This post talks about applying search engine optimization strategies to web pages, while working in parallel with a content designer.

Recently I was contacted by web designer who built QuoteACopier.com.  The owners of the site want to increase awareness about their services for providing pricing information and advice to buyers of digital copiers.  The website wasn't coming up anywhere in search results and they asked me to take a look at the site to see what could be done to improve search engine page rank.

The company provides good information, but they typically deliver this information on the phone.  In order for search engines to be aware of the value they offer customers, this content needs to be brought to the web.  As always, the golden rule of building optimized web pages is to make specific pages that provide valuable information to the people who are looking for it.

There were two challenges:  To improve search engine visibility, and to organize the site in such a way that the work to optimize the page is separate from the design of the page, so that the design could easily be changed with minimal impact to the optimization work.

The website was built using ASP (not ASP.NET).  To separate the design from the optimization, we created a template and used ASP server side includes.  We also made a piece of code to read content from .htm files and insert that content at the right places.  This allowed us to make one page that had layout in the right places, and the content in separate .htm files.  That makes it easy for the designer to use any tools to work on the HTML, and the SEO analyst to design the structure of the page.

The template has a header section, title section, and body section.  The header section contains a place holder for meta keywords and meta description tags.

Once the template was made, we made one page for each phrase that the customer wanted to match a customer search.  For example, if the customer enters 'prices on copiers', the customer would land on the prices on copiers page of the QuoteACopier.com site.  The template places the content elements of the page in the intended places, and allows designers to work in parallel.