Web Development

How to Create a Website

Domain Name Registration

Your domain plays a very important role in SEOSEO is Search Engine Optimization. When registering a domain, there are few stuff you have to consider.

  • The shorter the domain, the better.
  • Your domain must contain your main keyword(s).
  • I highly recommend a .com or a .net because of SEO.
  • Make the domain easy to remember.

A domain like howtomakemoneyonline.com is way too long, even though it is right to the point, onlinemoney.com is a much better domain, or .net if the .com isn’t available.

If you are going to make a site and you want to rank your domain for certain countries, like if you are going to make a site specifically for UK, then you would consider getting a UK domain extension (.co.uk) , and if you are Indian and will be writing in Indian language, then an Indian domain extension (.in) would work the best. This means if your domain extension is .co.uk, then you would be targeting Google.co.uk , since you want people from UK to come to you, and you would rank for Google.co.uk.
If your site is going for worldwide, then .com or .net is the best. But of course if you cannot afford $9-$10 then you would either have to wait for a $1 .com coupon from Godaddy, or you would have to buy a .info (which is from $0.9-$2.5, depending on the registrars). If you have $0, I would recommend you to go with http://Blogger.com since it’s owned by Google.com, and is extremely easy to setup, and Google will help it rank (but not alone of course).

Here is a list of the top domain registrars.

The prices are different for different domain extensions.

Choosing the Best Web Hosting Company for your Website

Web hosting is simply where you host your website, in better words, where you keep the site’s files. This is needed for a site.
Don’t get frightened because I said files, you don’t have to have any skills to make a site, you don’t have to know how to code or design. 99% of the hosts have Fantastico, it is a tool which is you will get when you buy a host. Fantastico makes life simpler, There are many programs which you can install with 1 click using Fantastico, you will just have to enter the basic details (site title, description, email, username, password etc).
Well I recommend you to install WordPress (under “Blogs” in Fantastico). WordPress has extremely good plugins, and they are very easy to install, and surely will help in SEO and other stuff (depending on what plugins you use).
And another reason to use WordPress is because WordPress has lots and lots of themes, any kind of theme you can think of, even company themes.

Here is a list of Paid Web Hosts:

List of Free Web Hosts (I recommend paid)

I haven’t used any of the free hosts above, so if something happens to your site, it is your own responsibility.

I am not sure if free hosts have fantastico, but if they don’t, it’s very easy to install wordpress.

WordPress as CMS for your Website

I have already mentioned the basics about WordPress, now once you have installed it etc, here are good plugins to use.

  • Google Analyticor
  • Redirection
  • Google XML Sitemaps
  • All in one SEO
  • Sexy Bookmarks
  • Tweet This
  • Top Commentators Widget
  • Contact Form7
  • Akismet
  • SEO Friendly Images
  • WP Super Cache
  • WP Auto Tagger
  • Broken Link Checker Pro
  • WP-DB Manager
  • Permalink Redirect
  • Related Posts

Now it comes to the themes part, choosing your theme for WordPress.

Here are a list of sites that have Free Premium themes(not all of them though) and free themes.

Some themes don’t allow you to add a logo, you can just enter the site title and it will be shown as text, but some themes require you to add a logo, but no worries, there are plenty of free tools to make logos (online tools), and you can make your own if you are good at photoshop, or if you can afford, then just hire a designer from BHW, and again, there are plenty of good designers here.

Make your Site Content Good and Unique

When it comes to content, there is a very popular quote, “Content is King”.
Google, and any other search engine site LOVES unique content, by unique I am saying that it cannot be found anywhere else, you can write unique content, if you can’t, then you can use a content spinner (there are many free ones, but you will have to do small changes to it since none are perfect).

It is extremely easy to add articles on your WordPress blog, I am sure you already know by now.
You may ask, how many words per article does Google love the most, people say different stuff, but I prefer 300-500 word articles.
If you can afford to hire an article writer, then sure go ahead, an article writer charges about 1 cent per word, and there are plenty of good writers here on BHW, go to the Buy/Sell Service section and you should find plenty.
But if you cannot afford, and you are not good at all in writing articles, then you can use non-unique content, just copying from another site related to your niche, and then pasting it on your site.
There is a plugin for WordPress called wp-o-matic , it’s really simple to use, it will take content from the sites you want, but sometimes you will have small issues, so you may need to add the article(s) yourself.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Website

Every search engine loves certain backlinks, Google will love backlink type A more than backlink type B, but Yahoo will love Backlink type B more than backlink type A, but all search engines have something in common, they all like backlinks, but just some are more powerful than others. So any backlink you can get is worth it.
There are many tools that can get you backlinks, and they do save time.
Before building any backlinks, you need to know your keyword, which will be your anchor text. The keyword must be located in the title/domain.

Anchor text is basically text/keyword that is clickable, like example when you go to Google.com , on the top you will see “Images” “News” etc, those are anchor texts, clickable words/text, which will direct you to another page.
Here are ways to get backlinks.

Blog Commenting – Blog Commenting on High Page Rank (PR) blogs are very powerful, I used to do them a lot before and the results were impressing. You can find high pr blogs easily, just google “how to find highpr blogs” and there are tons of ways, you can also hire someone to use scrapebox for you to find high pr blogs.
There are also high pr blog posts, meaning the post itself has a high pr, that is more powerful, but you might notice there are many spammy comments, but still it will take you few seconds to get a backlink.

There is a tool called “Scrapebox” that scrapes blog posts, on any niche (you decide the keywords etc) and it will scrape it for you, and you fill in the details (ie anchor text, url etc) and it will comment on all of them, but watch out about akismet, but I prefer manual blog commenting.

Forum Profiles – Well you know what’s a forum I suppose? You are on a forum right now. Simply find many high PR forums, register on them, and in your signature just enter your anchor text. Most of the times or forums it is this format (without space between U and R at the start)

Code:
[U RL=http://mysite.com]Keyword[/Url]

There is a tool called XRumer, it is an extremely powerful tool, but if your site is new, you should not use it, it creates thousands and thousands of forum profiles and puts your anchor in signature, but it is expensive.

Link Exchange – This works best if your site has a page rank, then you just request link exchange on DP or WF with the same niche, and most likely with the same PR. He will put your anchor text on his/her site, and you put his/her at your site.

Web Directories – There are tens of thousands of web-directories for you to submit your website to, and they will approve it. They also have featured listing but don’t mind that, just go for the free listing which 99% of the directories offer, these aren’t as strong as high PR backlinks, but they are still worth it, as I said, every backlink is worth it.

Press Release – This is usually done when a new site is launched, or you are launching something on your site, or there is an event etc, then you simply write a press release (google “how to write a press release”) , and then you will submit it to many press release sites, it will take few days to approve your press release.

Buying Links – You can pay other website owners to put your anchor on their site, the prices vary depending on the page rank of their site, and of course target websites on the same niche as you.

Guest Blogging – This one is one of my favorite. It is simply offering other blog owners as the same niche of your site, offering them a free article with 2-3 anchor texts in your article, this is indeed really worth it.

Buying Blog Posts – You can also buy blog posts, sometimes they will write an article for you and publish it on their blog, and sometimes you will have to write an article and they will publish it on their site, and again, prices vary on the page rank of the site.

Article Directories – Writing unique articles yourself or hiring an article writer, and then submitting it to high PR article directories, it will take few days to approve.

Yahoo Answers – You can also hire people for this as well, but a bit hard to find. Answers.Yahoo.com , register an account and go to the category on your niche, and answer people’s questions, but first 25 answers, don’t put anything in the “source” box, and then afterwards, for most of the answers put your website link in the “source” box, but make sure your answer actually answers the person’s question, it might get chosen as best answer, and Yahoo Answers ranks well for questions, and your answer will be shown first if it was chosen as Best Answer by the questioner.

Social Media – Social Media like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc, submit your websites there. There are many social media sites like digg, and you will have to create an account on all of them, and then submit your website.

Web 2.0 Profiles – Creating profiles on Web 2.0 sites is very powerful indeed, like Squidoo and then writing an article and linking back to your site, and also Blogger (Free blog, yes!) and writing an article linking back to your site, and video sites like Youtube, Metacafe etc.

Monetizing your Website or Blog

Monetizing your website so you can make money. Here are few ways you can make money from your website.

Google Adsense – Google Adsense , to register an account your site must be at least 6 months old, they will give you a code and you will put it on your site, and a banner will show up, or text link (you decide), and then if a visitor goes to your site and clicks on it, you will get money, how much, it depends on the niche and keywords.
There are other networks like Google Adsense, but Google Adsense is the best.

Content Lockers – In order for a person to access a page on your website (this works only if the page has something useful for the visitor), you simply put a content locker , and the person will have to do a survey in order to access the page. There are sites that offer that, you can google “CPA Sites” and you will get a list.

Selling Banner Space – If your site gets lots of visitors, you can sell banner space on your website.

Selling Text Links – Selling text links on your Page Rank blog (works best if your blog has a page rank! Else you don’t have to do this). The price you will offer for links on your site depends on the page rank your website is.

Affiliate Marketing – Clickbank is a website where you can find many stuff to sell, and you will get a percentage for each sale. Usually each affiliate offer you will get banners to advertise it with, with different sizes so you can put it on your site.

Donations – This barely works now, it will only work if your site really really had useful information so the person will donate to your paypal.

Best Tools for Backlinking

  • Xrumer – Tool for creating forum profiles
  • Scrapebox – Tool for blog commenting and pinging
  • SeNuke – Multiple uses, Web 2.0 profiles, article directory submitter, etc

Other tools for Backlinking:

  • Market Samurai
  • Sick Submitter
  • Rss Submitter
  • SEO Pressor
  • Tweet Attacks
  • AMR
  • Magic Submitter

Tracking your Website`s Traffic

Google.com/analytics is the best tool which is free to track how many visitors your site gets, from where, and from which keyword from search engines, it is the best, and most website owners use it. There is a plugin called “Google Analyticor” for WordPress which will allow you to put the Google Analytics code very easily, I really do recommend it (I already listed it in the plugin list above).

best seo practices 2013

Best SEO Internet Marketing Practices for 2013

Best SEO Internet Marketing practices for newbies:

The thing to remember is that SEO isn’t a magic bullet. It’s important, but no one knows the exact algorithms the SEs use, and each one is different so all you can do is optimize the best you can. There happens to be a few things that you should just always do whenever you make a new website. Don’t stress over every little thing, just make sure you are doing it, this should just become kind of automatic for you.

Make sure you fill in your meta tags with a good title, description, and the right keywords. I personally don’t think the keywords meta-tag is nearly as important as everyone else on here does, but it gives me a way to organize my keywords list for me to reference. When you start having many different websites, it’s good to include whatever notes to yourself you can. When you come back to work on an older site you might not remember eveything you were thinking before. The metatags help you remember your site info as much as it helps the SE figure it out. A good rule of thumb is that anything that won’t hurt you for SEO and might help, you should use and use correctly. Definately use the title meta-tag, try to include keywords in the title. Definately use the description meta-tag, google will normally use this for the summary it displays in the listing. It isn’t used for indexing so write it for humans, this is what gets people to click on your link when they see it in the SERP. Don’t use the same metatags for every page on your site. Take the time to make them be specific to each page.

Create good content. Make sure you have some decent content. Content is what the internet was invented for. If you have unique and quality content, then all the seo and backlinking you’re doing is just to get the ball rolling. Give them what they want, show them where it is, and they’ll start coming. If it’s good enough then it’ll eventually start building on its own naturally because people like what they found. That’s the idea anyway. So whenever possible use the best page design and the best content possible. Avoid duplicate content between different pages on your site, the SE will most likely penalize your site for that.

Remember, your content isn’t just something to get google to like your site, it is the whole point of your site. The content and how you structure it is what will make visitors do what you want when they get there. If it’s crap they’ll just leave, and 99% of them won’t leave by clicking on your adsense or affilliate link, they’ll just close the window or use the back button. (yes, of course if your doing blackhat stuff you can make the browser go where you want, but that’s for a different discussion.)

Include your keywords. Structure your content correctly, make a few title headers in the content that include keywords (use header tags h1, h2, etc.), try to have a keyword density around 2% in your content, and maybe 4% for the whole page including the metatags, alt tags, anchors, etc.

Be sure that your .htaccess is set up correctly. Decide on which way you want your url to be and stick with it. If you decide to use www then always use it like that in your links, don’t use both. I usually set up a 301 for all www requests to redirect to non-www urls. If you don’t set that up then every single page on your site can appear to google as having at least one duplicate. If that’s the only thing wrong on your site it isn’t going to kill you, but it’s so easy to fix. If you don’t know how to set up a redirect in your .htaccess file then just do a search, there are many other threads explaining it. Check google if you can’t find it here. Also, .htaccess only apples if your on an Apache server, Windows servers do it a little differently, if that applies to you then just search google to find out how to do it. If your consitent in your linking, then the only time the redirect will come into play is if you get natural backlinks that you have no control over. You should also specify which you prefer, www or not-www in google tools if you use it. (If you don’t then you really should, I recommend you set yourself up an account for webmaster tools and analytics.)

Make a robots.txt file and I like to include a favicon because without them the robots will trigger file not found errors on your server. Be sure to configure your robots.txt correctly. Make a custom 404 page. If your site has more than just a couple of pages then also create a sitemap.xml file. It’s not a bad idea to just create a sitemap anyway no matter what, it lets you define the structure of your site to the crawlers. Just search google if you don’t know how to do any of that, it’s very basic and you can find exact instructions within a minute when you do a search.

Other than that there isn’t a lot more you can do for on-site SEO. When people ask about SEO they’re always thinking of on-site SEO, but thats the easy and quick part. Just do it and get on with it.

Everything else is off-site SEO and involves building backlinks and promotion.
This is where you need to focus your efforts. This is where the magic bullet is, if there really is one.

Social Bookmarks, Directory Submissions, Profile Links, and Blog Comments are really the easiest place to start getting backlinks. It’s not a bad idea to purchase these links from a service. They are easy to make, but to do it right they really need to be posted from many different accounts and ip adresses. A good idea when your starting is to do it yourself a little bit to see how it works, then purchase larger quantities from a service. You want to get a lot of links, but you don’t want to over do it. Building to fast can look unnatural, just do some searches and read up on it a little more. How many and how fast is a judgement call you have to make. hold off on more complex linkbuilding until you have a little more experience. Linkwheels and other link structures can be very powerful, but can also hurt your site a lot if not done correctly.

Whenever possible include keyword anchors and title or alt tags on your backlinks. Don’t always use the same anchors, vary it up a little, use 3 or 4 different keywords and even do a few with some non keyword anchors. You are trying to look as though a lot of different real people have taken a liking to your site, if it were natural then all links wouldn’t be exactly the same, so you want to simulate that same type of randomness. Backlinking strategies are all about simulating the natural events that happen as a site grows in popularity. If you can do it successfully then the SE’s will give you good position in the listings, and then hopefully what you are simulating can become reality. The point of all of it is to get traffic.

Change up your anchor text. The idea of backlinking is to simulate that masses of people are becoming interested in your site. It should have some amount of randomness to it in order to look natural. I’ve seen a few made up stats on what’s best, but I think a good rule of thumb is maybe about 45% primary keywords, 35% secondary keywords, and about 15% random unrelated like Click Here, and then about 5% just the url. The exact percentage isn’t dramatically important, it just needs to seem like the linking is natural.

Create relevant articles containing your keywords, include backlinks using keyword anchors, and submit to article directories. Article directories are mostly authority sites and your article becomes a relevant backlink to your site. Then create profiles and accounts on blogs, social networking sites, forums etc. Include a link to your website whenever you do that and each one of those become backlinks as well.

Thats the end of it. Well kinda.
Go back and watch your stats to see what keywords are getting the most traffic to your site, analyze the data a little bit and if you need to, remove or add keywords to your content and tags, and adjust the anchors your using in your backlinks.

Continue building links. Remember you’re trying to artificially create the appearance to the SE that your site is popular. When that happens naturally, people are always adding new links to your site. Since you are trying to look natural you have to do the same thing. Linkbuilding never stops completely.

OK, there you go. That’s that basics of SEO. Everything else is about fine tuning, and has to be looked at for each individual situation.

Source BlackHatWorld Forum