Developing a Professional Website

Developing a good looking website can all be well and good, but it is important that when creating a website that you take the content of the website into consideration as much as you may take the overall look and design of a website into consideration. If you want your website to look professional then you need to ensure that you design your site in such a way that it looks both professional but attractive at the same time; this kind of balance can be hard to achieve meaning that not many designers can create such an effect with ease. However, the quality of your written content is also important since visitors may be put off a website if the content is gramatically incorrect. If you want to develop a professional site for a client then you should also take into consideration the quality of your written coding since a good web developer should be able to ensure that all the clients wishes are fulfilled in as few lines as possible in both a web page and CSS style file. As a web developer, when building websites for yourself or for free for others you may not take into consideration how professional a website looks, but when developing websites for paying clients it is important that you make the website look as professional as possible.

To make any website look professional the content of it has to be written to a high standard to that all visitors can understand it and so that it makes sense; it is also important that website content doesn’t contain any spelling or grammar mistakes which may actually put visitors off from returning. When it comes to search engine optimization you will find that the content of a website will play a huge part in the ranking that your website achieves on any of the search engines around. Due to the internet being a very competetive place, it is important that any websites that you create are as optimized as possible for search engines since this will help make the website itself look more professional, but being higher up in search engine rankings will also help any website look professional. Other ways in which SEO may be able to benefit a website professionally could include:

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Designing A Modern Website

The most important thing a web designer should remember while designing a modern website is that the content that they provide in the website should be original. This will also help your website in getting better search engine results and great web traffic.

Some of the important techniques for designing a modern website are that the name of your website and your website’s logo should be attractive and powerfully displayed. Using careful variations in design, color, fonts, placement of elements, concept, etc. will definitely help you to pick out the best of the lot.

Also, studying the various other professional and successful websites will give you a lot of ideas about what is needed to design a successful modern website. Designing a modern website is a time-consuming job that requires your complete dedication. But, once you are able to design such a master website, it will pay rich dividends for a long time.

Next very important objective is that your website and all its web pages should be really interesting and attractive. By doing this you will attract more web traffic to your website, repeated visits by your web traffic, and your website will be more attractive than your competitors’.

Designing Your Website’s Homepage

Your website’s homepage content should have short paragraphs, short sentences, and highlighting important points which makes the visitors understand the content easily. Remember to update your website’s homepage frequently. This indeed will help you in making your modern website sticky and optimized for search engines, which again will result in more web traffic to your website. Even the text size and the font which you use in your website design do matters. The content should not be too short or colorful. It should be relevant and presented in an interesting fashion. Your overall website should look completely professional but should be very easy to use by all your visitors.

Linking And Navigating Between Web Pages

As with any other website, you will naturally create many internal and external links between your web pages and to other websites and their web pages. Internal navigation between the web pages should be simple and easy for all. Remember, all visitors who visit your website would not be internet geniuses.

So, while designing your modern website, you need to keep in mind to create well-structured menus and high quality links to navigate between the web pages and all around your website. If you do not follow this simple web design rule, this will create confusion in the minds of your visitors.

If the visitors get confused and do not understand how to navigate, or are lost on internal pages, they are likely to leave your site and probably will not revisit. Always provide a link to your homepage from all your internal web pages.

Offer Something Attractive To Your Visitors

Website visitors are often looking for freebies. The web traffic too grows exponentially if there are plenty of good freebies offered along with good content. A useful e-book describing better ideas in your niche market that are not covered by your competitors or giving away some useful software as free download from all your web pages can really attract your website visitors. This is a good way of getting more web traffic to your ultra-modern website. Always see to it that your software or e-book has your web links embedded in them so they really become viral.

Use Attractive Images In Your Web Pages

It is true that images convey more message than a thousand words. Attractive and good pictures can make your website really powerful. The visitors can also understand the content through the images rather than reading the whole written content.

However, keep in mind that the images which you choose while designing your web page should be appropriate and related to the theme of your web page. Use attractive images, sounds, videos, and animations in your website. It is also necessary to have some high-quality content in your website because without good content, your website cannot succeed.

So, designing your own modern website is not a tough job at all. With all the help and support present on the internet now-a-days, it is becoming a really simple job to build good professional website.

Summary: Techniques for designing a modern website:

Your website should be professional-looking, easy to use, and eye-catching. This will attract tons of web traffic for reading the great information that your website expresses, while a good design will always be remembered by most of the visitors and will subconsciously force them to revisit. A modern-looking website will always get more web traffic. Hence, using great techniques for designing a modern website will benefit not only your website but your visitors as well.

Memorable Domain Name

A memorable domain name is simply a domain name that can be remembered easily by others. But, to get deeper into this theory, we need to remember that the memorable domain name must also relate well with the niche market that the website addresses.

If, for example, your website is about golf clubs or golf swings, and if you choose the name of your favorite movie embedded in the domain name, for example, TitanicReview.com or OnceUponATimeThereWasA.com, just to make up a few unrelated domain names that can be remembered well by the readers, but cannot be remembered what exactly they represent (golf clubs or golf swing technique in our above case). So, even if the domain names are good and memorable, they should also be related to your website’s main theme – golf club or golf swing technique.

Taking this point further and doing some actual keyword research, we can use a memorable domain name, PerfectGolfSwingTechniques.com or another domain name, PerfectGolfSwingTechnique.com for our golf swing related website. Check that these two domain names look similar and can be used interchangeably by your visitors. So, if possible, buy both the domain names if they are available. But, both are memorable domain names, and the included keywords are also searched by many surfers.

You will need to come up with similar techniques to find great and memorable domain names in other cases, for example, if you are targeting a different niche segment. The basic principles are similar as stated in this article.

If you want, you can immediate buy this domain name, because at the time of writing, the names are still available, if I am not mistaken! Why? Well, I will come to that question in a minute. Admitted, that these two domain names are very lengthy, but both are definitely memorable, especially by the golf lovers. And you know how big the golf niche is!

Of course, you will need to work correctly and follow great search engine optimization methods, use great products, use great content pages, and use skilled pay-per-click (PPC) methods (and may be, several other methods including using video, social marketing techniques, etc) to attract visitors and buyers.

In this article, these examples are just that, examples, to give you the idea of how keywords are being used by experienced and successful internet marketers to promote their products and profit from their various methods.

Well, these two domain names are definitely highly focused and relate to these two great keywords: “Perfect golf swing” and “golf swing technique”. Both the key-phrases are parts of “golf swing” –hugely popular keywords, all three, now including the “golf swing”!

So, by having the long-tailed keywords that embed three great golf related key-phrases, you are really gaining a firm foothold on those niches! The phrase “golf swing” is searched by surfers daily. We can find the approximate figures using specialized keyword-related softwares to find the exact number of searches in Google or other search engines. It will give us the insight into how many surfers are searching for those particular keywords daily and monthly.

If the domain names are not available, then you can simply add an article (“A” or “The” before the key-phrase) and buy that domain name if available. You can also add hyphens between the words, or use any similar “technique” and make the domain name unique and now can be purchased! Just make sure that the domain name includes all those keywords mentioned above.

This is a hypothetical case and is mentioned here just to give you an example that can turn out quite profitable. A right domain name can make your website very popular and can become quickly profitable if the entire website is developed correctly.

Using Overture, I find that the popular key-phrase “Golf swing” is searched by almost 23,000 people monthly and 750 daily. “Perfect golf swing” is searched by 2,400 people monthly and about 80 daily, and “golf swing technique” is searched by 1600 people monthly and approximately 54 daily. Of course, these figures are not too high where you, as a new comer, simply cannot compete with those established marketers and rank well in the search engine result pages (SERPs) because of the already high saturation.

These key-phrases, “perfect golf swing” and “golf swing technique” are almost perfect figures in this hugely popular niche “golf”. The figures are also not too low so that there are almost no searchers, and therefore, no sales because no one is searching for those key words.

You can then use Google to find out the exact number of results for these key-phrases, both by inclusion and exclusion of the embedding quote marks. For example, if you search for “perfect golf swing” once with the quote marks and once without the quote marks, you will get two very important results.

The first result, with the quote marks surrounding the key-phrase, will indicate how many competitors are already there with that exact key-phrase and who are ranking well, that is, which websites having that particular exact key-phrase are occupying the top 10 results, or the first page result of the search engine.

The second result, without the quote marks surrounding the key-phrase, will indicate how popular the particular key-phrase generally is.

Diverting a little bit away from our little research on how a good domain name will help us gain popularity and web traffic, the following method of doing deeper research will reveal how much planning and research goes in to finding a great key-phrase.

If you are able to do such various research activities, and come up with that one winning key-phrase that opens up a new niche that’s just waiting there to be exploited for waves after waves of profits! So, the following method reveals how deep others are going in their search of great key-phrases, and also how much worth that key-phrase has in other country settings:

You can also choose to see how much the key-phrase is popular in other countries by changing Google search engine to that particular country. But, this is not our topic for this article so we leave it there.

Just to give you one hint, you can use proxy settings and change to a different country’s I.P. code, and then use Google to carry on with your keyword research. Please also ensure that whichever method you use to find your key-phrases, always try to be on the right side of the cyber law. If using proxy is illegal in your part of the globe, then please don’t use the proxy settings. Your Google’s country settings will also change to that particular regional settings, and you will find different results!

Here, an important thing you must remember when using those proxies: never use the proxies to use different proxy settings and click on your website’s Adsense advertisements! Google has smarter engineers and have excellent traps placed, and they can quickly find out that you have used proxy softwares to click on those Google Adsense advertisements.

Your site will be quickly banned from the search engine and you will loose all your rankings as well as your Adsense commissions within a couple of days! So beware! This is what I call a sample of an illegal activity, and Google will mercilessly punish your website for all time to come for using proxy software against their TOS!

Now, getting back to our little research on getting that great domain name for your site, the example of “PerfectGolfSwingTechnique.com” will help you establish your website for the keywords or key-phrases included in the domain name, and this domain name will help you profit because the particular key-phrases included will rank your site well in the SERPs, because of low competition for those particular key-phrases.

Here, I also consider that you will be using the key-phrases in the right places in the Meta-tags and the content, and that too, in the right density. There are also other things like the quality back-links that you will need to make your site an authority on that particular topic.

Your niche-related keywords or key-phrases, also called the long-tailed keywords, should be present in the domain name as a major search engine optimization (SEO) technique. This type of research will find the hidden gems in terms of keywords that being searched by surfers, but are still not found by your competitors.

So, powerful keywords, even if they contain many words in the key-phrase, are really memorable for your niche market, and can help you get a profitable “Memorable Domain Name”. Such keywords can bring you profits through higher page ranks, better search engine results, and a laser-targeted web traffic to your website, much before other internet marketers catch your lead!

This particular topic of “Amazing Traffic Tips: Memorable Domain Name” is very important, and I am aiming to write more articles giving you details of other techniques with proper examples that will help you succeed. As the domain name is one of the most important feature in website development, especially if your site is a commercial or E-Commerce website, choosing the right domain name which is also a memorable domain name matters the most!

A domain name that relates to the theme of the website makes the site looks very professional, and is a great “stepping stone” to success! It is also non-changeable! That is, you are “stuck” with the domain name and your website really depends upon a great domain name to make an impact on the internet.

If you are really not a remarkably famous business name like Dunlop, Nike, Coca Cola, McDonald’s, or Pepsi, then it would be better for your online business if you can find a very popular key-phrase in your niche market. and get a domain name that includes the key-phrase! You can have a head-start on your competition just with a great and memorable domain name!

More on this topic of “Memorable Domain Name” later…

Technique: Search Engine Optimization with Subdomain or Subdirectory

Search Engine Optimization requires your website to fulfill many criteria, and the website URL should contain your keyword that reflects the web page’s theme. This keyword or key-phrase should be present in the URL as the domain name, the subdomain name, the subdirectory name, or the filename.

A profitable niche website will be able to create a serious online income for you, but to create real wealth opportunities on the Internet even if one of your niche website fails to perform well, you must create multiple websites with many different niche topics.

To create hundreds of different niche websites, you will need to either:

• Procure different domain names for each niche topic (for example, www.dog-care.com, www.HealthAndFitness.info, www.WeightLoss.com, etc),
• Or, create different subdirectory for each niche topics under your existing website (like, Website.com/dog-care/, MainSite.com/HealthAndFitness/, MainSite.com/WeightLoss/, etc),
• Or, create different subdomain (like, dog-care. MainSite.com, HealthAndFitness.MainSite.com, WeightLoss.MainSite.com, etc) for each niche topics.

Although the first option is the best SEO option, the cost of procuring so many different domain names, even if they are just approximately about $8 a piece, will definitely be a financial burden. Every year, you will have to incur the re-registration fees for all those domains, and also remember to register at their different due dates.

The second and the third options mentioned above are obviously the better choices, considering that you will have the option of having the best keywords or key-phrases as the subdirectory or the subdomain names. This also removes the obstacle of the best keyword or key-phrase domain names being unavailable to you. As these keywords or key-phrase are used only as the subdomain or subdirectory names, you can freely use them for your search engine optimization requirements.

The third option of using the subdomain depends up on your website hosting company’s policies of either making that option available to you or not. Normally, most of the web hosting companies does allow their clients to create unlimited subdomain names. So, it depends up on you to use these options for creating the many niche websites. If this option is unavailable to you, then you can create niche websites using the subdirectories option.

Many people who are unaware that the name of the subdomain or the subdirectory can play an important role in search engine optimization, can now optimize their niche websites in the best possible ways where the domain names are concerned.

They can now create a lot of separate niche websites using the subdomain and the subdirectory options freely, and generate more profit opportunities with them. Even if one or some of those niche websites fail to generate any income, they can still depend up on plenty of other niche websites that were created with the above options.

The subdomain part of the URL is completely separate from the main site as far as the search engines are concerned. The various search engines, especially Google, does not treat the subdomains as part of the main website. This causes your subdomains to be treated as a separate website and gets all benefits of the major search engines’ benefits, including the search engine optimization factors.

You can study the success of about.com, which has utilized this method of using the subdomains and creating thousands of different niche websites under one main website, about.com. Its various high ranking niche topics are created as subdomains and interlinked across the entire subdomains to create a very successful brand name.

Of course, maintaining such a huge website with hundreds of subdomains can be a daunting task. Yet, the magnitude of the success achieved through this method can well be duplicated by you and others quite easily.

By using the subdomain or the subdirectory options, you get all these benefits without incurring the additional costs of purchasing separate domain names and paying their annual charges too. The hosting costs are also paid only once for the entire website because all the subdomains and the subdirectories are just the extensions of the main website.

With all these benefits, you have separate niche websites without additional costs and thus save hundreds of dollars worth of domain name purchase and their annual fees.

The downside to using the subdomain is that, as it is treated as a separate website by the search engines, you will have to create all search engine optimization techniques like creating back links to each subdomain separately along with other SEO techniques like submitting to website submission directories, creating additional subdomain-specific forum-related signature and external blog links, creating on-page and off-page optimization, separate niche specific content on vastly different niche topics, possibly different website designing to make each subdomain look unique. Other factors of web designing, development, and optimization will have to be undertaken as many times for each niche subdomain website.

The possibilities of creating new forums, paid or free membership sites, adsense ready sites, affiliate websites, and even powerful mini-sites are the additional benefits if you opt for niche subdomain sites. If some of these subdomains become very popular, then your online income opportunities will get a huge boost because your total expenditure is considerably low as you are using only one main website. The niche subdomains act as multiple revenue generating sites from different niche topics.

Although each different niche will require different content, you can acquire the help of expert writers to write them. The internet provides you with many websites where freelance content writers can be hired for nominal fees to write great content for your different topics. The internet itself is filled with content on every possible topic that can be researched to create high quality unique content for your different niche sites.

You can also use the control panel of your main site to create different platforms to create your subdomains.

For example, one niche site can use WordPress, while other can be based on Joomla, which is a very popular content management system (CMS). Another site can be a community forum, while yet another subdomain can an eCommerce website. You can also use the cPanel and Fantastico’s “Site Builder” option to quickly create entire sites.

As the subdomains are nothing but the subdirectories on your main website, the cPanel of your main website can be used to manage all the subdomains residing on the website as actual subdirectories of the main website. The cPanel can also be used to manage other normal subdirectories as well. Hence, the cPanel’s “Addon Domains” option can be used to create the subdirectory for each acquired domain name, and the “FTP Manager” and the “File Manager” can be used to populate those subdomains with the content pages.

The same “MySQL Database” function can be used to create databases for each subdomain, and the “Web/FTP Stats” can be used to view the statistics of every subdomain. In this way, you can use the main website to create multiple niche websites - each subdomain is treated as a separate website by the search engines - which broaden your opportunities of creating multiple online income earning opportunities.

With these options of creating additional websites by using the subdomains and the subdirectories and using creative and successful search engine optimization (SEO) techniques for these sites, your main website’s horizons grow exponentially in every direction. While creating these multiple websites, you must also take care to calculate your web space needs for all the sites, and any future growths expected.

Hence, it is also worthwhile to watch the performance of every site that has been created, especially those sites that are showing growth in popularity and the web traffic that it is getting periodically. Using the cPanel, you must also watch and record the monthly bandwidth used, the disk space usage, and the disk space that is still available.

This will reveal how your websites are performing monthly, and especially reveal the time of the year when your websites are are getting more web traffic. Your website would have more than sufficient resources if it is revealing signs of good growth.

You must also plan for future additions to these websites, and calculate the approximate disk space that will be required in future. It can be a difficult task, but this method will also reveal when you should plan to upgrade your existing hosting plan and get greater hosting resources like the disk space and bandwidth.

Hence, this mode of search engine optimization (through using the subdomain and subdirectory) is not an easy one, but the careful efforts are worth the successful results!

E-Commerce Shopping Cart Hosting

One of the main things which many people and businesses want to add to their websites these days are shops so that they are able to sell their products or services via the internet; this is because that many are discovering what a powerful selling tool the internet can be for them, thus meaning that they want to sell their products via the internet as well just face to face or through their retail store since it gives them an extra source of income. The number of online shops has started to grow over the last few years since adding one to your website has become much easier than it previously was since there are now methods which allow you to add a shop to your website yourself which mean that you don’t have to pay a website designer or developer to install the application for you.

By adding an online shop or e-commerce store to your website, you are giving yourself an extra source of income since it means that you are able to sell the products which you might otherwise sell through your retail store or face to face directly to be public, meaning that you are also able to grab yourself another audience which might otherwise not be aware of your brand and the products that you sell. By optimizing your website and online shop with the use of previous articles within this blog, you are able to make sure that visitors who are looking for a product or service which you happen to sell or provide find your website and online shop through the use of a keyword search on a search engine that your website happens to be listed; this means that you are able to get customers which you might not otherwise get if you were to not have an online shop, and were to sell only through your retail store if you have one, or just face to face if that is the sales method which you use.

When setting up an online shop for your website, the main decision that you will come across is choosing the application that you want to base your online shop on; although this decision might sound like a basic one, it can be a fairly hard one to make because there are many different shop applications that might meet your needs in some areas, but not in others - you might also have limitations that you will have to take into consideration when choosing a shop application, although most are designed to function in range of different environments.

The main items that you will take into consideration when choosing a shop application for your website will include how many products or services you are able to list within your chosen shop application, whether it is commercial or open source and how it compares to other shop applications that are available; these features are important to consider since you don’t want to keep on adding new products or services to your online shop and then find that you aren’t able to add any more since you have reached the limit in that area, you also want to check whether the application which you want to use is open source or commercial - and if it is commercial you should consider the cost of it, and finally you should always see how your chosen shop application compares to other both commercial and open source applications since you might want to purchase a commercial application since it meets the needs of you or your business but there might be an open source application which is just what you want and suits you or your business’s needs more.

You should also consider whether or not your chosen shop application makes SEO friendly URLs with the use of a URL rewriting program out of your product listings to ensure that search engines see your product pages as search engine friendly, thus increasing the amount of visitors that search engines deliver to your website; you should also consider whether or not your chosen application has a search facility to ensure that your customers can easily search through your products or services if you happen to have many listed - this also means that your visitors and customers will be able to find their way around your online shop hassle free.

SEO Friendliness

One major feature that you should consider within a shop application is how search engine friendly it is, since if your chosen shop application isn’t that search engine friendly then search engines might not take kindly to it thus giving up on indexing your shop at a certain point, or might end up lowering the score that they gave you after your first crawl; if you happen to choose a search engine friendly shop application then you will find that search engines will take more of a liking to your online shop, meaning that they will give you a higher score thus giving your website and online shop more visitors which might even mean that you receive more sales through your shop in turn increasing the amount of money which you are able to earn from your shop.

The most basic SEO function which most shop applications under take is the generating of search engine friendly URLs for categories and products which are keyword rich to ensure that they are related to the content of the page that they have been generated for - the page titles of the pages for categories and products are also keyword rich as well since it gives visitors an idea of what they are about to view without having to wait for the entire page to load; both of these basic SEO methods are favoured by search engines since they allow search engines to match your website to more keyword searches that are made through them, meaning that search engines are more likely to place your shop higher up in the search engine results for certain keyword searches that are made by people who are looking for a shop or website which happens to be along the same lines as yours.

You personally should also try and ensure that the descriptions for your products are as keyword rich as possible, since search engines will also favour this since as is the case with keyword rich title tags and URLs, because of the fact that they can then relate them with more keyword searches thus providing your website and shop with a higher rank in the results page as well as an increased search engines score; this means that ensuring that your new online shop is search engine friendly is something which you have to make sure of as well, meaning that you can’t rely on the built in functions of the shop systems that you have chosen to use.

Choosing the Application that You are Going to Use

Choosing a shop application which you are going to use for your website can be a hard decision to make, since there are many different factors that you should take into consideration based on your requirements within this type of application; you should always ensure that you make your final decision based on information that you have read on your chosen application - this is especially important if you are planning to purchase a commercial application since you might not be able to get a refund if you purchase the application but then realize that it isn’t what you want.

The main factor which you should consider when choosing a shop application is whether it will run within your hosting environment or not - this is especially important since you don’t want to purchase an application but then find that it won’t run within your hosting environment, in this case you will probably not be able to get your money back; this means that you should always start out by using open source shopping applications, since you are then able to gain the knowledge of the hosting environment in which your hosting account resides, meaning that you know what kind of specifications to look out for when you look to upgrade to a commercial shop application in the future - this also means that if you decide to use an application that isn’t compatible with your hosting environment, you won’t loose any money since you haven’t paid anything for the right to use the application since it is open source meaning that anyone is able to use it for free.

You should look around at the different applications that are available for you to use as a shop on your website, since some may meet your needs in certain areas whilst others do in the areas which aren’t covered by some shop applications; you should always look around at both commercial and open source applications, meaning that you shouldn’t dismiss open source applications if you have the money to spend on a commercial application, and shouldn’t dismiss commercial applications if you want to use an open source applications but do have the necessary funds to cover the cost of a commercial application.

Conclusion

In conclusion, with the use of SEO friendly shop application, you will be able to bring more visitors to your main website as well - but you can’t just rely on the application itself to be SEO friendly, since it is up to you to make sure that your product and category descriptions are keyword rich since it will give search engines something else to favour in your website.

You should also be aware of the many factors that you should take on board when considering a shop application that you want to use on your website - the most important factor being whether you want to pay for the application that you are going to use, or whether you just want to use a free one which you can easily setup; this is because you don’t want to purchase a shop application for your website but then find that it doesn’t suit your needs, or find an open source application which happens to meet your requirements more than the commercial application does - however, one thing to note in this situation would be that you will not be able to get a refund on the license that you have purchased for the commercial application that you were using.

You should also make sure that before you purchase any application, or before you try and install any shop application within your hosting space, that the application which you want to use is actually usable within your hosting environment - whether you’re on a shared, VPS or dedicated hosting package; this is because if you want to use a commercial application but find that it doesn’t work, you won’t be able to get your money back and you could cause yourself a lot of frustration if you don’t use the right type of package.

Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines

Submitting Your Website to Search Engines and Directories

One of the most important but easiest ways of bringing traffic to your website is via the use of publicly available search engines and directories on the internet where you are able to submit your website to so that others are able to find it. For those who don’t know, search engines are websites where people are able to enter keywords which the search engine then processes to provide the visitor with pages of results which contain links to website which fit the visitor’s search criteria; directories on the other hand do allow people to search through them, but websites are normally categorized meaning that you are usually able to find a website in the subject area that you want without having to search for it.

Most people seem to think that submitting your website to search engines is a complicated task, and that you have to pay to have your website listed - that is actually incorrect since in most cases you can submit your website to the major search engines for free, meaning that your largest source of traffic can be gained without having to pay a penny; on the other hand, you might have to pay to submit your website to directories in some cases, although basic submissions are normally free and you only have to pay if you want to have your website ‘featured’ so that it is shown off to more people who are browsing the directory website concerned looking for a website such as the one which you run. In the cases of the larger search engines, you don’t always have to manually submit your website or individual pages to the engine to make sure that they are displayed within the search engine’s results pages; this is because search engines employ ‘bot’ technology which means that computers automatically find your website and then index the content and pages of it - this means that the crawled and indexed content is displayed to people who enter search terms which are related to content on your website.

The good thing with search engine bots is that they generally automatically pick up any changes within the content of your website meaning that they automatically crawl it again to update the indexed data; this is because bots will come and crawl your website at least once a month - if your website is one which has regularly updated content then you might find that they will come and index your data much more often, and less often if the content of your website is rarely updated. Although the bots of the larger search engines will come and index your website, smaller search engines will require that you manually submit your website to them in order for their bots to detect and index the content of your website; larger search engines with bots will also provide web based submission forms if you wish to have your website indexed more quickly rather than having to wait for a bot to come and index your content.

Unfortunately, submitting your website to search engines is not a method that you can class under building up back links, since search engines are actually the ones who will be basic the score which they give your website on the number of back links you have; directories on the other hand are a site which you can use to build up the number of back links which you have to your website - this is because directories will not give you any score, and that directories will automatically create a separate detail page for your website once you have submitted it to the directories which you have chosen to. To ensure that your work in submitting your website to search engines so that people who are looking for a website which meets the same specification or subject as yours, you should use the other techniques that have been mentioned in part 1 of this series of articles to ensure that your website is placed as near the top of the results pages as possible; this is because people who are using search engines don’t tend to go any further than the third page of their search when they are looking for something in particular.

URL Optimization

Another method which you can use to help optimize your website for search engines is to optimize your actual URLs and file names within your website; although this method may sound like one which won’t work, the renaming of your directories and page file names to reflect the subject of the content which is contained within the page can help improve the score that search engines decide to give you. One technique which most people don’t know about is to use URL rewriting programs which will automatically create search engine friendly URLs from the existing content that you already have on your website; if your website is a CMS based one or uses dynamic pages to call data from data bases, then you should deploy a URL rewriting program which will make the URL to the content more search engine friendly, if your website uses static pages and folders then you have no need to use a URL rewriting program since you can easily rename your web pages or folders through the control panel that has been provided with your hosting account or via a standard FTP connection.

If you run a blog or other CMS based system such as an online shop, then you will find that you most probably already have some sort of URL rewriting system deployed on your website; for example you will probably find that the directory which preceedes the actual file name of the file which is trying to be reached will probably be named after the category which you have placed your shop product or blog post in, the file name will then most likely be the title of the product or blog post which you have added to your shop or blog. By relating the file name and directory name of the file which is trying to be accessed to the subject of the content which is contained within the file which is trying to be accessed, search engines are able to see that you have put in the effort to ensure that both your URLs and content are keyword rich; if both the content and URLs are keyword rich then search engines will find it much easier to match your website to searches made by people with certain keywords which are related to your website. Another method which is part of URL optimization is to use a URL rewriting program to remove the file extensions of files within your website - you aren’t removing the actual file extension, but when a visitor looks at the file name within their browser’s address bar, they will not see any file extension for the file which they are viewing; this means that you are able to create much cleaner looking URLs which only contain keywords which are related to the subject and content of your website.

You should always try and make your URLs as keyword rich as possible, this is because the more keywords which are related to the subject and content of your website which you use, then the higher the score a search engine will give you and the more visitors that you will receive to your website through searches from search engines which have used keywords that you have used on your website; you should also ensure that the keywords you have used within the URL for your web pages are repeated within the title tag of the pages which you have designed for your website.

As mentioned previously, most content management systems choose to employ URL rewriting technology to ensure that the URLs which they produce are as search engine friendly as possible; this is because that without the URL rewriting technology the URLs which were produced by a CMS system wouldn’t be SEO friendly since they would contain query strings and other pieces of content which are not related to the subject and content of your website, and no keywords related to the subject and content of your website at all. One thing to note when optimizing your website’s URLs is that you don’t want to make them too long since long URLs are not liked that much by search engines, since they take into account that it would take a human a while to type in such a long URL.

Hiring a Professional

If you feel that you don’t have the necessary knowledge to carry out the work needed to ensure that your website is a success with the extra SEO work, then you should consider hiring a professional who has both the time and the knowledge to carry out the work needed to ensure that your website is able to benefit from the effect that search engines are able to have on the amount of traffic which you receive to your website; one thing to bare in mind though is that hiring a professional can cost you a lot of money, even hundreds of pounds in some cases.

Although it will cost a lot, it is important that you take into consideration the benefits that professional search engine optimization will have on your website; for example, if you are running an online shop then you should take into consideration that the amount of money which you earn from selling your products online will increase if the amount of visitors which you receive who are looking for a website just like yours. In some cases, the experts which you hire to carry out your SEO work for you will know people who work for the big search engines, this in turn means that they might be able to give your upper hand when it comes to being shown at the top of results pages for searches involving certain keywords; at the end of the day, the higher up in the search engine results your website is then the higher the amount of visitors which you receive from search engines will be, since you should always take into account that most people don’t go any further than the third page of results when they are looking for a website on a specific subject.

Professionals will also be able to do a better job than amateurs when it comes to search engine optimization, since it is something which they have probably done a numerous amount of times; this means that you should always take a look at the portfolio of an SEO expert before you ask them to do any work for you, since you want ensure that you are guaranteed success from what you are paying the expert to do for you. SEO professionals are also able to use other techniques which have not been listed in this article to ensure that your website reaches the top of the rankings and receives a high search engine score from the search engines that choose to index your content. Another thing to consider is that search engine optimization professionals might have premium accounts for certain directories, meaning that they can easily submit your website to the directory concerned so that it can be displayed in a featured place to the visitors of the directory concerned; this means that if someone has come to a directory to specifically search for a website which meets the same criteria as yours, then they will come across your website first since it will most likely be a featured one.

If you don’t have the money to hire a professional to optimize your website for you, then you can use the basic methods as outlined in this article to optimize your website by yourself, although this will not achieve the same results as a professional would, you will still increase the amount of visitors which you receive to your website, and in the case of an online shop your revenue as well; this means that if you successfully optimize your site then you could do it for others at a small fee, and start to charge more as you build up a successful portfolio.

Conclusion

It is hoped that with the help of this article, you have been able to optimize your site to ensure that you increase the number of visitors which it receives, and in turn increasing the revenue which you receive from your website in the case that you run a shop alongside it or you have chosen to place adverts alongside your content to help monetize your website. With the use of this article you should have learnt where you appropriately place back links to your website so that more visitors come and see your content; this will mean that the visitor count of your website will increase but at the same time ensure that search engines pick the back links up meaning that they will see your content is of back link quality since they will think that someone else has gone to the trouble of linking to your content since they have taken a liking to it. You should have also learnt where to place keywords within your content as well as in the title bar and how you should use keywords within the addresses to the files and directories within your website to show that the content of your the directory or file which is trying to be accessed is related to both the title (the page title) and address bar (the actual URL) content.

Another SEO technique which you should have taken on board is the design and layout techniques which you should use in the development of your website to ensure that search engines can easily crawl and index the actual content of your website; without the use of these tags, search engines might just give up trying to index your content after a certain point since it starts to become hard for them to read, just as it would for a human. You should have also learnt that you can easily hire a professional for a fee if you find that you don’t have the time or necessary knowledge to optimize your website - this should however be following with caution since if you don’t optimize your site correctly then you could end up reducing the amount of visitors which your website receives; at the end of the day, you don’t want to reduce the amount of visitors which you website receives since you will only give yourself or an expert more work to do when you get around to optimizing your site properly in order to increase the amount of visitors which you receive.