Archive for July 2011
What to do with your new Domain Name -The Absolute Beginner Webmaster (Part 2)
So you have a domain name and you have a web host. What should you do next? Well there are some things that you should do with some urgency! I tell you exactly what to do and how to do it.
I am assuming that you did not buy your domain name from your host. There are many reasons why it is not a good idea to do this. The most pressing reason is that should you have any type of dispute with your host, and these can arise even if you pay on time, then you can simply point your domain name at another host and carry on!
The first thing to do is to set up your hosting account to expect your new domain name. This means adding your new domain to the hosts nameservers. The way you do this will vary from host to host, some require you to email them the domain name and they sort it out usually within 24 hours. Others give you access to a control panel, in which there will be a section called ‘Domain Administration’ or something like that. In this case click on ‘add domain’ or the equivalent of it and enter your base domain name (ie mysite.com not http://www.mysite.com or http://www.mysite.com).Ask, or copy down from the hosts faq what the names of their nameservers are. Usually there are two and their names are simply the host name prefixed with ns1 or ns2, (eg ns1.myhost.net or ns1.spasmodynamic.com) but some hosts use more exotic schemes.
Once you have done this then you should ask for (or use your control panel to set) a catch-all email address for the site. This simply forwards all email addressed to any email address on the site to one address.
Now go to the domain registration company you use and login. You will find when you go to the settings page for your domain that you have an option to change the nameservers. Change these to your hosts nameservers. Be aware that it can take up to 24 hours for the changes to work their way around the internet, though you can often view your sites holding page (automagically inserted by yourhost) within a couple of hours.
During this time you can build a simple html page for your site. I recommend everybody hand codes a page at least once in their lives even if they do own a copy of Dreamweaver and this can be it for you! Before you start however because this is going to be a placeholder designed for the search engines to index we need to do a tiny bit of research. Hopefully you have read http://www.bukisa.com/articles/90037_birth-of-a-new-website-the-absolute-beginner-webmaster-part-1 and understand the value of keywords.
Do a search in google, for the main few keywords of your site on at a time. Write down the top 5 results for each keyword. Now go to http://www.webmaster-a.com/keyword-density-analyser.php and look to see in each case what the density of these words are on the pages. This will give you figures to aim for. Why can I not tell you a figure to aim at? Simple, Google applies different criteria in its anti-spam calculations to each subject area – whilst certain keywords may be acceptable at a rate of up to 18% of the pages content, some others become unacceptable at a mere 3.5%!
Now build a simple text page, make sure you have a title tag and a meta description tag. Important: Nowhere on the site should you put the words ‘under construction’ or talk about the site being incomplete! If you MUST do this then use an image to talk for you but do not name or the image or its ‘alt’ tag as under construction or roadworks or whatever. Make the image name the same as your keyword and the alt tag a sentence with your keyword in it.
If you know little or no html and you do not even know what an ALT tag is then a simple html tutorial is at http://www.webmaster-a.com/basic-html-tutorial.php
Must haves for your page – check these.
Title, No more than 66 chars long with your keyword as the first word. Should be an english sentence that makes sense.
Meta Description tag. No more than 120 chars long with your keyword towards the front an end. Should be two sentences which make sense.
h1 heading which almost repeats the title.
One or two paragraphs of text which is written so that your keywords make up a good percentage of what is said.
h2 heading
One or two more paragraphs of keyword rich text. Put one of the keywords in bold.
External Links, choose some websites that are on the third page of results for your keywords and put in a hyperlink to five or six of them.
A copyright statement that finishes with your keyword/phrase. For example – Site and contents copyright 2009 kluskies sable brushes.
Now upload your page to your host, you can either use FTP or your hosts file manager (usually on your control panel). There are plenty of free FTP (File Transfer Protocol) packages out there for both unix and windows. The next step is to use the keyword analyser on your uploaded page and double check the density to make sure you are at or near the limits you found earlier for your web sector. Adjust your text to suit.
Remember that as soon as you get your page indexed by the search engines (and we want this to be as soon as possible because it can take a long time to get decent rankings) you must change it once a week or so. This ensures they keep coming back for more and dont put you in the moribund and uninteresting sites category. This lack of chage in the holding page while they spend 6-8 weeks perfecting the final website is what most people get wrong!
Now you are ready to submit your site… or not! Read http://www.bukisa.com/articles/51959_the-best-way-to-get-your-site-into-the-search-enginesquickly on submitting without submitting!
Next time I will discuss building your site whilst taking SEO into account from the very start, making your content dynamic, and how to build links.
Written by Mattinblack
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Writing Articles – Advice For The Do-It-Yourself Webmaster
As an SME it is virtually impossible for us to hire the services of a good SEO company that is going to spend time optimising the site, adding new content and gaining good links for the site, simply because of the cost involved. Other SME’s are I am sure in a similar position. They would all love to have a web site that ranked highly in google and the other search engines and brought in a constant flow of new business. However to hire an SEO company to do all those things above is often beyond the reach of many small companies especially those just starting out.
However as a company providing services ourselves and 80% of our new business coming via the internet I can thoroughly recommend that you find a company, invest the money because you will soon get the rewards back. If you feel that you still cannot quite afford to go down that path because money in the company is tight then the other course of action I can recommend is to write articles. I kept seeing and reading all this free advice from SEO’s out there on the Web about the benefits of writing articles and submitting to article distribution centres and e-zines. I used to think when reading these words of wisdom how wonderful it would be if only I could do that, but I never did it. Until recently that is. About a month ago I decided I would try writing an article. First what would I write about? Big problem, what could I write about that had any relevance to my website or the services we provided and be of interest to anybody else? So I did a search on one of the article distribution sites looking for articles that had relevance to my own sites content and found nothing of real relevance. So nothing for it I would have to write my own. It still took another week before I came up with any ideas. I focused on what services we provided and how I could turn these into articles. Still nothing actually came of these thoughts. Then one night I was talking to one of our cleaners who was telling me about the problems she was having with the toilet brushes on these particular premises she was working at. They were the wrong shape for doing a good job! The following day I spoke to the company and they agreed we could put our own in. Then I realised that this was a problem in many places especially domestic households. So I wrote my first article about toilet brushes and the why’s and how’s of how people should approach the purchase of these objects. Once started the words flowed. I submitted this to two article distributors and one ezine. To my surprise it was accepted and I have not looked back. I now write on average two articles per week and have reached the grand total of 24 published articles. Each article gives me about five links on average, some provide more, others less, it depends on who picks them up and republishes them. Most importantly it has boosted my visitors and my backlinks and therefore my search engine position. When I did a search on who was linking to my site these articles produced 12 backlinks for google and a staggering 186 on MSN. It was incredibly interesting to see where my articles were ending up, often in very unexpected places, and it is global, so they can be picked up anywhere in the world.
Do not be put of by the thoughts
· I cannot write
· I have nothing to write about
· Nobody would want to read the things I know about
Because you are wrong on all counts. There is a lot of advice freely available on how to write good articles, go search it out. Everybody who is running a business has expert knowledge on some subject, and lastly the whole world is your audience so there will be many people out there who are interested in what you have to say. Surprise yourself, as I did, give it a go. After the first or second article you will find that they just flow and writing becomes much easier. Very importantly however they do wonders for your website.
Written by daisyda
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