Promoting Your WebSite

Build a Quality Site

Building a first rate site is the absolute key, the starting point in website promotion. If you haven't got something solid to offer, no one will be interested in your site. There is no point in working at link exchanges and spending money on PPC campaigns if your site is poorly designed and lacks quality content. There is no doubt that surfers quickly leave sites they can't figure out, sites with broken links, and/or sites with no content or worse, sites with misleading or false content. The good news is that building a quality site is within your reach as a webmaster. It just takes common sense, a little forethought and consistent effort. Here are some basic guidelines and tips to help you build a successful site: Build your site with passion. This has to be the most important tip for web design. If your are uninterested in the subject matter of your site, it will show. In fact, you might as well not even bother. It's like anything else. Success comes from passion first and foremost. Passion brings thought, inspiration and attention to your work. Pick a topic, cause or endeavor that truly interests you and devote your site to it. It's like anything else. If you're not interested in your site, chances are nobody else will be either. Write your own content. Integrity matters. There are some web promotion sites that advise paying professionals to write for you. Part of the logic behind this is that search engines rank well written sites highly. That may be true but I think it's a mistake. First of all, not everyone can afford professional writers. But second, and this relates to my first point, you should be able to produce quality content since you picked a topic which motivates you. Write your essays and run a spell check on them before you post them on your site. Have a friend proofread your pieces for you. You don't have to win an essay content. You just have to come up with reader friendly content. There are some sites with very good writing tips if you think you need some help. I recommend: How to Write a Five Paragraph Essay Tips for Good Writing by Judy Winn Tips for Good Writing by History Professor Richard F. Hirsh Google's "Good Writing" Content Filter by By: Joel Walsh Navigation Navigation Navigation. Your site has to be easy to navigate. Make very page reachable from at least one page which is accessible from every page on your site. Put easy to find and use navigation links to related content elsewhere on your site on every page. So if you have a PC Tips section, make every page of that section accessible from every page of that section. Create a site map or index from which every page is one or two clicks away. Break it down into sections if it is too big (more than a hundred links) but don't break it down to the point where users have to click through three or four subsections to get to the content they're looking for. Make your site searchable. Register with Google and add a Google sitemap Make sure the links on your site work. Search engines frown on sites with broken links. Check your links once a month or so. Write source code correctly. If you are new to web design, start out with basic HTML tutorials. I recommend: Lissa Explains it All Web Monkey Getting started with HTML by Dave Raggett Don't be intimidated. HTML is easier than you think. It starts coming naturally pretty quickly. Use correct punctuation, grammar and spelling. write long bodies of unbroken text. This kind of writing turns a lot of readers off. People like to know there is a break coming. We tend to scan articles. Try to keep your paragraphs to three, maybe four sentences. Add bulleted and numbered lists to long blocks of text and try to use them stylistically throughout your articles as a way of keeping the reader's interest. Use Headings and sub-headings to break up content areas into bite sized chunks for your readers Update your site as frequently as you can. Keep writing content related to the theme(s) of your website Let your visitors know you are accessible and willing to talk to them an answer questions or entertain suggestions they may have relating to your site. Put your contact info on every page Tell your visitors what your site is about by including a tag line along with your title Include a link to your home page on every page. Don't create pages and subdomains with content identical or very similar to each other. Don't bother putting a search engine box on your site. Most people ignore them. They use a browser toolbar or go to their favorite search engine page when they want to look for something. If you're going to include on audio file to your pages when they load then keep the volume low and the music tasteful. I can't stand it when I go to a website and I get clobbered by a loud (obnoxious) audio file. Keep your content areas free of distractions. Minimize your use of flashy banners and other video effects. Keep your content in one place. Repeat visitors to your site will encounter an unexpected delay in getting to the content they want on your site if you move it around on them. Unless it's absolutely necessary don't move your content to another place on your site. It's just an unnecessary inconvenience to your visitors. If you must relocate content then leave a link to its new location where it formerly was Google doesn't read text in images so don't use images to display important links and info on your site. Use text. If you can' format important content into HTML, use ALT tags. Link to only quality sites. Google doesn't judge you too harshly for poor sites linking to you, but it will penalize you for linking to low quality sites. Don't use someone's service if they want you to link back to them unless they have a GPR of 4 or more. That should weed out the less desirable links on your site. Don't use frames. Search engine spiders can't read them or have trouble reading them. They make printing the pages they're on problematic. Usually only one part of a framed page gets printed. Visitors can't bookmark framed pages. Only the frame gets bookmarked. The Internet Explorer "Find on this Page" word search only scans the frame and not the rest of the page. Employ honest web design practices. Do not: create pages which install trojans, virusses and other malware when people come to them put popup windows on your site. They're just another form of deceit and manipulation. Everybody hates them. Smart surfers aren't fooled by them. If you want to make money from your site then offer products and services straight up to your visitors. spam the search engines. This includes: putting content on your pages that relates only to the content you "advertise". Don't add words like "sex" "lottery" or other hook words if they have nothing to do with your content. In fact, don't include any unrelated words in your content setting up hidden redirects. Let your visitors move around your site and the internet for that matter, as they choose. "cloaking", a practice which attempts to trick search engines into indexing content on your site which is invisible only to the human eye yet visible to searchbots. The idea is to increase the site's ranking by fooling search engines into thinking you have popular content on your site which you really don't since no one but the bots sees it. Your page ranks higher than it should and, as a result, you get more traffic. the creation of doorway pages, decoy pages lacking real content which are crammed full of keywords designed to achieve high ranking with the search engines for one or two search terms. When a surfer lands on the page, they are redirected to the "real" website. Search engines will eventually catch you and penalize you for engaging in these deceitful practices. They will either decrease your ranking with them dramatically, putting you on page 40 of their related search results instead of page one or two, where an honest site would ordinarily be, or they will delist you altogether and you will become invisible to internet surfers forcing you to go through the reinclusion process. I've given you some basic tips for good web design here. There's a lot more to it and it really is worth the time to read up on just what goes in to building a good site. Take a look at these articles when you get the chance: ABCs of Building a Web Site A Web Design Tutorial for Rank Beginners Usability: The Key to Good Website Design It's written for Dreamweaver users but still has a lot of good tips for everyone How can I create a Google-friendly site? 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