M.I.C.A.
Are you ready to start your own website? If so, there are a few
things that you may want to know. We can show you how to completely
design and publish your website. We love spending time creating new
sites and think you will once you give it a try. We will provide all
of the resources you will ever need.
Design & Publishing
by James E. Clemens II
When it comes to designing a website, HTML is probably the easiest.
You can use the basic Notepad or WordPad included with Windows or
one of the dozens of tools available elsewhere. For someone new to
web pages, the biggest drawback of Notepad/WordPad is the “HTML
tags” not being in color. But after you get used to writing HTML,
will not need the color coding. One of the advantages of using these
tools would be the smaller footprint of your code. Many of the
aftermarket programs add bloat (hundreds of unnecessarily lines of
code) to your code. This can have a negative effect on your website,
when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). When you write
raw HTML code, you control everything.
If you are not ready to tackle HTML, there are some tools to help
you. Microsoft FrontPage 2002 or 2003 are perfect choices. I do not
recommend the use of earlier versions FrontPage, as it will add a
lot of bloat to your page. After testing the 2002 version against
Notepad (cleanest form of raw code), there were very few
differences. FrontPage will cost around $100.00, but it is worth the
money. I prefer FrontPage over Fusion, but then again, I prefer
Microsoft’s programs over most of the other stuff out there.
If you do not want to invest that amount of money at this time, try
NetObject’s Fusion 7. As a freeware program, it will work much the
same way as FrontPage. You can use pre-built templates or start from
scratch with a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) format. You
can add Java or Flash with a click of your mouse. Both FrontPage &
Fusion will create high quality, professional websites with ease.
Once you have designed your site, you will need to publish it and
upload the contents to your server. Both programs include FTP as
well as other ways to upload your content.
The internet has thousands of sites dedicated to helping you build a
perfect website. The only problem is finding respected resources
that are there to help you and not themselves, through unethical
practices. After considering this fact, we compiled a Resource Room
to guide you to some places we feel will take care of your needs.
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Search Engine Optimization
by James E. Clemens II
Most of your traffic will come from search engines. The performance
of your site will affect your relationship with the major search
engines. You will want to create a site that the search engines
like.
There are dozens of companies that ask for payment, promising to
give your site a high page ranking. This is something that they
truly cannot do. It will cost you time, money and worse yet,
possibly very low page rankings. When you pay, they will auto-submit
your site to dozens of search engines. This will affect you in a
negative way because the search engines consider this a spamming
technique. It can get you blocked from being listed at all.
Another trick they will use to try and boost your status is to list
your site on several link page sites or harvest sites. This will
give you very low status with the search engines. When you are
listed on a page with lots of other websites, without quality
content written about your site, search engines ignore you or give
you an un-credible status. This type of marketing will hurt you in a
big way.
If you market wall clocks, your site would not really “fit” on a
site about auto parts, as far as search engines are concerned. So
they give this link a very low score. If, however, your site is
listed on the “official wall clock union” site that only lists other
clock makers, you will get a higher score. The higher the score, the
higher the rank your site will have. So, link exchanging could be
good for your site or it could cause you a lot of problems.
Without paying for listings and advertisements, getting a high
ranking with search engines can take awhile. Still, paying for a
high ranking is not advisable unless you have lots of money. When
you stop paying, your site will lose all of the ranking score and
you will be back to square one.
I recommend that you submit your site yourself. Do not submit it
until you have it complete. Only submit it once to the same engine
in any three day period. Never submit a site that is ‘under
construction’ or has lots of errors. After it is submitted, it will
be indexed, or crawled, by the search engine. The time it takes
depends on the engine.
Once your site has been indexed by a search engine, it will be
listed on their directory/search page. When they index/crawl your
site, they read your code, without looking at your actual site. They
do not see images, Flash or your fancy graphics; they only read the
content and links. The higher the quality of links you have, the
better. And the more links that are attached to larger articles, the
better. If you have twenty links listed down a page with no words,
you will not get a preferable rating from the engine.
This is where “Meta Tags” and clean code comes into play. Do not add
Java or Flash at the top or bottom of your site, as this can cause
problems for the search engines. But do give them the keywords, site
description, and title Meta Tags. Put these at the top of your page
away from Java scripts and Flash. If you must use Java, build
yourself a site map from raw code only.
Your “keywords” Meta Tag will be one of the big things to consider.
When someone goes to MSN or Google and types your exact site name
and it shows up, it simply means that you have been indexed or
crawled. This is great news but not the only thing you want to
achieve. If you are a clock maker, you will want your site to be
listed when someone types in “quality wall clocks” or something to
that effect. This is where new traffic will come from and this is
what your “Keywords” Meta Tag will do for you. You will want your
keywords to come from the content that is on that page. And do not
repeat them over and over. All of the information that is put into
your Meta Tags should come from the content that is written on that
particular page of your website. When you have “Tags" that have no
relation to your content, they are considered un-credible by the
engines. Sometimes they can get you flagged as a bogus or scam site.
After talking about these basic things to consider, I want to
mention the fact that the most important thing for you to do is
write quality, original, credible content that is grammatically
correct and in a professional writing style. This is the only way to
boost traffic and rankings with the search engines and your
visitors. Educate and inform them, without focusing too much on
entertaining them. Make sure the search engines know about you and
then focus on your content.
Good luck with your site; check back with us from time to time to
pick up more tips about website development, computer maintenance,
and the big bad malware that is trying to get us all!
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