Web resources and tips for
building your own web site and improving your site ranking in search engines
updated 21/6/2011
Broadband internet access Australia | VPS Hosting by InMotion Hosting
|
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 or cheap. Most of the following tips
and resources mentioned below will cost you nothing. Others are modestly
priced. If you want to get real serious and buy Frontpage or
Dreamweaver then a larger investment will be required.
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.
There are free 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.
Some companies repackage content management systems, adding more
features to make life a
bit easier such as
Word Press Remix 3.0
If you are contemplating your own blog site then have a look at
The Ultimate Blogging Theme which is basically a WordPress
theme that takes out the "coding" part with vast "in-theme options" that
allow users to switch sidebars, change widths and heights, fonts, colors
and a more
Flash never - enough said.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving
your search engine ranking.s It 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 good content than great
design and Google does not care how pretty your site is. Change
your content regularly - keep it fresh and up to date.
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 your 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.
Submit your site to search engines
Tell Search engines about your site by submitting your URL and info. You can pay a service money to do this or for free you can
add your site
to Google or
Yahoo
This just takes time - here is a free bulk service I used - not sure
how effective these are.
I have read in a few places that automated search engine submission
can actually harm your ranking improvement - so tread carefully.
Se below about Google Analytics - if you sign up for this Google crawls
your site fully anyway.
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 for
jedistar:
Website outlook - a
stats service for free that offers a
valuation of your site.
SEO Quake is 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 sending you an
email. The free service is obviously basic but a great one
nevertheless.
Google Analytics -
awesome 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 available to Google you will understand why Google
rules the wwworld.
