Search Engine Optimization Book
Thursday, April 17th, 2008You may feel that we’re not quite to the point in this website building blog to get into SEO, search engine optimization, but it’s actually the perfect time. Rather than developing a site and finding out that your page structure, page naming, meta tags, content, etc should be different it’s best to know what to expect so that as you build your site you can do it right the first time.
In my opinion the best book for SEO is SEO Book. This is the most complete source for optimizing your website for search engines. Aaron Wall, the author, has taken the time to write an entire book on SEO and has done a fantastic job. Realizing that you’re new to website building I would strongly suggest that you spend the $79 for this book as it starts from scratch and build from there.
The great thing is that he tests his theories on his own personal sites and has developed the book based on his results. The great thing is that once you’ve purchased the book he offers a huge selection of free SEO tools to help you with your search engine rankings.
Here’s my personal case study that had me floored. I run the website SteakBrands.com and used to rank very well for my top keywords. Well slowly I started to slide down the top 10 until I was nowhere to be found. I purchased SEO Book and read it cover to cover even though certain parts were very basic. I then registered SteakBrandingIrons.com and built the site based on the information that he suggested.
Well, since I published the new website based on Mr. Wall’s recommendations, I rank in the top 5 of majority of my top keywords as well as number 1 for a ton of other keywords related to steak branding irons. His suggestions took some time to put in place and were very time consuming but in the end I achieved the search engine rankings that I expected.
With all of this said, I wouldn’t refer you to a product that I didn’t stand behind and this is definitely one that I would suggest. Also, Mr. Wall has a blog that he updates just about every day that has great tips for SEO.
My suggestion is to take a look at the SEO Book site and the testimonials. You’ll be very happy that you did!
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
CEO/Founder - www.WebsiteSpot.com
What’s That Digg Button On Your Blog?
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
One question that I’ve received on numerous occasions is “What is Digg?” and “What’s that Digg button on your blog?”. I figured I’d leave a quick post to explain it as best as possible. There are going to be those who disagree with my explanation but this is how I see Digg.
According to Wikipedia.org, Digg is a community-based news article popularity website. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system.
Basically Digg is a news site in which the tops results are based on the number of times an article is ‘dugg’. The more ‘diggs’ an article, image, or blog entry receives, the better the results. Now with that said, they are changing their algorithm to fight some of the ’spamming’ methods that have arose but the concept is still the same.
The great thing about Digg is that I find articles, videos, blog posts, etc that I would have never found if I didn’t view Digg. It’s like having my very own research team for interesting news. Creating an account with Digg is FREE and takes about 2 minutes. With that said, you can register for a Digg account by clicking here. Then you can ‘digg’ articles that you find helpful, interesting or even funny.
Plus once you’re logged in all you need to do is click on the ‘Digg’ button and the article is ‘dugg’. You don’t need to login or visit the Digg website every time you ‘digg’ an article. I really think it’s something that you would enjoy when you every have a moment to just surf for the latest news on a site other than the major news websites.
Now, how is Digg going to help your website? The amount of traffic to Digg is enormous and submitting your articles, blog posts, etc to Digg will definitely generate traffic to your website. The only thing is that your submissions need to be something interesting or your submissions won’t get ‘dug’ which won’t improve your ranking within Digg.
Well, I hope this helps a bit, you can read more detailed information on the Digg About Us page. Lastly, I always welcome you to ‘digg’ blog posts that I leave if you find them helpful or if you just feel that they could be helpful to someone else.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
CEO/Founder - www.WebsiteSpot.com
How To Make A Website Without Knowing HTML
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008I’ve spent the last 5 posts explaining how to make a website, basically from scratch. Well I wanted to spend 1 post on how to build a website using an online website builder.
For those are unfamilar with an online website builder, it’s an online application that will allow you to build a website without needing to purchase software that needs to be loaded on your computer. You simply visit the login page and everything is there ready for you to make updates from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection.
This is ideal for those who just want to put up an informational site with some text, photos & images related to their business without having to learn all of the HTML involved with building a website we offer Website Tonight.
Online Website Builder Demo:
URL: login.websitespot.com
Username: wssdemo
Password: Wsspassword1
Popular Online Website Builder Features:
1. Step by step setup
2. No HTML needed
3. 100+ Templates
4. Video & Audio Uploads
5. Easily publish changes
6. Click Here For A Complete List Of Features
This will allow you to login and see exactly how easy it is to change templates add images & text as well as publish your website. Once you’ve made some changes & published them you can view your changes at www.WebsiteSpotDemo.com.
The great thing is that you can update the template that you choose at any time and we offer upwards of 100+ templates to choose from. It’s definitely an option for building a website without the struggles of developing a website from scratch.
Another great thing is the built in HTML modules that will allow you to customize your site with HTML if you happen to need to insert HTML code or you’d like to have more control over the look of your site. You won’t find this flexibility with a lot of online website builders so please be sure to take a look at this when you’re testing out our demo.
Please contact me with any questions because I think that once you’ve had a chance to try the demo that you’ll love the online website builder.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteSpot.com
Make A Website - Reciprocal Links And Meta Tags
Monday, April 14th, 2008As the final part of my 10 step guide on How To Make A Website I’m going to cover a couple of SEO techniques. I definitely need to point out that these 10 steps are by no means the only steps to building an effective website but it’s a nice start. Also, the two steps that I cover in regards to SEO are just a taste of what you’re going to learn.
Search engines are always changing and the competition is becoming more informed so it’s important to visit sites that are dedicated to the subject of search engine optimization. By far, my favorite site in regards to keeping up with the latest search engine trends & releases is definitely SEO Book.
Tip 9: Reciprocal Linking Campaigns
I’m going to write a couple of in-depth posts on linking in the near future but I wanted to at least give you a heads up to again at least let you know that it exists and to get you thinking about it. Reciprocal links are links to another website placed on your site in exchange for links back to your site from theirs. This is a very important method of building link popularity which is an instrumental part of getting high search engine rankings.
It’s actually very simply to do but there are certain things to think about. Basically you come up with an agreement with the webmaster of a website related to your topic and you place a link of your website to their website and in exchange the webmaster places a link back to you.
The most important aspect of reciprocal links is the ‘anchor text’ that’s used to link back to you. For example, you have a website name ChromeWheels.com, you would want the anchor text from the other website to use the anchor text of chrome wheels in the link back to your site. It would appear similar to this: Chrome Wheels. The code would appear something like this <a href=”http://www.chromewheels.com”>Chrome Wheels</a>. This is basically telling search engines that this page is related to chrome wheels.
As far as I know, it’s not important if the link is case sensitive such as ‘chrome wheels’ or ‘Chrome Wheels’. This definitely doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter so I would just request that it be formatted the same with all websites. Also, I request that all links contain the www such as www.chromewheels.com rather than just chromewheels.com.
It’s best to manually contact potential link exchange partners but I use Arelis to manage my link exchange campaigns as you can run a script to see if anyone has removed links to you plus a variety of other features that makes managing a link campaign easy. Again, I would never use it to automate link exchange request emails but it’s a great way to manage your current links.
Again, I’m going to do an couple of in depth posts on reciprocal links but I wanted to at least bring it up.
Tip 9: Meta Tags
In my opinion, as well as many other people, the most important meta tag is the Title tag. This is the tag that displays at the top of your screen and is a very important part of SEO.
A couple of other tags that are used are the Description & Keyword tags. As people have abused them by stuffing them with keywords, related & not related to their website, they have become less effective. With that said, you’d never find a page of mine without these two tags because it definitely won’t hurt, just keep them related to your web page without stuffing them with too much repetition of your keywords.
Here is how a basic meta tag would appear on a web page. I’ll again use the chrome wheels example.
<HTML>
<head>
<title>ChromeWheels.com - Chrome Wheels, Custom Rims and Tires</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”ChromeWheels.com offers the internet’s largest selection of chrome wheels. Shipping discounts available on all chrome wheel and tire packages.“>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”chrome wheels, chrome wheel, custom rims, tires, rims, discount chrome wheels“>
</head>
I’ll save some additional meta tags such as ‘revisit-after’, ‘robots’ & ‘distribution’ for another post but these are definitely the tags that you don’t want to miss when creating your pages.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteSpot.com
How To Make A Website - Graphics And Blogs
Thursday, April 10th, 2008So far I’ve covered some of the basic steps on how to make a website but I haven’t covered images & nor creating a blog. The images are a very important part of your website in regards to keeping visitors interested & for search engine optimization. A blog is going to keep content your website fresh and if you can write content that’s valuable, it’s going to keep people coming back to your website.
Tip 7: Images & Photos
How often to you revisit websites that don’t spice up their site with images or illustrations? For me, it’s rarely. I like to look at images & photos because it can answer questions without having to read through tons of content.
It’s important to place images on your website but don’t over do it. Many people still use dial-up for their internet connection so it’s important to use images that aren’t to large or exceed 72 pixels/inch. Most monitors don’t resolve more than 72 pixels/inch so you’re just making the images larger for no reason at all.
Another important part of images is the ‘alt’ tag, obviously search engines can’t figure out what an image relates to so it’s important to give your file a descriptive name and use the ‘alt’ tag. A good example of this would be something on the order of <img src=“chrome-wheels.jpg” alt=“Chrome Wheels” />.
To break this down you’re telling the search engine that your image is named ‘chrome-wheels.jpg and the alt tag is another way of describing to the search engines what the image is related to. It’s important to use the alt tag as often as possible because it’s a way of optimizing your web page for search engines.
There is a huge selection of image editing software on the market from free options like Gimp to higher priced editors such Adobe PhotoShop & Adobe FireWorks. I personally use both, I use PhotoShop for editing photos and I use FireWorks for creating and editing images such as banners & buttons. The later two offer advanced features so be sure to research them before making a decision.
Tip 8: Blogs
I’m running long so I’m going to make this short. Blog is short for Web log that consist of regularly updated entries displayed in reverse chronological order. Essentially an online diary or journal. The great thing about blogs is that search engines love blogs because of they are generally updated with new content and generally updated with unique content. You’ll find that almost every single web host offers a blog application with their hosting services.
There are a lot of different options in regards to blogs from hosted versions such as BlogSpot.com to versions that you host under your own domain such as WordPress. I personally use WordPress because I can host it on my own server and there are so many features that you can add to it. By the way, no matter which you choose, blog software generally is free.
You’ll find that we offer WordPress with all of our web hosting accounts as well. One final thing, I’ve covered just a very small area of blogs. In my opinion the best website regarding blogs and how to make money with blogs is at ProBlogger.net. I personally check with ProBlogger.net about 2 - 3 times per week so it’s a great idea to check them out.
In my next post I’m going to cover a couple of SEO, search engine optimization techniques.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteSpot.com
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