Website Development

Forum participation is another activity that can generate traffic to your website or blog. First of all, presumably the subject of your website is something that interests you or about which you have some expertise; therefore, if you join a forum whose subject is similar to that of your own site, you will have opportunities to take part in discussions about topics that genuinely interest you. The discussions might inspire a future blog post or suggest ideas for your website which, in turn, can lead to traffic to your site. For example, if you notice the same topics being discussed often, or the same questions being asked repeatedly, you could write an article about those topics or a blog post that attempts to answer those questions. The next time the topic comes up in the forum, you could post a brief response and also direct interested readers to visit your blog post or article for more thorough coverage of the topic.

In addition to any inspiration it may kindle, forum participation also provides the opportunity to interact with people who share your interests, some of whom may have websites or blogs of their own. If other forum members visit your blog and find it useful, they might link to your site as an additional resource on the topic. Perhaps their visitors also have websites or blogs and they, in turn, add a link to your site too. And so on--the benefits would snowball. Now the question arises: How do you share the fact that you have a website with other forum members? The opportunity to make people aware of your site or blog is made available in three possible places: i) in your member profile, ii) in your signature, and iii) directly in the body of a post.

Public Profile

Many forums offer members the option of creating a Profile, in which members can share some information about themselves, for example, interests, location, a favorite book, a website URL, etc. When other members of the forum wish to know more about you, they can go to your Profile, note the website you have listed, and visit it. (Keep in mind that this information is public, so do not share anything in your Profile that you wouldn't mind sharing with the whole world.)

Signature

A signature is a short phrase that members can create that is automatically appended to the bottom of their posts (they can usually be disabled on individual posts, if it is not wanted on every post). Signatures offer a convenient way to automate the process of adding a standard close to each post—one that may include the URL of your site. For example, I have a signature similar to the following in some of the forums in which I participate (note that the blog title is usually hot-linked to the blog URL):

Cheers,

Duncan
Website Development Blog

Body of Post

The opportunity may arise for you to include a link to your website in the body of a forum post. If your website provides information directly applicable to the topic being discussed in the thread, you can add a link to your website right in the post. This opportunity does not present itself often and, when it does, you have to be sure it won't be identified as spam; otherwise, the post will be deleted immediately and your forum membership may even be terminated by the administrators. This point should be stressed: before including a link directly in a forum post, be very sure it is directly applicable to the topic being discussed.

Note that not all forums offer all three features and, even if they do, links in forums are usually nofollow--so they provide no benefit in terms of PageRank. Links in a Profile or Signature usually have the nofollow attribute attached to them. Links included directly in a post almost always have the nofollow attribute attached to them. Very few forums allow links without the nofollow attribute. In any case, do not focus solely on whether a forum's URLs are nofollow or not; instead, your primary consideration should be raising awareness of your site among your target audience: (i) members are precisely the people you want to know about you and your website, and (ii) other visitors to the forum are brought there by an interest in the subject of the forum (which the forum administrators are also working to promote).

Join a Relevant Forum

Internet forums exist for just about anything. For example, say one of your hobbies is fishkeeping; you have a few aquariums in your home, have been keeping fish for several years, are very interested in the hobby, have gained substantial knowledge about the hobby, and have created a website about fishkeeping. Now you want to find forums pertinent to fishkeeping. You could start with a Google search:

Search 1: fishkeeping forums or
Search 2: forums about fishkeeping

Alternately, you could use some of Google's advanced search capabilities; most forums have the term "forum" in the URL, so you could do a search as follows:

Search 3: fishkeeping inurl:forum

Going through the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), you could then find forums that are most appropriate for you. Perhaps you are interested in a particular type of fish, say, betta fish. You might refine your search and find the Bettas4all Betta Forums. Perhaps you are particularly interested in one aspect of keeping betta fish, say, breeding bettas. In this case, you might find the Betta Breeders Forum. Refining your interests further, maybe you would like to interact with betta breeders in a particular geographic region, say, Canada. In this case, you might want to join the Betta Breeders Canada Forums. The point of this example is to illustrate how closely forums can be matched to your own interests and/or expertise regardless of how specialized they are. There is no justification for joining random forums with the intention of making scores of near-meaningless posts just to drop your link all over the place; that is a deceitful practice. Instead, find a forum relevant to your interests and join that forum. Then participate with meaningful and informative posts that also yield traffic to your site.

Consider a scenario that goes counter to the advice given above: say you join a forum whose theme is dissimilar to that of your site, for example, an astronomy forum. Your lack of knowledge in the field of astronomy would limit the contributions you could make, the numbers of posts you make would be few, and you would be perceived as being not very knowledgeable on the topic. Most importantly, the number of members who also have an interest in fishkeeping would probably be significantly less than what would be found in a fishkeeping forum--the result being that few members would visit your site.

To summarize, forum participation is an activity that can effectively generate targeted traffic to a website or blog. In addition to the immediate and direct benefits, such as the posting of your link in the forum, the secondary benefits are equally--or even more--significant: the opportunity to be genuine in your participation, the creative stimulus, and the potential for like-minded visitors to promote your site through their own work. By joining an appropriate forum, specifically, one whose subject is similar to that of your own site, the probability of getting visitors is higher than if you join a forum whose subject is dissimilar. In conclusion, done properly, forum participation is an excellent method of making your site or services known among the audience most likely to be interested in the subject.

Cheers,

Another technique to develop links to your site is to submit your website URL to search engines and directories. As stated in the previous post, the more links to your site, the higher your site will rank in search listings, the more traffic it will get. Like everything else in SEO, the benefits won’t become evident overnight but--over time--positive effects will incrementally materialize.

Creating the Submission Material

Before submitting your website URL to a single search engine or directory, one important preliminary task is to prepare the information you plan to use in your submission. Thousands of web directories exist, and more are being created all the time, so instead of re-typing the same information thousands of times, prepare the information beforehand in a plaintext editor and save the document. Consider my ongoing--fictional--example about “XYZ Webhosting Company”. In the document, I might save something similar to the following:

Title:  XYZ Webhosting

Website URL: http://www.xyzwebhosting.com/

Description:
XYZ Webhosting is a high-quality webhosting company that provides hosting for a variety of needs: shared hosting, dedicated hosting, VPS, etc. and hosting packages on Linux and Windows servers are available options. etc. etc.

Keywords 1: hosting, web hosting, webhost, webhosting, VPS
Keywords 2: hosting webhost webhosting VPS

Some points to note:

1. The title includes a targeted keyword. In many cases, the title becomes the anchor text of the URL in the directory listing, so choose carefully.
2. The description includes one or more keywords.
3. Two versions of the keyword list have been created: one comma-separated and one separated by blank spaces (some directories require a keyword list in the different formats).

Once the material has reached the point that it includes all the information I want it to, and has been thoroughly edited into a well-written paragraph, the document is saved as, say, “dir_sub_material”. Having this document saved and available every time I want to do some directory submission ensures that I am using good-quality material, spelling and grammatical errors have been corrected, proper keywords are included, and it doesn’t have to be re-typed many times (possibly introducing typos into the submission material). Then, when I submit to a directory, it is simply a matter of copying material from the document and pasting it into the appropriate fields of the directory submission page. Directory submission is an ongoing task: over the course of months--or even years--working from your version of a backed up document like “dir_sub_material” will save a lot of time.

Search Engine Submission

Once the submission material is ready to use, the first submissions I recommend you make are to search engines. Approval of a submission to a search engine can take a long time. So, instead of doing other SEO activities first, and then submitting your website URL to search engines, and then waiting years for a reply, do it first. Get this task out of the way early and then forget about it. After you have submitted your website URL to search engines, move on to your other SEO activities. In the months--or years--to get a reply from the search engines, you will have been productive on other website marketing activities.

Following are links for submission directly to the two major search engines:

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/

Bing: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

Also, less well-known search engines are blekko and DuckDuckGo.

I also recommend looking for audience-specific search engines. Many search engines exist that target a particular audience and it is often easier to get a site listed in some of these search engines--if your website is relevant to that particular niche--than it is to get into the big, general, search engines. There are search engines specifically for sites based on geography (e.g. – for Canadian websites, or topics of interest to Canadians) or audience interest (e.g. – students, academia, etc.).

Phil Bradley has an extensive list of search engines: http://www.philb.com/

In fact, he has a list of over 200 country-specific search engines:

http://www.philb.com/countryse.htm

If your site is of particular interest to people in a specific geographical location, submit it to a country-specific search engine; sometimes administrators of those search engines want to help local webmasters, and so they are more accepting of your site than would be, say, Google.

Alternately, if the purpose of your site is to attract visitors with specific interests, submit it to search engines that target that specific audience. For example, consider the following:

Sweet Search (for students):  http://www.sweetsearch.com/

Oolone (returns site page previews):  http://oolone

Ice Rocket (a search engine for blogs):  http://www.icerocket.com/

DeepDyve (for academic publications):  http://www.deepdyve.com/

Furthermore, at following links are posted lists of search engines that may be relevant to you:

Top Online Engineering Degree, "50 Coolest Niche Search Engines You Never Knew Existed":
http://toponlineengineeringdegree.com/?page_id=146

About.com, "The Search Engine List":
http://websearch.about.com/od/enginesanddirectories/tp/search-engine-list.htm

OnlineUniversities.com, "100 Niche Search Engines Every College Student Needs":
http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2010/02/100-niche-search-engines-every-college-student-needs/

In addition, there are two excellent sites that present much information about search engines: Search Engine Watch and Danny Sullivan's Search Engineland.

A search would turn up many more search engines and related resources; in fact, I discover more all the time without actively searching. I encourage you to find niche search engines--into which your site would be appropriate--and submit to them.

Directory Submission

Once you have submitted your website URL to all the search engines which you think are appropriate, it is time to move on to the main task: directory submission. Similar to my advice for search engines, there is one submission I recommend you make before proceeding to other submissions:

Open Directory Project

This directory is huge and well-known. However, like the largest search engines, it is hard to get a site included in it and, even if a site is accepted, that acceptance can be a long time coming. So, submit your website URL to it early in your SEO activities and then move on to other tasks.

The process for submitting a website to a directory is similar for all directories:

1. From the main page, navigate to the appropriate category, and sub-category if necessary. Try to navigate to the lowest, most-specific, category into which your website would be appropriate.
2. Click on the button or link for submitting a website for listing in that category (usually it is called “Suggest Link” or “Suggest URL”).
3. Enter all the required information for your website submission (copy and paste from the “dir_sub_material” document you created earlier).

Several ready-made lists of directories are available, for example, Web Directories List and Best Web Directories. Like the advice given above for search engines, I recommend looking for and submitting your site to niche directories, directories into which your site would be appropriate based on geography and/or intended audience. Your site has a much better chance of getting accepted into a niche directory if its topic fits nicely into the theme of the directory, than it does if submitted to a general directory. So, if you are, say, a German webmaster, make sure to submit your site to a German directory, whose unstated goal may be to increase the exposure of German sites.

Another bit of advice I’d like to offer: spend time in webmaster forums; a few are listed in the left column of this blog, under the "Favorite Links" header. Many of the larger webmaster forums have sections in which the administrators of new directories can announce those new directories. By keeping an eye on these forums, and submitting your site to a new directory immediately after it is announced, your submission has a very good chance of getting accepted. The reason for this is that the administrators of new directories are usually anxious to get their directories populated, so (i) they are not as strict with requirements; and (ii) submissions are often accepted without having to pay a fee or provide a reciprocal link. When a directory becomes better established, and its traffic and PageRank increase, the administrators often stop accepting free submissions, or submissions without a reciprocal link, and become more critical when vetting submissions. So, keep an eye open for the very newest directories and submit to them right away.

I also suggest visiting the Info Vilesilencer site. This site’s raison d'être is web directories; it presents much information about them: how they are used, links to other resources, and lists of hundreds of directories. The site administrator, who goes by the nom de plume Dan Jensen, does a thorough job of vetting the directories on his lists for their SEO aspects (i.e. – Are they quality directories that filter spam listings? Do listings in the directories use the “no-follow” tag? Is submission free?  Etc.). This site also features forums in which further information is exchanged--including a section for the announcement of new directories. For the reasons stated above, this forum is an excellent place to watch for the newest directory announcements.

To summarize, if you explore the resources mentioned above, you will discover many directories, lists of directories, websites, and forums, and you will be lead to even more resources relevant to directory submission activities. In fact, many more search engines, directories, and webmaster forums can be found by searching; the ones listed above are just a few examples of what is available. The forums, alone, are excellent resources: they are sources of the latest information and provide an up-to-date exchange of ideas. Directory submission is a task that will keep you busy for years (if you don’t lose interest before then), and is a part of doing thorough SEO work.

Cheers,
 

My previous two posts covered techniques that could essentially be done independent of other people: on-page SEO factors, creating a link to your site from your social networking account, and adding links to social bookmarking sites. However, there is only so much you can do on your own. Unless you are content to have your site remain obscure--and with very little traffic--you really have no choice but to involve other people: you are going to have to make link requests of people.

The first and easiest step that you can make in this regard is simply to ask your immediate network of contacts: family, friends, classmates, co-workers, colleagues you may know from a club or sports team, etc. If you know anybody with a web site, a blog, or an account on a social media site (like Facebook), simply ask them if they could add a link from one of their pages to yours.

The next step is to expand your link requests beyond your immediate network of contacts. In your web surfing, you may have come across several sites similar to yours. If not, they are easy to find by doing a search. In any case, investigate those sites and see if they have a resources section relevant to your web page. Then contact the administrator of those sites and ask if they could put a link to one of your pages on that resources page.

You should also investigate websites that can be considered competitors of your own web page. For example, if your web site is about webhosting, do a Google search for “webhosting” and find out what sites come up for the search term “webhosting”. Let’s say one of the top websites on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is the website for “XYZ Web Hosting”:

www.xyzwebhosting.com

(Note: this company name is fictional. I just made it up for the sake of this post. I don’t know whether or not a company by this name really exists)

Now investigate why this site ranks so highly in the SERPs by doing a link search; after all, pages rank high in Google because other pages are linking to them. You can do this by entering the following in a Google search:

link: xyzwebhosting.com

Google will then list pages that link to xyzwebhosting.com.
(Of course, in your case, you’d enter the URL of the page you are investigating, not xyzwebhosting.com).

Go through the list of pages linking to xyzwebhosting.com and see what kinds of pages they are. Many of them might be web pages of individuals, for example, students, teachers, hobbyists, etc. In many cases, the link to xyzwebhosting.com may be on the page of a hobbyist who has no loyalty to “XYZ Web Hosting“, but simply included a link to xyzwebhosting.com in a generic “Favorite Links” section of their website. If you contact the webmaster, and make a request, he or she might be willing to add a link to your site too. Always be honest, polite, and professional when you make the request. They will either say yes or no; it is pretty cut and dry.

You should repeat this process for all the keywords for which you want your site to rank highly. The more links to your site, the higher your site will rank in search listings, the more traffic it will get. This work of cultivating links to your site is the core of Search Engine Optimization (SEO); the next several posts will continue this exploration of techniques for building links to your site--all part of the overall objective of SEO.

Cheers,

Once you have your page(s) ready to receive visitors, and search-engine friendly, the next step is to get visitors to your page. Building up a consistent stream of significant traffic to your site requires a lot of effort and time, and there are many aspects to this task. The next several posts will describe how to achieve this goal. I have divided this work into the following smaller tasks, ranked in order (I believe) of sophistication: social bookmarking, link requests, directory submission, forum participation, blogging, article writing, and offline marketing. The first four of these tasks have been grouped together in a general “200” level of development activity because I believe these activities are the quickest and easiest way to get links.

Social Media

Today, almost everybody with Internet access has a Facebook account. If they don’t have a Facebook account, perhaps they are a member of one of the many other social networking sites such as MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, etc.--many such sites exist. In fact, an extensive list of social networking sites is posted on Wikipedia, but even that list is not complete.

If you are already a member of one of these sites, making the world aware of the existence of your web site is as simple as including the URL on your “Profile” page. And, if you are on Facebook, you also have the options of “Sharing” a link, or creating a “Fan page” which can include your link. As your network grows, more people will visit your page, see the link to your web site, and potentially visit it.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is another first step you can take to promote your web site. (In addition to the benefits of promoting your site, social bookmarking sites do provide a practical service. Personally, I like their convenience--your links are available from anywhere--as well as their practicality--they are a back-up in case your computer crashes.) Many social bookmarking sites exist on the Internet. The biggest and best-known are probably Delicious and Diigo, but there are hundreds of others. For example, here is one page that lists several social bookmarking sites: Social Bookmarking Sites List. Furthermore, web developers frequently post on the topic in their blogs, for example, here is one from Caroline Middlebrook. A web search would turn up many more similar services.

Note that in addition to general bookmarking sites, several specialty bookmarking sites exist that target particular audiences. For example, the goal of Brainify is to be used by students for bookmarking pages relevant to their studies (registering for a Brainify account is free, but users must sign up for an account with an email address from an academic institution). Depending upon the purpose and topic of your web site, you might find a social bookmarking service into which your site is particularly suited. In any case, social bookmarking is a good way to raise the profile of your site; I recommend creating accounts with one or two online bookmarking services, and bookmarking your site on them.

I happen to like Delicious, so let’s consider an example using Delicious.
Signing up for an account is free and easy, and once you have an account you can save your bookmarks online.

The general routine follows (after you have logged in to your account):
Enter a page’s URL.
Give it a title, if you don’t like the one automatically assigned.
Give it a description, or include some notes to yourself, if you don’t like what has been automatically assigned.
Give it some appropriate tags.
(Note that all bookmarks you save on Delicious are public by default unless you check the option to keep a bookmark private. You have to log in to your account to view your private bookmarks.)
Save it.

Repeat this process to save a few of your favorite bookmarks and save a link to your website. I recommend saving a few pages that are similar in topic. When you are saving the URL of your own page, remember to try to include one or two of your target keywords in the title and description. Be accurate and honest, but try to get a keyword or two in there somewhere.

A few aspects should be noted.

First, if you saved a URL that other Delicious users have saved, Delicious will indicate this fact by including the statement “X saves” over the title of the URL, indicating that X number of Delicious users have saved the same URL. For example, say one of your favorite sites is the Web Hosting Talk forums (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/). If you bookmark this URL, Delicious indicates that this URL has “1457 saves”. In other words, 1457 Delicious users have bookmarked this URL. Also note that the statement “1457 saves” is hot linked; if you click on it, you are taken to a page listing the users who have bookmarked that URL, as well as a list of their tags. You can then click on a user name and view their saved public links. You can check out all of them, or you can focus on the links that the user has tagged with tags in which you are interested. It is a great way to discover sites that are similar to your own.

On the other hand, suppose you have saved the URL to your site, which is brand-new and nobody else knows about. In this case, Delicious includes the statistic “1 save” over the title of the URL, meaning, so far, you are the only person to have saved this URL on Delicious. However, the tags you have assigned to this URL may already be in use by other users. Using the example from above, say I had tagged the Web Hosting Talk URL with the tags “hosting” and “webhosting”. If I click on my “webhosting” tag, only my bookmarks to which I have assigned the “webhosting” tag are listed; however, at the bottom of the page is a hotlink giving me the option to “See all links tagged webhosting”. If I click on this hotlink, I am taken to a page listing URLs that have been saved on Delicious and assigned this tag, ordered by number of “saves”. This is another way to see what other bookmarks Delicious users are saving with the same tag. Or to investigate some of the “related tags” that Delicious presents.

The key observation to be made here is that this process works in reverse. Other users may not know about your site, but if they save a URL with the same tag as you, they may take some time to investigate what other URLs are bookmarked with the same tag, leading them to your bookmarks--and your site. So tag your bookmarks carefully; they should be descriptive, accurate, and have enough general appeal to bring other users to your bookmarks.

Another reason to carefully tag your bookmarks is to ensure that they appear in tag searches. Again, if nobody yet knows about your links (and, in turn, your website), users may still be lead to them when they do a tag search. At the top of every Delicious page is a “Search” option. Users are much more likely to perform a search for pages tagged “webhosting” rather than “cheap-hosting-in-Canada”, or something like that. Such a tag is too specific to have much interest, and the odds of such a tag bringing traffic are small. So put some thought into the tags you assign to your bookmarks.

One other aspect of social bookmarking which I would like to mention before concluding this post is that if you succeed in making your site popular to the point that many Delicious users bookmark it, it may be featured on the Delicious front page--which leads to much additional traffic. It is a goal for which to aim.

To summarize, social media and social bookmarking offer the opportunity to create the first links to your site and, with them, traffic. Both of these methods are completely under your independent control; you do not have to go through another person and the results are immediate. Unlike directory submission, forum participation, and article writing (all of which will be discussed in subsequent posts), neither method requires the approval of an administrator, editor, or moderator. The independence, the ease, the immediacy of results, and the potential of driving significant traffic to a site, are all features that make the employment of social media and social bookmarking sites good first steps in the promotion of a web site.

Edit (14 December 2011):
Since making this post, I have also come across another list of bookmarking sites:
http://www.social-bookmarking-sites-list.net/social-bookmarking/800-social-bookmarking-sites.html

It should go without saying that the most important on-page factor influencing the popularity of a web page is its content. If a site has great content, offers something unique, great resources, good-quality information, etc., it will attract a lot of traffic, many people will link to it, and they will refer other people to it. On the contrary, if a web page offers nothing of value, is poorly written, looks bad, etc., it will rightfully remain obscure and will receive little traffic.

Assuming your page offers something of value to visitors, and that you intend to proceed with further Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work, this post examines aspects of on-page factors that should be considered as a fundamental part of SEO work. Although on-page factors do not play as large a role as off-page factors when it comes to a page’s ranking in search engine results, they should not be neglected. If you are serious about your SEO efforts, on-page factors should be included for the sake of being thorough as well as for the sake of making the page as friendly to search engines as possible.

First of all, I would recommend deciding on the keywords for which you would like to rank highly in search results. Your web page might already have a general theme or topic, but you still have to decide exactly what terms are highlighted in your web site that will attract visitors to it. For example, would you like your page to rank highly in search results when somebody does a search for the term, say, “web page hosting” or “website hosting”? The difference is a lot of traffic. To help you decide which term to use, Google's AdWords Keyword Tool (External) is an extremely useful service that provides information about the monthly number of searches conducted for user-specified terms.

For example, on April 19, 2010 this tool indicated monthly search volumes as follows:

web page hosting 90,500
website hosting 673,000
hosting 20,400,000
web hosting 6,120,000

From this information, you know that in a month many more searches are conducted for the term “website hosting” than for the term “web page hosting”. In other words, if your SEO efforts are successful, attracting visitors who have conducted searches for the term “website hosting” will bring a lot more traffic to your site. By using this tool to select the best keywords for your site, you can then proceed to use those keywords to optimize your on-page SEO factors: title, meta tags, and h-tags.

The Title

The title of a web page is what shows up in the Title Bar of the browser, that blue bar at the top of the browser window. For example, when you are on the home page of this blog, the title should be "Website Development - Mozilla Firefox" if you are using the Firefox web browser and "Website Development - Microsoft Internet Explorer" if you are using Internet Explorer.

The web page title is coded into the HTML of a web page in the head section, for example,

< head >

< title > Web Page Title < /title >

. . .

< /head >

Including one of your keywords in the title of a web page makes it more Search Engine friendly, it helps the search engines better classify the page and helps the page rank higher in search results than if the keyword is not there. Try to keep the title no longer than 70 characters long.

Meta Tags

Meta tags help search engines identify the theme of a web site. They do not cause anything to be displayed to visitors of the web page, but they are read by search engines, which use the contents of the meta tags as an abstract or summary of the page; basically, they inform search engines that the page is about such-and-such a topic. Like the Title, meta tags are coded into the head section of a web page:

<head>

<title>Web Page Title</title>

<meta name="description" contents="META DESCRIPTION">

<meta name="keywords" contents="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyword4">

. . .

</head>

Again, you should include the keywords for which you want the page to be ranked highly in search engines. Further information--specific to Google--is posted on Google’s "Webmaster Central" site. From that particular post, I recommend navigating to the main "Webmaster Central" site and from there exploring the wealth of additional information that is available.

In addition, there is also a "Google Webmaster Central Blog". Again, from that particular post, you can navigate to the main page and from there explore all the other posts, on a variety of topics (remember though, these sites cover information specific to Google).

h-tags (h1 - h6)

h-tags are tags for highlighting the beginning of a section and giving it particular emphasis, much like chapters or sections of a book are given headers. Including your keywords in these tags also helps boost the page’s ranking in search engines. For example, if the web page is going to discuss the topic of “website hosting”, you might want to mark the section header with <h1> tags that include a keyword as follows:

<h1>Website Hosting</h1>

These tags increase the size of the font, and bold it, so that readers know it is a section header. In addition, search engines interpret these tags as giving the content within the tags special emphasis. So if you have something you want search engines to take special note of, include the terms in h-tags.


I would also like to briefly mention a couple other factors before concluding: broken links and alt attributes for images. Broken links make it look like you are not paying attention to your own site. Make sure all links on your page are valid; if they are not, correct them or remove them. In turn, an alt attribute should always be included with a graphic. Search engines cannot see the image, so they use the alt description to identify what the image is about. If your alt description is accurate, and includes one of your keywords, all the better. For example, if you include a gif of a computer, named computer.gif, on a page you might include the following HTML:

<img src="computer.gif" width="540" height="334" alt="Graphic of a Computer" />

This way, even though search engines cannot see the graphic, they can read the alt tag and know the image is a graphic of a computer.

Finally, keep in mind that these tips should not be overdone. If you fill all these tags with an excessive amount of keywords, it is called “keyword stuffing” and the effect might actually be detrimental to your search engine rankings. Be honest. Provide a genuine description of what the page is about without being excessive.


Cheers,

This post is the first article of what I plan to be a series of articles about the growth of a web site and its developer. In the course of developing several web sites, I, as a developer, have grown too: learning about different technologies, acquiring new skills, and discovering various resources. When I started creating web pages, learning basic HTML coding was enough of a challenge. Thinking about other web technologies--for example, Javascript, PHP, Java, databases, blogs, WordPress, and more--seemed like complicated, abstract quantities that I never expected to use. Leave that to the professionals--or so I thought! I dismissed consideration of many of these technologies, picking a web host that offered only the most basic of services--and now I regret not giving more serious consideration to these technologies. If I were starting over again, I would do things differently. Over the course of the next several articles about web development, I hope to share my experiences, and offer some advice so that others can benefit from that experience. In this article, I will consider some factors that should be taken into account before even starting to code a web site, specifically, factors regarding naming and hosting a web site.

Picking a Domain Name

First of all, I do recommend registering your own domain and having it hosted rather than using a free hosting service. Having a real web site will give you experience with some of the basics of web development. If you continue on as a web developer, having experience with the nuts and bolts, and the business aspects, of having a site hosted is important. If you ever apply for a job as a web developer, and you do not have this most basic experience, you would most likely be disqualified from consideration for the position.

Second, pick a domain name that is descriptive of the theme of the web site and is intuitive. Do not pick a domain name that is nonsense, such as hffjhad1kj5.com. A domain name that is actually a word is much better. Ideally, the domain name should state the theme of the web site. For example, if you plan to create a web site about cooking, you should register a domain name such as cooking.com, mycookingsite.com, etc. Such a domain name makes it easier for people to remember; it is much more intuitive than picking a domain name such as, say, mysite.com. (Note: I am just making up these domain names for the sake of this article; I have not checked to see if these web sites exist.) In addition, later on, when you start working on building traffic to your site, some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts suggest that having a meaningful--and topic-relevant--domain name improves a site’s rankings in search engines, resulting in more traffic to the site. (More on traffic building techniques in a subsequent article.)

Once you decide upon a domain name, the next step is to register the domain. Many companies offer domain registration services; a search for domain registration or web hosting should turn up thousands of results (many web hosting companies offer registration services too). The question may now arise, should a person register a domain through the same company they are considering to host the site? The answer to this question is that it is a matter of personal choice. If the company is good, it doesn’t matter. Some people like the convenience of dealing with one company; other people don’t want to give all their business to one company. Myself, I don’t like putting all my eggs in one basket, so I try to spread my business out among several companies.

Picking a Hosting Company

Several factors should be considered when selecting a hosting company. First, there are the technical aspects: How much web space and traffic is provided? How many email accounts come with the hosting package? Does the service include anti-virus and anti-spam filtering? What online services does the company support (for example, Java, PHP, MySQL, etc.)? Do not disregard these aspects, thinking that you will worry about them later.

I would like to elaborate on some of these aspects.

(i) Anti-virus and anti-spam filtering
When a web site is first created, traffic is pretty low, incoming emails are few, and worrying about anti-virus and anti-spam filtering is not a high priority. However, as traffic to your site increases, there is a good chance your email address will get on spam lists and your email Inbox will fill up every day with spam--which may include potential viruses. Having these emails identified--and blocked--before they arrive in your Inbox is a nice feature to have. Presently, one of my hosts does no filtering whatsoever. I receive about 1000 spam emails a day, causing me to waste much time every day simply cleaning out my Inbox. A host that identifies and blocks spam at the server is nice to have.

(ii) Java support.
Java is quite popular right now. Many companies fancy themselves avant garde and are really into Java. So if you think you might want to learn Java, to improve your employment prospects, or for other reasons, make sure your host offers the ability to run Java applets on your site. That way, as you learn Java, you can post your applets on your site. In fact, the same applies to any other web technology you might want to learn: being able to experiment on your own site as you learn is a real convenience.

(iii) PHP support.
PHP is very popular and enjoys a huge support base. With PHP, dynamic pages can be created for which the source code can not be viewed by visitors. (Javascript also allows dynamic pages to be created; however, some users disable Javascript in their web browsers, so the code does not run. PHP does not have this problem; since the code runs on the server, it does not depend upon settings within a user’s web browser.) In addition, several appealing services may be desirable on a web site that depend upon PHP: having a contact form that does not allow users to see the recipient email address, adding a forum, and having an RSS news parser, for example. Furthermore, PHP is one of the requirements for having a WordPress Blog on a site. If you are not into blogging already, don’t casually dismiss the possibility of adding a WordPress Blog to your site. Blogging can be an important aspect of your site, and WordPress provides one of the most powerful and popular platforms for blogging. PHP is offered by so many hosting companies as part of their basic packages, why go with a company that does not?

In addition to the technical considerations made when selecting a web host, there are the business aspects of the decision: location, cost, customer support, hours of operation, etc. If you do a search for web hosts, or read a computer magazine, you’ll come across the major hosting companies pretty fast. However, perhaps you would like to keep your business local. Sometimes it is nice to have your hosting company in the same time zone. On the other hand, you may want to spread out your business over different companies. Personally, I work on a few web sites and like to spread my business out over several different companies in different geographical locations around North America; however, there have been a few times when I have found it awkward trying to contact a company that is three hours ahead of me (I am on the West Coast; my hosting company is in the East). All these aspects have to be taken into consideration.

Summary

To summarize:

1) Decide upon a meaningful domain name, ideally one that is intuitive and directly relevant to the theme of your planned web site.

2) Register the domain. The company through which you register the domain can be the same company you also choose to host the site; the decision is yours.

3) When selecting a company to host your site, consider the two aspects of the services they provide:

a) business and customer service:
(i) cost,
(ii) location (time zones and hours of operation),
(iii) reliability and reputation,

b) technical aspects of hosting packages:
(i) web space and traffic allowed,
(ii) the number of email addresses included in a package,
(iii) other services supported, such as PHP, MySQL, the mod_rewrite Apache module, and Java. I would recommend getting a package that at least includes support for the first three. A host that supports these features will provide the basics of a plain HTML web site, plus it will allow you to add PHP-coded features, plus it will allow the option of having a WordPress Blog on your site.
(iv) anti-virus and anti-spam filtering. This option is nice to have, but not necessary. It does stop a lot of garbage email at the server instead of letting it through to your Inbox.