Web Design For Idiots

This will be the most valuable thing you learn about getting your website seen

S.E.O. If you have been doing any research on how to get visitors to your website, you will have come across this term one way or another. If not, then let me tell you want S.E.O. means.

Search Engine Optimization:
A practice in making your website friendly or optimized for search engine crawling or indexing.

There are three major things that you should concern your self when it comes to building a website. These are things that you should take into consideration while you are designing, but if you are done designing, you can easily make some changes to optimize your site. So lets start with THE most important thing in S.E.O.

BACK-LINKS

You probably never heard this term before. I didn’t until I started doing some serious research into how to optimize my website. A back link is literally a link back to your website from another website. Its a simple concept really. Google figures that if people are linking to your website, it must be good. They look at a back link as a vote for your site from another site.

The thing is, there are quality back-links and garbage back links.
A quality back link is one that is on a website that contains relevant content to your website, does not have a “noFollow” tag on all things, and is not a “link farm”

Now to explain a little more in depth the whole noFollow thing. The average person’s website does not use noFollow on their links, but there are some scripts like WordPress, that automatically ads noFollow into your link’s HTML code to tell the search engines NOT to follow the link to your website. If a website is scanning another site and finds a link to your website on that other website, they will follow it and basically record it into the database as a link to your site. When there is a noFollow tag, the search engines just see that link as plain text and it has nothing to do with your website in their eyes. There are plugins and addons for wordpress that take the noFollow tags out of links and links in comments.

A link farm is something you REALLY want to stay away from. A link farm is a place that will offer to sell you 1,000 “quality” back links and claim to get you to the top 10 in google within a short period of time. Now the old adage holds true where if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. These places CAN get you to the top 10 of google, but it is at a HUGE cost to yourself. Basically, google will first see that you have a lot of back-links to your site and catapult you to the top. Then they will do a little more searching and find out that those links came from a spammer’s source or LINK FARM and your website will be black listed and you will have to work VERY hard to your website off of google’s black list. You will basically have to grovel and work hard to apologize.

Now, a directory is different from a link farm. They are not spammers, but simply collectors of links that they organize into certain categories for users to browse. A place like Link Listings is just a collector of links. The difference is that a directory will only give your website ONE link and one link only. A link farm basically owns loads of domains and they fill their domains with lots of listings. Have you ever accidentally typed in the wrong url and ended up on a page that looks like it’s just a directory of random websites? It happens to me all the time. THOSE things are likely owned by link farms.

The best back-links are those that you acquire natural. When a website does post your link on their website, they are truely interested in you website and want their visitors to check it out. So in theory, the whole idea of back links is the really good.

A good way to accumulate quality back-links is to visit people’s blogs and post a comment with a link to your website. The thing is, though, that you really only should make comments on blogs that are relevant to your website, AND your comment should absolutely NOT be just a link. You should always make a useful comment that is relevant to the post. This is how the blogging community has become so tight knit. Bloggers will help each other with this, and usually will return the comment on your site. If you don’t have a blog, and you are promoting some other site, don’t worry, you can still comment on blogs with a link back to your website. Its all good so long as you make things useful and relevant – and friendly.

You have to be aware though that blogs by default automatically make comment links noFollow. So you will need to find blogs that are noFollow Free, or have the uComment iFollow logo. If you look at my comment box, you will see a little line of text that says “This comment could be noFollow Free” There are a few easy ways to find noFollow Free blogs. One is to just google noFollow Free Blog Listings. The other way to download a program called Fast Blog Finder which is a program where you can put in a keyword and then have it search for all types of blogs. It will give you a list and highlight those that are noFollow free. Its a great way to get some good back links AND to find new blogs. There is a free version of this program, so go ahead and download it. I have been using the free version for 6 months now!

And finally, the other good way to get quality back links is to write articles for other websites. If you do an about.com website and add your link to that website, you will get a link back. Go around and find article based websites where you can contribute that are specific to your niche, and get to writing!!!

So while you are tackling the whole idea of building backlinks, you can start optimizing your website’s content for search engines. The whole idea about optmizing your site for search engines is CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT!!. Even if your website is mostly images, you can still add textual content to your pages!

Always add an alt and title tags to your images!! An example would be like this:

(alt tags should also be used on text links!)

Search Engines supposedly give a lot of weight to the content in your footer. If you create a nice little list of links to important pages on your website and give those links alt tags, then you will have that covered. You can see an example here.

And finally, WRITE CONTENT THAT IS DESCRIPTIVE AND RELEVANT TO YOUR WEBSITE!!

So i know this was another long and wordy post, but if you are a newbie, this will be EVERYTHING you need to know to start getting your website to the top. When you have started collecting back-links, you can go to google and type in the following:
link:yourdomain.com
This will show all websites that google has found that are linking to your site. Sometimes it takes a while for google to find new links though.

Check your GOOGLE PAGE RANK HERE 10 is the best and 0 is the least. Also note that you will be at 0 for a long time when you first put your site up. It took 6 months to go from 0-1 with my bscphoto.com website. And a LOT of time was spent on that site.

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Want to know who is offering this awesome content? Here it is! Someone who is relatively new to web design. I am new enough to still remember how absolutely frustrating it was to try and get anything done in this field, but have also been around long enough to be able to help those that are where I was a year ago. Aside from web design, I run the office of my dad's engineering business, and do book keeping by trade. I love my pets.. All 6 cats, 1 peg legged dogs, and 1 hedgehog. LOVE THEM!! Oh yea, and my husband. He lets me chase my dreams and I let him do the same. We are happy people because of it. Read more from this author

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 9:41 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.