Build your own website, use a template site or hire a website design firm.
Familiarize you self with basic HTML code
Learn some basic HTML code...it's easy and it will aid you immensely
with your understanding of website optimization and if you plan to put
advertising on your site you will really appreciate the usefulness of
knowing some basic HTML.
I think it's very important to know a little bit about HTML code and
webpage structure. Whether you build a website yourself, or hire someone
else to build it for you.
You need to be able to tell your designer how to properly
implement your SEO techniques, and a working knowledge of both HTML and
web page structure is very helpful when you talk to your designer. It's
pretty simple stuff and there are thousands of tutorials available
online.
I want my sites to be simple and very user friendly. Simple and
user friendly kind of go together. I like to keep things simple so
that there is less to go wrong should anything go wrong, and it's easier
to build and to troubleshoot the site when things are kept simple.
The site should look professional. Your visitors will trust your site
more if it looks like a professional high quality site, and thus are
more likely to make a purchase or take whatever action it is that you
are promoting.
Template based websites
An inexpensive way to get a professional looking website is to use a
template site. You can purchase very nice looking website
templates for about $35 to $150. I haven't used a template site so I
don't know all that much about them. As I understand it you still
really need some other stuff like Photoshop to work with the templates.
There are of course website design firms that will build you a site with
a template for a very reasonable cost.
Just be sure that you will have the ability to access and change any
of the HTML code that you need to. For instance, if you want to put
advertisements on your site, or tracking code from Google Analytics, or
change the meta tags, you will need to be able to change the HTML code
directly.
Text editors for websites
You should get a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) type editor
such as FrontPage2000 or DreamWeaver. There are a number of good
web page text editors. If you know HTML well, you could write the
whole site in NotePad. HTML code which stands for Hyper Text
Markup Language is very simple and all it does, is formats your content
for display in your browser.
I use FrontPage2000 for my text editor. Editors are easy to use
and allow you to create nice web pages even without an extensive
knowledge of HTML coding. I keep my web pages pretty simple and I try to
make it very easy for the visitor to accomplish whatever task he is
there for.
Keeping the pages simple and straightforward helps insure that the
pages are easily spidered by the engines, and easily navigated and read
by the human visitors.
To build a website, a text editor is a must for most people
Write your copy for humans
Your web pages will have two types of visitors...robot spiders and
human beings. Write for the humans. Search engines are very smart
and getting smarter all the time. Do not try to fool or trick the search
engines. If you get caught the engine can ban you for a long time. It's
not worth the risk.
Instead, provide good high quality information and lots of it.
Organize the information in a way that makes it easy for the humans to
decipher and at the same time makes it easy for the search engines to
index your information using the keywords you wish to use...the correct
key word phrases. I will show you how in the section on web page
optimization.
Keep your navigation simple
If you keep the navigation very simple it is good for both humans and
spiders. Any important material should be within two clicks of
your home page. This makes it easy for the search engine spiders to
follow your links, and the engines may assign less value to a page as it
gets further from the home page in clicks.
Now we can get on to web page optimization...
Optimization
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