The following steps are the fundamental
rules to help you build or improve your website to attain quality SEO
(search engine optimization). Your top priorities should be ; Content,
Title, Description and Keywords, which are known as the meta tags
followed by selecting the right Domain name and Back Links.
The bells, whistles and fancy graphics in building a good website come
last! The reason for this is very simple. A search engine seeks to
place informative style websites in the top listing. This means, to
get a good search engine index a website should contain the
information/content that a person conducting a search will find as
quickly as possible. When a search engine sends out it's robot/crawler
to scan your website to calculate if your website contains what people
browsing the web are looking for- it pays no attention to the
bells,videos, whistles and graphics but rather the information/content,
title, description, keywords, domain name and back links. These are the
key factors you must follow in learning how to build a good website that
will lead to top search engine placement.
Meta tags: Meta tags are a websites Keywords, Title and Description). Meta tags are
only visible to the search engines and will not be visible to your
visitors. They should be typed into the properties section of your
website. If you want to check out the meta tags in someone else's
website, you should double right click your mouse on that particular
site and then click onto the word :"Source" the meta tags will then
show up. Your meta tags are very important in that when a search engine
sends out it's robots to crawl/scan your website, it will read the meta
tags to calculate if the information it reads provides a good
description as to what your website is all about. The information it
gathers must correlate with the content within the website. If all is
well, your website should get a good search engine placement.
Domain names:
Selecting the right domain name is one of the very important factors
in getting top search engine placement and more free traffic to your
website. This lesson will give you some helpful insight on selecting a
domain name that will help you achieve a top search engine listing!
Many people in the website industry will advise you to get a short
domain name under seven letters long. The fact of the matter is; this
is nearly impossible to do today due to the fact that ninety nine point
nine percent of all the good domain names under seven letters are
already registered. If you really need to have a short domain name and
don't have luck with finding one through registries - you can check
auction style domain resellers like Sedo and Snap names to locate some
very good under seven letters domain names. You will probably pay a
little more, but you may find just the right one for your website.
When the world wide web first started years ago there were many short
domain names available, but for today if you can't find just what you're
looking for I would suggest the following: Take the extra effort to select a domain name that describes what your website or service is all about. Focus on phrases that are highly searchable.
My example is this; Let's go with the idea that your website is about
dog training. Most people will select a domain with their own name
included or a phrase they may like such as; Little puppies center or
Tom's dog training school, ... The point is, unless you are well known,
no one is going to do a Google search for "Tom's dog training school".
It would be much better to select a domain name that is made up from words and phrases
people normally use when searching for your type of product or service
on the web. For example; let's say that you live in the state of
Rhode Island I would try to find a domain like (RI dog training
schools). The end result will be that your website will attain a top
index placement due to the fact that when someone is searching for dog
training schools they will more than likely use a phrase as the one
mentioned rather than "Tom's' dog training school".
Content : How
to make the best content for your website. I would suggest that you
make up your website content with about one hundred and fifty to two
hundred words of content per page describing what your website is all
about. Some people believe that more content is acceptable. This is
fine by me as long as you make sure that the keywords and keyword
phrases you have selected are within the website content two to three
times. Your content should have a nice flow to it and tell a good story
as to what your website is all about. Basically it must give the
reader an easy and informative understanding as to the services or
products you are offering. It is also very important that you make sure
that the visitor knows where to go next after reading your websites
content. The main lesson here is that your content must flow naturally,
give the reader a good understanding of what you are offering and have
your keywords and keyword phrases within the content two to three times.
Building your meta tags; If you follow the example I have mentioned regarding domain name selection, make sure to use the domain name as the title. This
will definitely put your website in a better position when push comes
to shove for search engine placement. Next, you should make a description
for your website. This should be a phrase that provides the best
description you can as to what your website is all about. This
description should make people want to visit your website. The
description usually shows up under the title when someone conducts a
search for a product or service. The description should answer what the
person is looking for. I would strongly suggest that the description
phrase should include your main keywords as well as the title. Keywords: Try
to include about twelve keywords that best describe what you website is
all about. Your keywords should include your domain name, your title
and words or phrases that people will generally search for when seeking
to find your type of business.
I know that this can take some
thought and good writing skills to do because the description must flow
properly. If you follow this rule you will greatly improve your meta
tag rating as a whole. Proper meta tags are one of the most important factors in getting your website top index into search engine
Back links:
How back links work. Back links play an important role in helping your
website find a good index into the search engines. How this works is
very simple. Trading back links with a website that has similar but not
competing venues means that the person who finds your website will have
a connection to other information pertaining to the same venue they are
seeking. For example; let's say that you have a website that provides
helpful information on how to fix cars and someone else has a website
that sells auto parts. Even though both websites are in the auto
industry they are not competing because each website is not offering the
same services. So if you trade links with each other, the search
engine robot will find this and see that your linked websites are
providing more precise and informative information to the end user. So
the point is; If you trade links with a website offering products or
services that are similar in nature the search engine will take note of
this and give you a better index. I would strongly suggest that you
stick to the rule of only trading back links with other websites that
offer similar venues as yours and keep the linking down to under seven.
You must remember that it is not quantity of back links but quality. I
would stay clear of the - buy 100 back links for ten dollars offers.
The search engine robots may find this as spam and reject your website
all together.
Color, font, graphics:
The general rule is that you want your website visitors to be able to
read, follow and understand everything in an easy to understand pleasant
format. As far as colors go, I would suggest that you stay with the
blue tones, white tones and green tones. For most people these colors
are considered comfortable to the eye. You can experiment with the
different shades of the above mentioned so as to find the shades that
blend together well for your particular website. You want visitors to
stay focused on your message without being distracted by an assortment
of wild colors. Keep it simple and you will be safe. Regarding fonts, I
would stay with the most common ones which are; Arial, Georgia,
Courier New and Verdana. I would suggest that you also try to stay
away from making a lot of the bold text in that it tends to take away
from the natural flow of your content. Bold is fine for headers but try
to keep it to a limit. Regarding graphics - keep it low. The reason for
this is that if you put larger size graphics into your web pages it
takes longer for the page to download. Which means potential customers
will get frustrated and go on to the next website. In the internet world
you are dealing with potential customers from all over the world. In
many countries people do not upgrade their computers as fast as the more
modern countries. The point is, the older style computers do not
download graphics as fast as the newer computers. So, keep your
graphics low and make sure that any photos are thumb nail size for fast
download. In today's web design world a lot of attention is being paid
to graphics/videos. Because there is so much design technology
available, many web designers are placing a great deal of attention on
the bells and whistles aspect of websites and not paying attention to
the marketing venues. You may have the most beautiful website with all
the bells and whistles but the fact of the matter is; The bells and
whistles will not get you top search engine listing which means free
traffic. In fact, the over doing of bells and whistles will more than
likely put your website on page two million! The search engine robots
who decide your websites placement within their search engine are mainly
focused on your website content, back links and meta tags which are the
keywords, title and description. The top search engine in the world -
Google will tell you the very same points I am trying to get across
within the pages of this website and worth repeating is: To attract more
website visitors and attain a better search engine listing you must
follow the rules of good content, good back links and meta tags which
are your keywords, title and description.
PayPal Shopping cart E commerce: How
to get paid on line from your customers with Visa, Mastercard, Discover
card, American Express...There are many E commerce shopping cart venues
to select from when it comes to how you want your customers to pay you
after making a purchase on your website. PayPal is one that I use. I
have found that their system is very easy for both the website owner as
well as the customer. The PayPal system accepts payment from all the
major credit cards such as Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American
Express as well as allowing the transfer of money from one PayPal
account to another. Once payment is settled, the funds can stay in your
PayPal account or be transferred over to your bank account. The
merchant services are very easy to use and you don't need to be a
computer genius to get started. After you open an account at PayPal you
can log onto their site and find all the tools and information you will
need to set up a payment system on your website. The ability to make
Pay Now buttons is very easy to step through as is the whole merchant
service venue.
Website hosting: Once you have completed building your website it's time to publish it for the world to see. You
will now need a web hosting service. A web hosting service is an
Internet hosting company that provides service that allows individuals
and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World
Wide Web. In simple terms; You need a web hosting company to publish
your website onto the internet. The scope of hosting services varies
widely. The most basic is web page and small-scale file hosting, where
files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a Web
interface. The files are usually delivered to the Web "as is" or with
little processing. Many Internet service providers (ISPs) offer this
service free to their subscribers. The website hosting company may also
provide an interface or control panel for managing the Web server and
installing scripts as well as other services like e-mail. For web
hosting services I have always used namecheap.com for my web hosting needs.
The services are reliable, easy to use, very reasonably priced and the
customer service is very helpful.
