The Contester Blog

How to set up a thriving web site

To make a winning website or blog you need content, web hosting and Search Engine Optimization. Nowadays it is possible to set up an online store for free and for a small amount of euro you can make your own web shop with good support from your ISP.

At the base of your net publication is a tested web hosting company with safe servers and great support. Depending on your location, it should not be challenging to find such a hosting company. If you plan to operate a web log on Word press, we recommend utilizing a UNIX based webhosting solution while other solutions demand a IIS host.

Growing serious content for your web log or site is smooth if you like writing. Be sure to select a topic that really occupies you; you will have to keep on writing about that topic for a long time to get the success you set out for. Good sites to pick up themes and intake are blogs and community web sites like TwitterMySpace and YouTube.

In the procedure of producing a serious web site or web log, you must hold your web site updated with the latest SEO proficiencies and be positive your website is comfortably optimized for search marketing. The work of optimizing your site for search engines takes good content, lots of incoming links and a mastered host setup so you can control all technological components of your websites performance including the optimum URL structure.

Building a successful presence on the Net takes a lot of work and some skills but with publishing software like Drupal the programming skills will be held at a minimum, so that you can focus on making good and serious content.

One of the most primary aspects of any web marketing strategy is how do I win in the major search engines, e.g Google and Yahoo. How do I make my site to rank better in Google, Microsoft’s Live or Yahoo?

One of the most strategic aspects in doing competing in the search engines (forgetting the fundamental principles like killer content are in place) is receiving links to your site. You can bring this a lots of different ways, some considered positively by the serps and some not so positively.

One of the trusty styles, that the serps think is satisfactory is link building with articles.

Fundamentally this calls for writing a fresh article, rather about something from your area of knowledge, and then posting it to a free article directory.

You really cannot underestimate the crucial nature of link building. If there is one signal that takes precedence to the search engines, on the whole, it is links. Fine, there are masses of other signals, e.g the domain name, but you are kidding if you guess you are going to be listed well, and easily found, if you do not realise any links.

Building links with articles is easy. It is something the search engines say is okay. And, it adds value to the web, by providing valuable content that might be interesting or useful to users. The real question is what are you waiting for?

Search engine optimization remains a minefield of old advice, outdated ideas and outright dangerous techniques that can get you banned. Here’s the main points to great search engine optimization.

On the internet, the information that you read can have been created days, weeks, years or even decades ago. The techniques that worked in a simpler, more nieve era do NOT work now – there are teams of PHDs working to eliminate any tricks, or shortcuts that you can take.

Ages ago, you might have gotten away with tiny words, written in white – or putting some heavily searched term into your page text or meta tags – or doorway redirect pages, or computer generated series of keywords created from the search engines themselves.

All of this is now viewed as SPAM – bad stuff that interferes with the normal operation of the search engines providing searchers with information that is relevant to their search term.

The search engines have recently removed one BILLION pages from their index – and you know they are hunting down any more that are out there. You can try and trick the search engines, and suffer the inevitable consequences, or work WITH them.

Page optimization can be as simple as having your keywords be a part of the TITLE tag, and in an H1 heading, and having the page actually be about that topic!!! Revolutionary, I know, but that’s what the search engines are trying to provide!

The “boost” in rankings comes from “off page” factors – things not even on the web page! These are called links, and search engines work on the basis that if ten people say that a page is about internet marketing, or 1966 Mustangs, it probably IS!

You can help your ranking by working on the text that links to your page – if the links say “Home Page” or “Click Here”, they don’t do you any good – the keywords that you are trying to optimize for are the words that should be in the links, with some rotating and variety.

You can generate those links by submitting to your industry or subject’s directory, creating articles about your topic and linking back to yourself in the author box, reciprocal linking campaigns, buying links, posting to blogs, comments in forums – all work well to signify what you page is about.

If you have a good resource – a resource of value – people will begin to link to it of their own accord – and rankings generally rise over time as people discover a resource – so don’t waste time creating websites, getting links, and popularity, just to be banned for trying some SEO tricks – the search engines want to work WITH you, instead of against you!

Andrew Larder, Internet Marketing

Finding the successful keywords is crucial in order to get not only a lot but the right quality of traffic to the website. Attractive Keywords are important for both: search engine optimization and CPC campaigns. It is a process of trial and errors and this work needs a lot of dedication. People use keywords in order to search what they need. A keyword can be a single word or a phrase. You need to expose your website with the right keywords in order to attract people.

Preparatory work

You need to find out what people are looking for on your website. What are the relevant terms to search for the information or offers on a certain website? If a website sells e-books, the people might not only type in the word e-book, they might look for a specific e-book and use specific phrases. It makes a difference, if a website offers e-books for business purposes or entertainment. The people could type in either marketing e-book, business e-book, affiliate marketing e-book or star wars e-book, Harry Potter e-book.

If there are famous brand names on your website, you may use them to attract people. An e-book website could be an affiliate of Amazon and thus use the brand as keyword.

Test the keywords!

You will create a list of keywords and you will need to test how popular and useful they are. You may use these keywords on your website, within the meta tags and in the description and keyword list of your submissions to directories and search engines. The internet offers some useful and free tools to test them. Testing keywords is recommendable.

Some useful, free tools for testing keywords

The Keyword Selector Tool of Overture lists a lot of suggestions with alternatives of single keywords and phrases of the tested keyword. It counts a search term that has been used during a month. Thus the popularity of keywords and phrases can be determined.

Google Adwords estimates the possible traffic in clicks per day of a keyword. It displays the possible average position if using Google Adwords. It calculates the daily costs according to a given budget. It finds alternatives to each tested keyword. Google shows the clickthroughrate CTR. This is the percentage of clicks that a website receives in relation to the impressions (the number of times a website is shown). The higher the clickthroughrate the stronger the keyword!

Goodkeywords is a free windows software for finding the perfect set of keywords for the webpages. The software can be downloaded. No registration is required.

Using, supervising and revising keywords

It’s not easy to find and choose the right keyword. The described tools are very useful. The reality has to show the results. It’s important to supervise and track the used keywords weekly and to revise them from time to time. Even a CPC campaign on a small budget can be sufficient to determine the trends and popularity of the used keywords.