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Building a successful website is not an
easy task. It takes time, work and most of all patience.
There are many different factors that all need to come together
in order for a website to take off and become a success.
Especially if your starting out for the first time, things
can be very overwhelming. So this article is intended to
guide beginners, who are trying to build there first site,
as well as veterans who have already created a few sites,
but just have not had the knowledge to turn those sites
into successful ones.
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First Thing First - Before you start designing the site,
you need a well developed plan on what type of site you
want and what sort of features you plan on offering to your visitors.
It is very important that you offer something unique to your visitors.
Site Design - Once you have your idea for a site and know
what your going to offer you need to design the site (or purchase
a design if you not a web designer). The design isn't as important
as alot of people think and having a great design by no means
guareentees your site will be successful. With that said, there
are still a few things that any good site has to have if it plans
on being a success.
- User friendly navigation - Having a clear and simple navigations
system is very important for a site. If people get frustrated
because they can't find something they will leave and go somewhere
else.
- Content Setup - The content on your page must be setup in a
manner where you can tell what goes with what. Having a good color
scheme can really help out by seperating content so that it is
easy to read and find things.
How do you get traffic? - Ok, so now that you have setup
the site on the internet, how do you get visitors? This is obviously
the hardest part and takes the most work.
Content, Content, Content - This is definetly the most
important thing for a website. Unique content is key. It doesn't
matter what tricks you try to get visitors to your site, if you
have no content, people will leave as soon as they get to your
site.
Search Engine Submission - Once you have good content
on your site, you need a way for people to find it. You need to
submit your site to the large and small search engines. But definetly
make sure you do at least these.
- google
- yahoo
- msn
- ask jeeves
- excite
Stay away from software or sites that say they will automatically
submit your site to 1000's of search engines, those will hurt
your site more then they will help.
Search Engine Optimization - Once you have submitted your
site to some search engines, you need to optimize your site. Meta
tags are no longer as important as they once were, most of the
major engines to longer include them as factors in there search
algorithm.
- Good key word placement - This is very important. If your page
is about Photoshop tutorials, you want to make sure to use those
words many times on the same page. As well as other combos like
tutorial, adobe, tips.
- Spider Friendly URLs - You want your URL's to be as simple
as possible. If your page is about downloads,
yoursite.com/downloads.hml
is better then
yoursite.com/navigation?downloads=15
If your using a PHP, CGI or some other scripting language having
long dynamic links is unavoidable at times.
- Heading Tags (H1 - H6) - Heading tags are used by some search
engines, google included, to identify words which are more important
than the rest of the page text. The point of this is that the
heading tags will sum up the topic of the page, so they are counted
as important keywords
Link Exchange - This is also very important to bring traffic
to your site. You want to make sure you have links to your site
from as many sources as possible. This will also help your PageRank
if you get linked by sites with good page rank. Also remember
that text is always better then an image, since anchor text is
what search engines look for.
That concludes that basics of creating a successful website. Theres
alot more that could be said on almost every part of this article,
but this is just meant to give an overview of the process.
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