|
While jedistar.com is not a state of the art web site there are some
lessons I have learned which may be of use to noobs like me who are trying to
manage a hobby site. The key for me is it has to be easy and the
tools must be free. Here is a list of tips and free resources
which may prove useful. Please note that I have no commercial benefit if
you take up any of the services I mention here . Buy your own domain name - if you are
getting someone else to manage or host your service don't let them hold
your domain name. Domain names are cheap.
Don't pay for content management systems. Unfortunately I am a
Frontpage user with no experience with content management systems.
However, according to what I have read the best of these are Drupal,
Joomla and Wordpress and they are free open source products. If
you are paying someone to do your site and they are charging you for
this - change developers.
Flash never - enough said.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) appears to be a black art but
jedistar has improved its rankings over time with the following
approach:
Content is king - it is better to have content than great
design and Google does not care how pretty your site is.
Email people and ask them politely to link to you - sometimes they
will. Do not be offended if people ignore your request. Be
prepared to link to people who email you also. Friends are useful.
People often ask me to link to their sites and so long as they are in
the same neighborhood I am happy to oblige.
Use different page title information for each page. The text in
your title may appear in Google search results so consider this
carefully.
Label images (picture properties) - google reads these and
traffic can come your way via images.
Submit your site to search engines but I don't see any point paying
for this to be done. When you use Google Analytics (see below)
Google will be crawling your site daily - so that is a good start.
Be patient - the longer you are around the more likely people are to
notice you.
Site map. Google likes sitemaps - here is a
free tool which I use.
Note the free version is limited to 500 pages you need to pay $19.99 for
more pages.
Advertise your site.
Participate in forums in your area of interest. Refer to your
site in some of your posts but NOT ALL of them. Participate in the
forum and gain credibility as a useful member - not just as a self
promoter.
Publish updates of your site on
twitter,
facebook,
myspace and other networking sites.
I don't use a content management system so I find
twitter an easy way of
updating those who are following updates at my site.
Free tools
Wufoo is a free form sender so that
you don't need to expose your email address
Alexa - web stats - no need to
join or add code to page
Quantcast - statistics.
Requires code added to your pages. Nice simple interface and gives
useful info - here is an example of a Quantcast web stat graph:
Website outlook - a
stats service for free that offers a
valuation of your site.
SEO Quake as an add on to Mozilla
gives you access to your site (any site really) stats on the fly - very
cool.
Internet Seer lets you know if your site is down by ending you an
email. The free service is obviously basic but a great one
nevertheless.
Google Analytics -
awesome growing tool set. Gives you information on traffic sources
and search terms. This is a must use resource. Again it
requires membership and code to be added to each page. When you check
out the information availablle to Google you will understand why Google
rules the wwworld.
Site search tools
Atomz
PicoSearch
FusionBot
Google Custom Search
Advertising
Google Adsense and
Infolinks text links are simple to use and provide a modest
income. I have also had some luck as an
Amazon associate.
 |
