Website Building Tips

Many Webmasters try to promote a badly built
website and get frustrated when they see no
results in terms of sales or returning visitors.
In order for you to succeed in promoting a
website, you absolutely need to have a site that
is clean, clear and filled up with original and
interesting content. You can spend tons of green
bills on marketing and even generate hordes of
traffic to your website but if your website does
not show confidence and trust noone will be
neither ordering from you nor returning to your
website.

The following website building tips will hopefull
help you draw attention and visitors to your site
and perhaps also close a few sales. How do you
want to be seen? Your website is the way you
present your self and your products, like a
storefront on the streets if you will, and it is
important that you present your self in a manner
that appeals to the audience you are targeting.

CONTENT IS KING, as always...

Before you begin to build your website, try to
choose a topic that you are familiar with and
have some kind of interest in. If you choose
something that is of no interest to you, your
visitors will often be able to spot that and find
your website worthless. In these days of adsense
sites etc many people just put of crappy websites
to earn a few quick ones but the content and the
quality of the content, in particular, is very
often missing.

Also when building websites on topics that you
are not interested in will be a constant pain in
the behind for you when it is time to update.
Today there are many ways to make automatic
websites and even make automatic content and
updates but as we all know there is a need for
updates to stay listed in the search engines and
not everything can be made by computer software.
If the website is interesting to you it is much
more possible that also other people will find
interest in your website. If you are new to the
game and not so familiare with niche research
etc, try to explore what other people are
interested in and see if you can find something
that matches your interests and then try to build
a website around that topic.

As soon as you have chosen a topic for your
website it iss time to start writing content.
Always use a spell checker! :-) No matter how
good a writer you are there will still be times
when you make typos. That I can guarantee. Try to
make your content look professional and make it
easy to read. Also try to get the text to flow
naturally and divide it into easily readable
chapters and paragraphs.

Your visitors want as good quality content as
possible and they want a lot of it. A good idea
for any beginner is to fill your site with
articles written by other people as long as they
fit your site's theme. You can find plenty of
those re-printable articles on the internet.
Allthough these articles will not help your
website in terms of ranking or indexing they will
provide good and easily available content related
to the theme of your site. Later when you get a
bit more expericend write your own articles,
tips, and details of all the products and
services on your site. Remember, the key to
building a good website is content, content and
CONTENT.

LAYOUT and DESIGN...

Mission One: Make your website easy to navigate
and make it easy to access your content. Use a
simple, no fuss style and layout with easy to
find links. Do not disquise your links behind
text or pictures only ment to get visitors to
click. Basically it should be easy to understand
the layout of your site and moving from page to
page on your website should be made wirh ease.

Websites full of graphics are complicated to
maneuver around and most visitors will find these
kinds of website terrible to use. Also by the
introduction of Flash many wemasters made their
websites so darn "flashy" that it became almost
impossible to surf the sites on low speed
connections. The sites often looked, and looks,
like a show off room for the webmaster rather
than the informative and usefull content the
visitors are looking for. Remeber; most people
search the interenet for information and nothing
more - Keep it simple! Some banners on your site
is ok.But the glorious days of banners are gone
and blinking banners, buttons and flashy colours
will turn visitors away.

META TAGS:

Meta tags are little lines of code that are
placed between the HEAD and the /HEAD tags in
your site's HTML code. They do not affect how the
page is displayed but they provide information on
who created the page, how often it is updated,
how often the search engine spiders should visit
your website, what the page are all about, and
which keywords represent the main content of the
website. These "tags" are not visible to your
visitors but is only used by the spiders when
indexing your website.

THE DESCRIPTION TAG:

These tags are very important. This is the title
people see when someone does a search on a search
engine and your listing comes up, the description
is displayed right below your title.

Since you want people to click on your link, you
absolutely need to make sure that your
description will grab their attention and make
them want to click on your link to know more. If
no description tag is found, search engine will
most likely create their own description and most
likely not manage to describe your page properly.


Description tags should be short but descriptive.


THE KEYWORDS TAG: META name="keywords"
content="Your Kewyords Here"

Search engines will only display a small part of
the description in their results list. If a
description tag contains too many words, the
extra words will be cut off. Try to avoid that as
it may ruin your chance of getting the number of
clicks you should be getting.

Keyword tag contains words and phrases relevant
to the content of your website. Commas and spaces
separate the different words from each other.
Keyword tags is not visible to the visitors at
your site, nor do the search engines display them
in their results but many search engines read the
keywords tag and give a small increase to the
ranking for the words that are mentioned in it as
the words in the keyword tags shoul be some of
the most releavant words for your site.

Search engines will read about ten words or so,
so it is no use in stuffing in a lot of keywords.

Going through your site before launch...

Once your website has been finished, go over it
word for word, line for line, and correct any
typos, errors, or broken links. Nothing is more
frustrating than clicking on a link and then find
out that the link is broken or leads to a
different page than the page you were actually
trying to reach. It's a real visitor repellor!

Monitor your site on a regular basis and make
sure the links and content is working and up to
date. There are even automatic link checker
programs that can be used for this purpose.

One last thing; if visitors can see that you are
available to contact, they will be much more
likely to trust you and click on your links.
Therefore include contact information, maybe even
a picture of your self, so people can easily
contact you.