I put alot of time into this hopefully it is made a sticky. Web Marketing & Making money with your website By Todd Hebert Owner The Tire Store and LA Wheels Direct I first want to start by explaining that designing a website is the easy part. It is what you do after that takes time and must be maintained as outlined in this training paper. Everything included in here is very important and must be followed. GETTING UP AND RUNNING 1) Site design and optimization The important thing to designing you website is to make it user friendly but at the same time using your keywords (phrases you want people to search for to find you) numerous times throughout the page. This must be done on every page you create. Some key items you must include on each page are outlined below. A) Meta Tags - the most important meta tag is your title. You want your main keywords included in your title. Many search engines such as Google rely heavily on title tags. The next important is the description tags although search engines do not rely on these much many of them use them as your listing when your search comes up. You want to use the description tag to promote your page. The final tag that is not quite as important is your keyword tag. Many search engines do not use this anymore but for the ones that do you will want to include this tag. B) Picture tags You will also want to include alt tags on your pictures. Google especially relies on alt tags to bring pictures into the search results. C) Internal linking Many skilled webmasters overlook this important aspect of web design. This can also be included in promoting your website below but I chose to include it here. Internal linking can make or brake a website. You want to have links within your website so that both people and search engines can navigate your site. When creating a new page be sure that people can link to other pages on your website via that page such as your home page however where people make a mistake is they put a hyperlink that plainly says HOME Or MAIN PAGE this is wrong. You want this to use anchor text with something descriptive Such as Return to the flower farms main page or More exotic flowers to choose from. Remember internal links count as much as external links. 2) Promoting your website The important thing about promoting your website is that you want to come up naturally in the search results so that it does not cost you for advertising. The thing to remember is this does not happen overnight it takes time, changes made today may not make a difference for a couple of months but keep up with it. Quality inbound links are the key to getting your site to the top of the search engines and there are various ways to do this as described below. One important thing to mention is anchor text is very important you want to change your anchor text often. In case you do not know what anchor text is it is the phrase people see that they click on so for a tire site it might look like this BF Goodrich tires at the best prices. A) Link exchanges Link exchanges are the best way for a beginning website to get started. A good source is linkmarket.net . Remember from day one work on this for at least 15 minutes every day and stay with it always as much as you can. Every link counts and gets you further up on the search results. B) Directories Submitting your site to directories is also a must do. Each directory gives you a link that holds a lot of weight. I suggest the Free directories with exception of Yahoo directory that is one of the only paid directories I recommend. Submit to the open directory project (once) This directory can take years to get into but do not keep submitting or you will never get listed. The important thing is to find a section that actually has an editor that is active. C) Writing Articles There mare many free article sites on the web. You right an article about your product and make sure you are able to include a link to your site in some way.. Article writing takes time but can help you more then anything if done right. D) Paid advertising Use this alternative when getting started or to compliment what you have already done.. Various search engines offer paid advertising such as Google, Looksmart and yahoo. This can get you a lot of traffic fast but remember it can cost you money just as fast. My advice is to pick keywords that are relevant but not general for instance if you sell Tires you may not want to purchase the keyword tires however BF Goodrich tires might be better. E) Forum posting This should have bee listed higher up on the list. Online forums are a great place to get your links out there. Many forums allow you to include a link in your signature. I suggest joining a number of forums and change your anchor text and link you point to offer so that each page and keyword is getting exposure. This method is very effective. Remember do not spam forums just go in and answer questions or ask. You do not want to promote your products just post.. Your signature link being posted is what you are trying to accomplish. 3) Putting it all together Maintaining your site takes time but it does not have to interfere with your regular schedule. Listed below are the key things you should try to do following the schedule below. Daily Exchange links & post in forums Weekly Write an article or 2 and submit to directories Bi weekly Change content on your pages, Little changes let the search engines know the page is still active. Monthly Create new pages atleast 15 this can be done throughout the month but you should try to create atleast 15 new pages per month. The more pages you have the better remember internal linking and optimization. This is always necessary however if you want to make money with your site through alternative methods it is recommended. Remember each page is another page people can find to click on items to make you money. MAKING MONEY WITH YOUR SITE It does not matter what kind of site you have you can make money with it. Even if you have a shopping site why not compliment it with some revenue from other sources. Many shopping sites make more money from referral revenue then they make on selling products. Here are some ideas. Affiliate programs Affiliate programs allow you to promote other peoples products and make commission on what your site sells. This is done by banners, Links, Content links and various other forms. A highly recommended affiliate website to get you started is Commision Junction www.cj.com . Pay Per click This is a great way to make money and try to put the ads on every page. The 2 top companies are Google with there Adsense program and Yahoo with it’s Yahoo Publisher Network publisher.yahoo.com. You must choose one or the other because Google will ban you if it see’s Yahoo ads on your site. Selling Advertising Space This is another alternative but I would use it only to compliment the other 2.
If you're referring to the TITLE element, it is most definately not a META element. It has its own semantic meaning - the title of the Web page. Since your whole post deals more with SEO than actual design best practices, I'll spare the hyperbole and just say that you should put the page title first, followed by the section title, and then finish up with the site title. For example, <title>Chicago Bears Off to Promising Start in 2007 | Sports | Chicago Sun-Times</title> Code (markup): As for the actual META element, search engines do not pay nearly as much attention to them as you think. Due to over a decade of abuse by black-hat spammers looking to increase their own rankings at the expense of the people they were trying to promote their sites to, search engines obliterated the value of the META tags in their search engine results. If you're going to use a META tag or two for search engine optimization purposes, stick to the keywords and description only. However, bear in mind that search engines will place little to no weight on these in the SERPS, and they're just a security blanket in this day and age. Search engines will use the meta description if they can't pull a description from the page in question, but other than that, they're worthless. And when the top four search engines control 90% of the search market, you really don't want to spend a lot of time optimizing your meta tags for the other 10% of the market. 5-10 minutes at most is all you should spend on META. To Hell with Google. This is an accessibility requirement for people who cannot see the images (either because they use dialup and turned them off to improve download times, are blind and using a screen reader to read the page, or are using a text-based browser such as Lynx). I'll agree with you that inter-page linking is over-looked. However, usability studies have strongly indicated that many people prefer having either the site's logo be clickable (and take them to the home page) and/or having "Home" as the link to the home page. It gives people a sense of security and safety, knowing that if they get lost, they can "follow the yellow brick road" back to the home page, which is much harder to do with a descriptive home page link like "Return To the Flower Farms Main Page". Besides, if someone's never been to that page before (remember, anyone can enter your Web site from ANYWHERE), how would they be able to "return" to it? If you're going to use such text, use it as a tooltip popup via the title="" attribute on the link. But do so sparingly, and don't overdo it. You know, to be honest, this topic really deserves a book all its own. Fortunately such a book exists. It's called "Word of Mouth Marketing - How Smart Companies Get People Talking" by Andy Sernovitz (with a forward by Seth Godin and an afterword by Guy Kawasaki). I highly recommend this book. Seriously. As for the anchor text, I wouldn't change it often. I craft each page of text before writing a single line of code to be as seamless as possible. I don't want my links or other content to be "spammy" or otherwise stick out like a sore thumb. Not only that, but the links I include are to relevant content that contains more information on what I'm talking about. You know, I really don't exchange links with sites very often. I have very little control over how the links are handled or even presented, which is why I prefer to cross-link my own sites with each other. If I do link to a site someone else made, I'll do so because I'm recommending the page in question as a valuable resource, not because I'm trying to get people to link to my site. It's a reward for doing what's right - and something I wish people would consider far more seriously than they do now (which is pretty much not at all). That's not necessarily true. They'll probably bring you traffic, but they won't help you with the search engiens since the pages themselves hold very little weight. And to be honest, I seriously consider ODP to be about as relevant as Microsoft Windows is to the windows in my home. That's great and all, if you can promote your site or yourself. Just make sure that the articles you write are of a very high quality and get people to want to look you up online. If you want to become good at writing Web copy that sells, I strongly suggest you read "Web Copy That Sells" by Maria Veloso. Another thing I don't do. I'd rather have people do the advertising on my behalf for free than pay to have it done (antother reference to "word of mouth" marketing). A lot of forums actually have rel="nofollow" on links posted to them and their members' signature fields so this is not as effective as you claim it is. However, it will get your sites exposed to people (who may be tempted to click the link - especially if the link text is written in such a way as it compels them to). Exchanging links and posting in forums can help, as I said already. This is something that can be done daily, and shoudln't take more than 15-45 minutes of your time. As for writing articles, once or twice a week is fine, but if you submit them to article directories, you may be in for a rude surprise. Let word of mouth work for you, and try to avoid haivng your articles syndicated unless you don't mind the duplicate content penalty (a link back to your article's page can help offset that). Maintenance and upkeep on pages should be done monthly rather than bi-weekly. Unless you adopt a half-and-half policy of cleaning out the cobwebs on half your site early in the month and the other half later in the month. Just pick a schedule and be consistent. 15 pages a month? Are you mad? That's one page every two days! Besides, if you're writing articles and posting them to your site, you're already doing that as it is! Only problem is that if people don't like your site, you won't make any money. I'm not big on making money from advertising revenue, but if I were, I'd probably second the recommendation for Commission Junction. There's so much more involved here than you let on, so if anyone's reading this, conduct your own research before trying anything. And most importantly, read each site's Terms of Service before you enter into any agreement! But honestly, this has far more to do with SEO and marketing than Web page/site design. I'd ask a moderator to move this thread to the appropriate forum if I were you. You'll get better exposure that way.
Dan I appreciate all of the contructive critsism. Most people would not take the time to do so.. I think this thread is a great learning thread for begginners. They can take my post and your post and use there best judgement that is what this forum is all about.. Again thankyou for your time and if this should be moved I would appreciate it if a moderator would do so.