. (A site map is a link for your customers to see every web page on your website.) Your website should not have more than 100 links per sitemap page, if you have more than 100 web pages we suggest you split the list over more than one page.
Having a keyword rich website is great for SEO (Search engine optimisation) however it's important to view yourself as your potential target market. Try to use keywords that reflect what you expect your target market to search for (specifically), there is no point putting great keywords in the meta tags when they are not included in the content. Meta tags and alt tags, should be descriptive and relevant to the content of the web page. Meta titles should ideally reflect what the web page is about . The meta description should be a brief description of the page, the meta description of this page is, "planning website content to optimise your websites performance"
It's worth considering that one of the primary functions of alt tags, is to allow the visually impaired to use text recognition software that reads the content of the tags and relays the text, by voice, to the user, therefore your alt tags should accurately represent either the function of a link or a description of an image. For example "click here to go to X page", "image of A and B in operation" or even both; "image of A and B in operation, click here to go to X" etc.
Whilst images can create a better look to a website, search engines cannot read what's written on an image. you need to weigh up the advantage of text against the functionality of images to gauge the best layout for your web site.
