Some websites can save lives. If even one teenager learns about the dangers of texting while driving from an educational website, the effort to create and put up the site is well worth it. A texting-awareness website can provide startling statistics, wrenching life stories, and grizzly accident photos to help make its point. But in order to be effective, search engines must list your site early on its results pages – page one is the best placement. That’s because many people never look beyond page one’s search results. So, you need a good website that is highly ranked for searching. Here are three requirements:
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Design – Your website should be designed to attract and keep a visitors attention. The layout and graphics are very important. Many people choose to implement a WordPress website because of the great range of themes available, often for free. These themes give your website a custom, polished look without a lot of design work on your part. Care must be taken to structure the menus and content so that each page on the site reinforces your message and cross-links to other pertinent pages. If you are unsure how to proceed, you can hire a professional webmaster to take care of all the details.
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Content – You are addressing a serious topic – the dangers of texting while driving – so you should be serious about your content. It need not only be factual and persuasive, it must also be written grammatically, with good English usage, spelling and punctuation. Nothing turns off visitors faster than sloppy content. Invest the time to do an excellent job, or alternatively hire a freelance writer to do it for you. Make sure the content is laden with the search keywords by which you want to be found. You want each page to make its own point without fluff or waste. Use short snappy sentences whenever possible.
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Search Engine Optimization – SEO techniques improve the Page Rank of your website, moving it further to the front within search engine results pages. One important technique is backlinking. That is when another site creates a hypertext link to your site. This can be valuable if the backlinking site is authoritative (i.e., has a high Page Rank) and covers a topic similar to yours. The more the two sites have in common, the more valuable is the backlink. You can check backlinks using an Internet tool to display who is linking to your website. The tool should report the Page Rank and other valuable information about each linking site.
Follow these three steps, and you can be sure your texting-awareness website will have the impact you desire.