Mmmm! Sounds good to me! But what exactly has this to do with website design? Well, nothing. Except that part of website design is getting pages listed in search engines, and this page is an experiment to see how it works. You'll notice that the page title is "Omaha Steaks" and the page filename itself is omaha-steaks.html, so the entire url is http://www.whiteoakdesign.com/omaha-steaks.html. Well, that's a good start. Search engines naturally favor pages that contain the search keywords or phrase – even more so when the keywords are in the title and url. It makes sense, really, because if the owner of the site dedicates a page to a product or subject, the chances are that the page is going to feature some pretty good, highly relevant content.
Here's some more of that lovely food to drool over: "The ultimate cookout steak also makes the ultimate gift! Our Boneless Strips are cut from the heart of the loin so they're a firm, well-marbled steak that's full of bold, beefy flavor. So make your grill sizzle with an Omaha Steaks Boneless Strip. An 11 oz. Boneless Strip is approximately 1 1/8 inch thick."
It's important to use the keywords throughout the page too, and not just in the title and filename. And it's well worthwhile adding the same keywords, or variations of, to link anchor text and images. Notice how I have images on this page (shamelessly pilfered from Omaha Steaks' website) along with their text, and each image is a link. Not only that but I've used the image ALT attribute; if you're an Internet Explorer user you can run your mouse over the image and some text will appear. This is the explanatory text that shows if, for some reason, the image fails to load.
As I write this page I don't really know how it will fare in search engines. In my experience I've had pages show up fairly quickly for my desired keywords, and in quite a few cases with high listings. For instance, when I added the page Chickamauga Web Design, suddenly my site started showing in the top five at Google for the search term "chickamauga web design" or variations of. It depends on the competition as well, though. I created a similar page for Chattanooga Web Design and, while this definitely boosted my rank for that search term, I don't enjoy quite such high listings because there are more web designers in the Chattanooga area.
Similarly, while I might think this page is fairly well optimized, I don't yet know how well it will do in the listings war. There's a lot of competition out there! But I will keep an eye on it and mark my progress here. This page was created on October 31, 2006.
What if someone looks for Omaha Stakes?
It might be worth mentioning at this point that many people misspell words. For instance, instead of searching for omaha steaks someone might search for omaha stakes. While it's fairly easy to include variations of keywords and phrases, such as "web site design" and "website design," it's a little harder to naturally include misspellings in your text unless you do what I'm doing here – make a point of mentioning the misspellings for what they are! Who knows, perhaps now I'll catch some visits from those who can't spell. But that's fine, as long as they know how to spend money on stakes, right?
So, to finish up, let's have a few more choice words from our test subject: "Omaha Steaks is located right in the heart of beef country where conditions are ideal for raising the highest quality cattle. Midwestern, grain-feeding gives our beef superior marbling which makes it the most tender, tasty beef anywhere. Choose from premium quality steaks, luscious beef roasts and gourmet beef entrees."
Updates on search results
A few days after creating this page, my site was crawled as normal and the link to this Omaha Steaks page was "noticed" at the foot of the home page. I'd searched each day for "omaha steaks site:whiteoakdesign.com" to restrict searches to pages of my site only, and suddenly my home page appeared. So now Google has found the link to this new page. The question is, how long before the new page is included in searches?
About two weeks into this test, around November 14, my Omaha Steaks page finally got indexed. Again I'd been searching "omaha steaks site:whiteoakdesign.com" each day, and suddenly omaha-steaks.html popped up. Armed with the knowledge that the page is now included in the Google listings, I typed in "omaha steaks" and started through the listings page by page. And there it is, on page nine. So just two weeks after uploading the page, it's now on page nine of Google. Not much good, but a start!
It's now November 19 and my listing has moved up to page eight. I haven't linked to the page from any other source yet, because I want to see what happens a step at a time. Moving from page nine to eight is not a very exciting improvement, but it is an improvement all the same, and for no apparent reason. Let's wait a little longer – say to the end of November, and then I'll try linking to the page from other external sources. (Incidentally, a search on the misspelling "omaha stakes" puts me at number two on page one, and all because of my paragraph about the misspelling.)
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