I am working on a redesign of my primary business website. I want to achieve at least 2 goals which I frequently help my clients with, goals that like the cobbler who's children have no shoes I have not achieved for myself.
- I want to make the site more sematically correct. More than just stuff like menus should be lists, not just <span>s in <divs> information should be simple and easy to navigate. Heading tags should be nested in ways that would make sense to my highschool composition teacher, rest her soul.
- I want to focus more on the RIGHT keywords, and make sure that search engines correctly interpret what my site has to offer searchers. Of course, I will have to figure out what those are.
The site I have now does OK in terms of page rank, and the keywords that most search engines calculate are acceptable, and the XHTML and CSS validates OK most of the time too. I wouldn't mind it if the site looked a bit cooler while I am at it.
Oh, and one other thing... it is going to be entirely MT powered.
Here are a few links to pages I have reviewed recently to research this project.
- http://www.bradchoate.com/weblog/2003/07/15/movable-type Brad Choates article on using individual entries as the whole basis for the site. I agree with Brad that tempaltes are not a good place to put actual content. For one thing, the mt-search.cgi doesn't look at templates, it only reads the DB and the results link to <$MTEntryPermalink$>
- http://www.brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/07/15/creating_an_entire_site_with_movable_type/ From Shirley E Kaiser, more information like Brads, with good linkage to still more like that.
- http://www.richardsramblings.com/archives/2004/10/001662.html is a link to Richard D. LeCour's MT Plug-in "Keywords.pl" Which reads the database for all the main parts of an entry and then performs a simple calcuation of keywords and keyword pairs.
- http://www.googlerankings.com/ This site allows you to research how Googles sees and ranks your pages for free, and also offer some commercial services in this arena. They are not affiliated in any way with Google.
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