Websites can be used for many different purposes; you can make a personal website about yourself where you may want to post family photos that you might want to share with friends and family, or you may want to build a business website so that you can sell your products online and promote your business through the means of the internet. Many people would love to be able to create their own website, but don’t necessarily have the knowledge to do so; although there are many web-based products which claim to let you build your own website, they don’t necessarily let you customize your website as much as you want since your are limited to certain templates- because of this you should always learn how to build your own website from scratch with HTML.

Learning Languages

To build the most basic of websites you need to start off by learning HTML and CSS. HTML is the basic language of all web pages - without it you won’t even be able to create one page. CSS stands for ‘Cascading Style Sheets’ and is the language used to style elements on a web page - you need to know this if you want to make your web pages look good. If you want to extend the features of your website to include something dynamic, such as a shopping cart then you will need to learn a server side web language such as PHP or ASP.

There are many resources on the internet that you can use to learn web languages, including:

• http://www.w3schools.com - This site has tutorials for languages which are widely used on the internet. This resource if perfect to get your from being a novice to having intermediate knowledge of web languages.
• http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/ - This site has many different articles, tutorials and code examples which can help you to learn ASP.NET, and its older sister - classic ASP.
• http://uk3.php.net/tut.php - PHP.net - the home website of the PHP scripting language has put together a simple tutorial to help out beginners.

Once you have learnt the basics of HTML and CSS, you are ready to start building your website.

Choosing the Design Software

When building a website you need to design what piece of software you will be using to do it. When choosing web design software, there are several variables that you should always take into consideration, these are: cost of the software, the complexity of the software and whether you are going to build using your own code or by using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. Website design software can range from nothing to around £500; if you are going to be building your site using your own code then you have no need for a WYSIWYG editor meaning that all you need is a text application, such as Microsoft Notepad or jEdit - a piece of software specifically built for this kind of scenario. If you are after a piece of software which you would like to do all the coding for you and that lets you see the final outcome without having to do anything complicated then you want a piece of software which is known as a ‘WYSIWYG’ editor; these pieces of software generally cost, and examples include NetObject’s Fusion and Adobe’s Dreamweaver. WYSIWYG editors are generally more complicated to use than normal text editors since they have more built in features to help someone along with the building of their site. Listed below are some of the most commonly used website design programs:

• http://www.microsoft.com/express/vwd/Default.aspx - Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express Edition is a free piece of Microsoft software created to encourage more developers and designers alike to take up ASP.NET coding. It can be used as both a WYSIWYG editor and a plain text editor, and has many features built in.
• http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/vstudio/default.aspx - Microsoft Visual Studio is VWD’s bigger brother and it’s costs vary since there are various different editions of it.
• http://www.jedit.net/ - jEdit is a free plain text editor that was created specifically for web designers. You can use it to script in any language, but it doesn’t come with a WYSIWYG editor.
• http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/ - Adobe Dreamweaver (formally Macromedia Dreamweaver) is probably the best known piece of website design software throughout the world. It comes with both a code editor and a WYSIWYG editor, but is quite costly priced at $399 (approximately £199).

Getting Your Website onto the Internet

Getting your website onto the internet doesn’t have to be the complicated process that many make it out to be. All you need to do is purchase a domain and website hosting and you are all set to go. A domain is the address which you type in to go to a website - the cost of these is relatively low as you can pick a domain up for about £5/year these days; web hosting as well is relatively cheap as in most cases you pick a package up for £22.99/year. After you have purchased both of these you should be given access to an online system known as a ‘control panel’ where you can control all aspects of your website and its hosting.

To upload your website to your web space all you need to do is establish an FTP connection with the FTP server for your site (normally ftp://ftp.yourdomain.com). You will be asked to login with your FTP account - these can normally be created through your control panel. Once a connection has been established you have to copy your website files into the root of your website, this is a folder normally named ‘public_html’ under Linux hosting or ‘httpdocs’ if you are on Windows hosting.

Once the files have been copied, all you need to do is open a fresh browser window, type your domain into the address bar and your website should appear as if by magic!

Promoting Your Website

You’ve got your website completed and on the web now. The next thing to do is to get your website promoted so that you can start receiving visitors. You can submit your website online directories under a category that fits your website and sign up to online advertising services so that your website will be advertised on other websites; you should also make sure that your website is listed in the results of popular search engines such as MSN, Google, and Yahoo - this will ensure that your website receives visitors. You should find the links below helpful when promoting your website:

• http://www.google.com/adwords/ - Google AdWords is Google’s advertiser network which is known as a PPC (pay per click) program where you can create your own adverts for your website which will be then shown on the websites of Google publisher’s.
• http://www.url-free.net/ - This is a prime example of a website directory where you can submit your website to a certain category where it can then be found by others who are browsing the category.

RSS feeds are xml files updated on a regular basis which people subscribe to within RSS readers. The information carried on them is normally up to date and they are normally found on news sites and blogs, basically sites which are updated regularly and which people might like to be up to date with. In this article I will go through creating an RSS feed; they can be created in two forms: dynamic - this is where dynamic server side pages are created to query databases to display the new information automatically and require no manual intervention for the data to be displayed; manual - this is where a basic xml file is created and which has to be updated manually.

The Basic RSS Format

RSS feeds are made up of several different elements and tags which create the final document. The following is an example of an RSS feed:

As you can see the XML version used is the first thing to be declared within the document, the second being the beginning of the RSS tag which means the beginning of the feed; including both of these within your feed is important since a browser will use these to work out that it is an XML file which contains an RSS feed. Click here for an example of an RSS 2.0 feed.
The feed itself is contained within a ‘channel’ tag - some browsers output RSS feeds into a styled, readable format and this tag is important to ensure that browsers which have this capability are able to render your feed in this way. The first few lines within this tag describe your feed and contain information such as the title of the feed, a description of it, the language in which it is written as well as the last time it was updated.

After that the different items of the feed are shown - these are displayed within ‘item’ tags and there is no limit on the amount of these which you can have in one feed. The basics needed to structure an ‘item’ tag are the ‘title’ and ‘description’ tags which ensure that the item is outputted into a readable format.

Dynamic RSS Feeds

Feeds of this type require a server side page such as a PHP or ASP page be created to query a database so that the up to date information be displayed. This process requires no manual intervention and is completely automatic. To begin with you need to make sure that your page is outputted to the browser as an XML document, to do this you will need to add a header response line to the top of your page, and make sure that it outputs the page in the ‘text/xml’ format. The rest of the feed is outputted like the example above, except
Manual RSS Feeds

These feeds are ‘.xml’ files which are updated manually and always take the form of the feed displayed within the first section of this article. You should only opt for this type of feed if you aren’t going to update often as updating it can be a timely procedure.

Link Organization is Key as it helps you to establish the anchor text you are targeting, and you get idea about which page you should link to the inner pages that more suited to specific content than your homepage. Getting link to the inner page is critical but important as a whole for the SEO process.
Once you get a strong list going on, stay organized by grouping your list of link prospects into different sections, such alignment will help you to set up and match best content for specific links.
These can include:

* Forum links

* Authority links (.edu, .gov, etc)

* Web Directory links

* Blog links

* Media links

* Social Media links

* Specific wiki that follow links

Depending on the industry, your list can even be further categorized. For example, like if you’re from finance site, you can have headings such as:

* business site

* finance sites

* personal loan sites

* Insurance sector sites

* Finance/stock sites

* Venture capitalist/equity sites

By organizing your links you get the opportunity to meet your target prospects easily & effectively.

-Paul

SEO campaign on-going basis is inherently important likewise you do often maintenance of your site; it will help you to improve your PR and surpass your position in SERPs. On-site SEO needs level headed work since there are possible reasons for surge and fluctuations in search results due to change in algorithm. Tracking traffic and analyzing the link structure is extremely important since the backlinks degrades overtime, you need to feel the gap with more quality backlinks regularly. Organic search engine listings are most important since there are always sites are competing with you to take leverage and your great position and gain exposure. It is essential that you should more focus on listing in local search engines, local directories, yellow pages to gain popularity to get good results in local search that give you lot of exposure for international search results as well. You should attempt to get more new pages, new inbound links and fresh content, if you are doing PPC leave the keywords that don’t give you results and choose keywords that are less competitive but have worth to target, targeting little narrowly specific keywords for specific niche & demography can bring some significant results.

Also different datacenter get altogether different set of information from your website so the output will be different, however if you focus more on relevancy and uniqueness in content it will give you good output in search results altogether. As discussed earlier the search engine devalue the links or can remove the pages of some site from getting index that have not improved and updated. Since search engines update their indexes and algorithms fairly often, they reduce the value of pages like which have not relevant content, ugly theme, bad linking structure, page error, broken links etc. Always remember the search engine principle are based on to provide the most relevant results to their users the relevancy is to be top up. Ongoing SEO also include link analysis, traffic volume, keyword analysis, quality content, site stats, site referrals, link development, page indexation, competitive analysis, benchmarking, these all factors require regular work to improve search results on-going basis.

To be continued in next post..

-Paul

Social Media Optimization let you to reach to your intended audience by using a set of methods that make possible to generate publicity and positive word of mouth about your product or service. These Methods include adding socialize button, RSS feeds, bookmarking,tagging, blogging and incorporating third party community functionalities that enable you for networking with other people. Also you can create a viral video using service like YouTube videos and draw attention of your audience. Overall social networking let you to create viral marketing by increasing your linkability and making tagging and bookmarking easy. User generated content is very powerful tools by which people share content easily and leverage the power of the network, if you follow these tools it will greatly help you to let your content travel fast.

Here are the comprehensive lists of social bookmarking/networking sites that may interest you to take a look on them especially if you’ve planned to create the buzz.

squidoo.com/socialbookmarkingsites
rev2.org/2006/07/11/33-places-to-hangout-in-the-social-networking-era/

-Bob

A search engine is simply a website with a database. The database is filled with information about other websites. That information is generally provided by those other websites in order for their site to show up when someone makes a search using the search engine.

If you have a web page it will not show up in any of the search engines unless you go to those search engines and add your site to their database. When you add your site they will ask for your URL Address. That is the information that appears in the address box at the top of the browser. For instance, if you want to surf the internet to exabytes.com you would type something like this into the address box: www.eukhost.com When you press enter, your browser attempts to find that site on the internet.

When you submit your page to the search engines they request that same information for their database. They often want to know a little more information such as the email address of who is submitting the information, etc. This information is then stored in the database.

After submitting the information to the database someone working for the search engine company, or the software which is part of the search engine will surf to your page and try to find some key words that relate to the information contained within your page. Those key words are also stored in the database and related to your address.

Then, when someone makes a search using a keyword that matches any of your key words, your page is displayed in the list along with any other pages that also match what they entered. If you try this with you page, don’t be discouraged if you don’t find your page at the top of the list. It takes a lot of effort to make that happen.