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.

I view a lot of websites in my free time. I offer design and functionality feedback to newbies in the online forums. More times than I can count, I will click on a link in one of those feedback forums, and there it is. A SPLASH PAGE. The most annoying and useless page on any website.

You might be thinking, “Well, my website has a splash page, but it’s because the script I used put the main part of my website in a sub folder”

If you use a “simple script” installer, you probably had this happen to you. When you install something like oscommerce or wordpress, you are usually asked to name the folder or directory in which you want to keep that script in. With oscommerce, the default is “catalog” and with wordpress it is usually “blog.” Then you realize that when you type your domain name in, you see your normal home page, or if you dont have one, NOTHING. Then you realize that in order to get to the script you just installed, you have to type in yourdomain.com/catalog to see your new script in action.

The “newbie” thing to do would to be to create a page called index.html that will show a nice little graphic or a flash animation that says ENTER or SHOP NOW

Other times, people will create a splash page because they have multiple sections to their site. For instance, a photographer might have a portfolio, a store, and a blog all on the same page. They then assume that it is a good idea to make their first page a place where the user chooses where they want to be, the Blog, Portfolio, or Store. It sounds like it makes sense, but it is not the best idea and here is why.

#1 reason why splash pages are a BAD IDEA

They kill your SEO (search engine optimization). Just so you know, people do not PAY to get on the first page of google, those people on the first page of google just have websites that are very search engine optimized. If you want to learn more about optimizing your website for search engines, see this post.

Search engines, especially google, have very complicated algorithms to calculate which website in their directory is the most relevant to the terms entered in the search box. One of the things that search engines give a lot of weight to is the content on your first landing page. They assume that you will put the most relevant and important content on your first page because that is where most people will end up. They also use the main page to spider through your website, the more links to the rest of your website that is on your main page, the better it is for the search engines.

So now that you know this, when you think about a splash page, it goes against every thing that search engines want to see in a website. A splash page is usually ONE picture (or flash item) and ONE link into the website. This gives the search engine almost nothing as far as the most important content on your site. You want your main page to be a plethora of information about your website.

#2 reason why splash pages are a BAD IDEA

It annoys and confuses customers. Especially flash or video splash pages or intros. Most people who are browsing the net are people who like things instant. This is about 98% of society. People who search the internet are there for instant gratification. The goal of all web designers is to create as few clicks to get the customer from one page to where they WANT to be. When you have a splash page, you are already adding one click just to SEE the content which they will then have to click another time to get to the category or page they want to be in.

Also, there is no way that you can fully summarize your website and all of it’s content with one image and an enter here link. When a customer finds your website somewhere on the net, (via search engine, link in someone else’s site, etc) they don’t really know what you are all about and they really can not learn that from your main page. That makes your first impression very poor, or almost non-existent.

When a regular user comes to your site, they already know what they want and where they want to be. It will be quite annoying to see that same page over and over again that they know contains not one thing that they want to read about.

Oh yea, and did I mention, if you have a flash intro it’s even worse. Then you have to sit there while you wait for the darn thing to load, and if you have a slow internet connection, it is going to really drive you nuts. If you are a new visitor, at this point you would think to yourself,
“This is not worth it, I can probably get the same thing/information somewhere else on the net”

So this may of may not leave you with a dilemma.

You have a website that’s already built and you don’t know how to move things so that you do not need this splash page.

Depending on your situation you can do one of 3 things.

If you have a website that is just ONE thing. (Meaning it is JUST a store, or JUST a blog) You can simply log into your hosting control panel and create a REDIRECT. What this does is it automatically will bring people to yourdomain.com/blog when a visitor types in yourdomain.com. The visitor will see a change in the url bar, but it will not be a change that will alarm them. The search engines will be the same. They will crawl to your domain but instantly get redirected to your sub directory of “blog” and use that content as your main page content. This is, however, not the best way to do it because search engines are not super keen on redirects, but it is WAY better than a splash page. Lots of high ranking sites still use a redirect for their root (yourdomain.com) to their sub directory (yourdomain.com/blog).

The other thing you can do is reconfigure your script to be moved into your root (yourdomain.com). If you have an oscommerce website, you can read about how to do that here. If you have wordpress you can click here. If you need help with a different type of script, feel free to contact me!

And finally, if you have a site that has multiple types of content (like a portfolio, blog, and store) then you need to figure out which you would like for customers to see on first impression, and then create a navigation in which you can get to any one of those sections without having to move from the page in which you are on. You then will move that one part into your root directory, and can keep the rest of the parts in their existing directories. You can see an example of this here on my husband’s photography website: BSC Photo

Looking at the landing page of the site, you can see that there is a lot of content, and there is a link to all parts of the portfolio as well as the shop. We are adding a link to the blog soon

So the moral of today; Ditch the Splash Page and get a nice, userfriendly home page.