How to Make a Website

So you want to know how to make a website. Where do you begin? This article walks you through the basic steps: Making your Web pages Designing your website, and Getting your website online. Making your Web pages Your website will probably contain several Web pages, linked together. A Web page is similar to a printed page, in that it can contain text and images. However there are some important differences between a Web page and a printed page. For one thing, a Web page can be of any length, from just a few words to several screenfuls of content. To view a long Web page, you simply scroll down in your browser. A Web page can also contain links to other Web pages and websites. This ability to link to other content really makes the Web useful. So how do you make Web pages? Read on... Understanding HTML Web pages are created using a language called HTML. HTML is easy to learn. An HTML Web page consists of the page's text surrounded by various tags for structuring and formatting the page. For example, to create a paragraph of text you surround the text with

and

tags:

Here is a paragraph of text.

You can create your HTML Web pages using any plain text editor, such as the free WordPad on Windows (Start menu > All Programs > Accessories > WordPad) and TextEdit on Mac (Applications > TextEdit). Just open up the editor, type your text and HTML tags, then save the file with a .html extension (for example, mypage.html). You can then double-click the file to view the resulting page in your Web browser. If you're new to HTML then start with our basic HTML tutorial. What if you don't want to learn HTML? HTML is fairly simple, and it's a good idea to learn at least a few basic tags. However if you don't fancy building your Web pages by typing HTML by hand then there are some good alternatives: You can use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Web page editor. This is software that you run on your computer. It lets you create Web pages by entering or pasting text and inserting images, much like using a word processor. There are many WYSIWYG editors available. At the high end there are applications such as Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Expression Web. RapidWeaver and iWeb are also options if you use a Mac. Good free editors include KompoZer and Amaya. You can use a content management system (CMS). Many Web hosting packages come with a CMS that lets you enter your Web page content via your Web browser. Typically this involves using a browser-based rich text editor (which works like a simple word processor). You can create a blog. Blogs are specialised content management systems that are very easy to use. Find out more in How to Start a Blog. Designing your website At some point you'll probably want to add graphical elements to your website, whether it's a few holiday snaps, a logo, or a complete page design. To do this, you'll need a graphics editor to create the graphics, and ideally some knowledge of CSS to style your pages. To get some general Web design tips, check out our Web Design and Style articles. Creating Web graphics To create graphics and manipulate photos you need to use an image editor of some sort. These let you open or create images, adjust them as much as you like, then save them out in a format suitable for including in your website. Popular image editors include: Adobe Photoshop (and the more affordable Photoshop Elements) Adobe Fireworks GIMP (free — strange name but it does a good job!) Various free browser-based editors such as Splashup and Aviary. You can read tutorials on working with popular graphics editors in our Web Graphics and Multimedia section. Once you've created your images you can insert them into your Web pages — either using your chosen WYSIWYG editor, or by adding HTML img tags (find out more on working with images and HTML). Using CSS to style your pages As well as adding images to your website, you can style your Web pages using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Like HTML, CSS is an easy-to-learn language. You can use CSS to lay out pages; style images and text; build navigation menus, and so on. If you're coding your HTML by hand then you can easily add CSS to style your pages. Typically you do this by creating a separate .css file to store your styles. If you're making a website using a WYSIWYG editor then it will handle much of the CSS styling for you. However, for best results it helps to learn at least a little CSS. To find out more about using CSS, start with our CSS introduction, then have a look at our other CSS articles. Getting your website online Once you've made your website, you'll want to put it on the Web so that others can see it. This involves signing up with a Web hosting company, then uploading your Web pages and other files to the company's Web server. Finding a Web hosting service There are thousands of Web hosting companies out there. How do you choose the right one for you? Try reading our Choosing a Web Hosting Service article to help you decide. If you want to have a domain name for your website — such as www.example.com — then take a look at How to Set Up Your Own Domain Name. Uploading your website Once you've signed up for a Web hosting account it's time to upload your website's files. Find out how to get going with your hosting service, as well as how to upload files, in Getting Started with Your Web Hosting Service. Now you've made your website, and put it on the Web for all to see. Congratulations!

Podcast SEO – How to optimize your podcast. About.com

Ever wanted to know how to optimize your podcast? This article on about.com tells you everything you need.

“Depending on what you are using to create your blog entry, optimizing the podcast’s page is a good start. Sites such as PodOmatic allow each podcast episode to have its own page and unique URL. When choosing the title of your podcast, you need to keep in mind what relevant keyterms or keyphrases people would likely search for that could lead them to your podcast. For example, my podcast is about SEO or search engine optimization. If you type “SEO podcast” on Google,you’ll see me in the #1 position.”

I’d like to thank John Havens, for letting me be the first guest writer on about.com’s podcasting section. Thanks John, you rock!

Top 7 SEO mistakes new site owners make.

1- Lack of content Not enough original content can be bad for your site and possibly land you into the supplemental results.

2- Duplicated content This is usually a problem with content management systems. Using the same amount of content with a few words rearranged can hurt. For example, if your site offered services for different cities and you used the same content for all and simply swaped out the cities; that would be seen as duplicated content.

3- Bad urls – Google just announced they can no longer read urls that end in id=123, which is great, however if your urls contain more than 2 query strings, you can still run into problems.

4- Hiding content – Believe it or not, this is still a problem. Some people try to get away with it by not making blend in exactly with the background (making the content 1 shade darker or lighter than the background color) or by making the content so small it can barely be read.

5- Exchanging links Linking to unrelated sites, especially while taking part in a link exchange, can be bad for your site. As Matt Cutts has stated here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/2006/05/, it’s best to stay away from link exchanges with sites that are not related. This might translate into your site not being fully indexed.

6- Backlinks and rankings – Many people have no idea what to do when they have a site built. They assume they can have it built and submit it to Google and that’s all it takes. Others are obsessed on numbers, thinking if they merely out-link their competition, they will rank better. Neither one of these are true.

7- Title and descriptions tags – Keeping title tags and or description tags the same throughout the site is bad. I have heard designers say, It keeps the site uniform. What it really does is place you in the supplemental index. Title and description tags should reflect what the page is about.

The Dark Art Of Search Engine Optimization

The title of this article is designed to illustrate the point of this article. Today we won't be taking a look at black-hat search engine optimization tactics. Admittedly, I've toyed with them in a "know your enemy" kind of way but I'm no expert on advanced cloaking techniques nor effective link sp@mming tactics. What we're going to cover here are the hidden (i.e. dark) areas of effective optimization strategy.

I've written numerous times in past articles and blog posts that using tricks to rank your site highly is, in the end, ineffective as tricks imply a manipulation of the ranking formula and will eventually become obsolete as the search engines work to advance their algorithms and shut down such possible abuses. But here I'm going to illustrate some of the tricks we use to drive traffic to our site. Is this a conflict? Not really; these "tricks" aren't so much directed at search engines as they are website owners and visitors. These are marketing tricks, not SEO tricks - they just happen to help you with your rankings.

Before we begin let's review an important point about Google. When most people think of Google they think of the dominant search engine (and in that they would be right) HOWEVER if Google was primarily a search engine they would be much smaller than they are now. No, they are an advertising company and the world's largest at that. To this end they need traffic, market share, and clicks. They need you to love Google.com, visit it often, visit their other properties and offerings such as Gmail. If you do this, the odds of you clicking on one of the paid ads increases and their primary function is fulfilled. It is driven by this purpose that Google has developed the most complex search algorithm that has ever existed. Their search is their primary source of traffic. The better their results, the more you will return, the greater the likelihood you will click an ad, the more revenue they generate (thus leading to their continued increases in reported revenue quarter-after-quarter). Why is this important? Because this is the driving force of their current algorithm and will be for the foreseeable future we can assume that any action that increases relevant traffic to your site, increases the stickiness of your site and/or increases the number of links from relevant sites to yours will help your rankings and it will help Google keep their visitors loyal.

Let's also recall the purpose of this article. This is NOT an article about black-hat search engine optimization tactics, it's about the hidden aspects of SEO that are often overlooked. And so, without further ado, let's get down to the meat - what are the dark tactics that you can use to boost your website rankings.

Building A Sticky Site

A point I've made in past articles that I will reinforce here as opposed to "contradicting" will be that of the importance of a sticky site. Of course, monitoring your statistics to assess your visitors' behavior is an important practice for the conversions on your site however it's importance from a search engine optimization perspective is often overlooked. I've mentioned before and I'll mention again, the search engines have the ability to monitor the length of time a visitor spends between visits to that engine. If you are on Google, enter "seo services" into it and visit the Beanstalk site but only spend 5 seconds there before hitting the back button Google can infer that the site was not what you were looking for. If it was 5 or 10 minutes before you returned back to Google they could thus infer that you found content you found useful to your query.

So let's put that more obviously, having a site on which visitors find what they're looking for quickly, easily, and in a visually pleasing way will increase their time on your site which will thus increase the assumption by the search engines that you are relevant for the phrase the searcher has queried. This will reinforce that your site does indeed belong among the top site. As a disclaimer: this works on a mass scale so don't go running off and clicking through to you competitors and quickly hitting the back button. First, it's unethical (like clicking their paid links) and second, it doesn't work like that (how big a hole would THAT be in the algorithm) so it would only be a waste of your time.

The how to of building a sticky site I will leave to designers (being an SEO - my skills lie more in understanding mathematical formula).

Clickability Counts

The engines know when your site appears in a set of search results and they further know how often your site was click on when it appeared. The more often your site is selected when presented in a set of results the more relevant it is assumed to be and thus, the more entrenched it becomes in that set of results (assuming your stickiness issues are dealt with).

What this means is that your title and description matter, not just as part of the classical search engine optimization tactics we've used them for since the 90's but also to draw visitors to your site. Fortunately the end goal of the engines closely matches what your own end goal should be for your site - maximizing traffic. Let's take a look at two example titles that the Beanstalk site could have:

An old-school over-optimized title: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services Company | Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization | SEO Services, Internet Marketing, Link Building, Consulting, Training & Copywriting

Our current title: Expert SEO Services by Beanstalk

Can you see the different? While our title changes periodically as we test new titles for clickthroughs we always keep it short, easily read, and always such that the whole title will appear in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Our clickthroughs are much higher with shorter titles than longer and we have seen the same results with client sites.

The same applies to your description tag but the rules are a bit different. With your description tag you want to make sure to include your targeted keywords and make the copy compelling to a searcher. The reason for this is that when searched keywords are including in your description, is is typically the description that appears in the SERPs. This give you an opportunity to determine how your ad to the world appears. You write your title, you write your description - write both well and your clickthroughs will increase. And when your clickthroughs go up, the implied relevancy the engines will assume your site has to that phrase will increase with it and thus, so too will your rankings for that phrase.

Getting People To Link To You

We're not going to bother discussing reciprocal link building, directory submissions or the other usual suspects. There are countless articles out there on those topics; what we're going to focus on here are the tactics for getting articles picked up widely the resources you want to get them onto (and if you're reading this - you know it works) as well as ways to get the links that both you and the search engines will love the most - the ones you don't ask for or work for outside of creating a great site with useful content. The best part of these links is that they not only work to boost your link popularity but they also tend to drive great traffic to your site. Let's begin with articles.

When you're working to publish an article there are two main audience members: the readers and, more importantly, the editors (I say more importantly as they're the ones that determine if you have any readers at all). There are some tactics for increasing both:
Write a compelling title. This gets back to the point I was making in the first paragraph. Everyone is interested in black hat search engine optimization, even those of us who don't practice it. Readers will be drawn to it as it receives relatively low coverage and editors like to publishing something that they feel may draw some controversy. While this article doesn't get into black hat tactics as some editors may have hoped, it will draw them in and get their attention.
Find quality related resources and get the article published there. I generally use a tool like PR Prowler to find good, quality resources to submit articles to. You can do it manually through a search engine, PR Prowler just speeds up the process so much that after its first use it's paid for itself. You want the places you submit to, to be related to your industry and you want them to provide a link back. If you can setup that link as anchor text instead of your URL - all the better.
Keep a list and add to it. If you're going to publish multiple articles don't start from scratch every time. Keep a list and try to add a few sites to it with each submission. This will keep your list growing and get you more exposure/links as time goes on.
Keep a good relationship with the editors. They are the end-all-be-all of whether this tactic will work or not as a link and traffic building tactic. Make sure you're polite and don't write nasty emails if you get declined. Read what they say and make sure to take it into account with future articles.

But what if you don't want to build links with articles, what if you want to get links the old fashioned way (and I'm talking about the old old old way - you know, before there was any SEO value to it). What if you would like to get people to link to you simply because they like your content (I know, shocking but it actually happens !!!) There are a few different factors that you need to take into account to accomplish this. Here are a few important rules to follow:
You'll need to create content that others will want to link to. This is an art in-and-of-itself. I wrote about some of the basic rules involved with this in a past article "Building Link Bait" and so I won't repeat it here.
Get the bait into social bookmarking sites. This will get people interested in your topic aware of it. If it's good, they may link to it. Don't just focus on Digg and the other majors, look around for some industry-specific bookmarking sites. For example, when this article is complete I'll work to get it into Sphinn, an SEO bookmarking site.


Get the bait into forums and/or blogs. I'm not talking about blog sp@mming here, I'm talking about finding blogs and forums that are RELATED to your topic and who's visitors could be genuinely helped by the tool, information, etc. that you're providing. Don't worry if the blog has rel="nofollow" on the links. The purpose is webmaster awareness, not getting links from the blogs (I'll leave that to a different article).
Promote the bait on your site. Use banners, links, your blog, etc. to build awareness.
Provide the code to link to your bait. The easier you make it for people to link to you, the more of them will. Provide the code with a text and banner option and you'll increase the number of people who will link to you.
Put out a press release. If it's big enough news, put out a press release. If the media grabs it you've won the lottery both in publicity and in high valued links.
If the topic of your bait is searched on the engines, rank it. :)

Conclusion

So these are the darker arts we're talking about. Not black-hat, just overlooked more often than not. Add these to your repertoire of thoughts as you optimize and link building for your site and you've given yourself a one-up over most if not all of your competition.