Costa Dedes’ latest article titled “Website Building Tips” is reprinted here. [Article]


Costa Dedes’ latest article is reprinted here.

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Website Building Tips

Many Webmasters try to promote a badly built website and get frustrated when they see no results in terms of sales or returning visitors. In order for you to succeed in promoting a website, you absolutely need to have a site that is clean, clear and filled up with original and interesting content. You can spend tons of green bills on marketing and even generate hordes of traffic to your website but if your website does not show confidence and trust noone will be neither ordering from you nor returning to your website.

The following website building tips will hopefully help you draw attention and visitors to your site and perhaps also close a few sales. How do you want to be seen? Your website is the way you present your self and your products, like a storefront on the streets if you will, and it is important that you present your self in a manner that appeals to the audience you are targeting.

CONTENT IS KING, as always…

Before you begin to build your website, try to choose a topic that you are familiar with and have some kind of interest in. If you choose something that is of no interest to you, your visitors will often be able to spot that and find your website worthless. In these days of adsense sites etc many people just put of crappy websites to earn a few quick ones but the content and the quality of the content, in particular, is very often missing.

Also when building websites on topics that you are not interested in will be a constant pain in the behind for you when it is time to update. Today there are many ways to make automatic websites and even make automatic content and updates but as we all know there is a need for updates to stay listed in the search engines and not everything can be made by computer software. If the website is interesting to you it is much more possible that also other people will find interest in your website. If you are new to the game and not so familiar with niche research etc, try to explore what other people are interested in and see if you can find something that matches your interests and then try to build a website around that topic.

As soon as you have chosen a topic for your website it is time to start writing content. Always use a spell checker! 🙂 No matter how good a writer you are there will still be times when you make typos. That I can guarantee. Try to make your content look professional and make it easy to read. Also try to get the text to flow naturally and divide it into easily readable chapters and paragraphs.

Your visitors want as good quality content as possible and they want a lot of it. A good idea for any beginner is to fill your site with articles written by other people as long as they fit your site’s theme. You can find plenty of those re-printable articles on the internet. Allthough these articles will not help your website in terms of ranking or indexing they will provide good and easily available content related to the theme of your site. Later when you get a bit more experience write your own articles, tips, and details of all the products and services on your site. Remember, the key to building a good website is content, content and CONTENT.

LAYOUT and DESIGN…

Mission One: Make your website easy to navigate and make it easy to access your content. Use a simple, no fuss style and layout with easy to find links. Do not disguise your links behind text or pictures only meant to get visitors to click. Basically it should be easy to understand the layout of your site and moving from page to page on your website should be made with ease.

Websites full of graphics are complicated to maneuver around and most visitors will find these kinds of website terrible to use. Also by the introduction of Flash many webmasters made their websites so darn “flashy” that it became almost impossible to surf the sites on low speed connections. The sites often looked, and looks, like a show off room for the webmaster rather than the informative and useful content the visitors are looking for. Remember; most people search the internet for information and nothing more – Keep it simple! Some banners on your site is ok.But the glorious days of banners are gone and blinking banners, buttons and flashy colors will turn visitors away.

META TAGS:

Meta tags are little lines of code that are placed between the HEAD and the /HEAD tags in your site’s HTML code. They do not affect how the page is displayed but they provide information on who created the page, how often it is updated, how often the search engine spiders should visit your website, what the page are all about, and which keywords represent the main content of the website. These “tags” are not visible to your visitors but is only used by the spiders when indexing your website.

THE DESCRIPTION TAG:

These tags are very important. This is the title people see when someone does a search on a search engine and your listing comes up, the description is displayed right below your title.

Since you want people to click on your link, you absolutely need to make sure that your description will grab their attention and make them want to click on your link to know more. If no description tag is found, search engine will most likely create their own description and most likely not manage to describe your page properly.

Description tags should be short but descriptive.

THE KEYWORDS TAG: META name=”keywords” content=”International Offshore Bank with the Best Rates”

Search engines will only display a small part of the description in their results list. If a description tag contains too many words, the extra words will be cut off. Try to avoid that as it may ruin your chance of getting the number of clicks you should be getting.

Keyword tag contains words and phrases relevant to the content of your website. Commas and spaces separate the different words from each other. Keyword tags is not visible to the visitors at your site, nor do the search engines display them in their results but many search engines read the keywords tag and give a small increase to the ranking for the words that are mentioned in it as the words in the keyword tags should be some of the most relevant words for your site.

Search engines will read about ten words or so, so it is no use in stuffing in a lot of keywords.

Going through your site before launch…

Once your website has been finished, go over it word for word, line for line, and correct any typos, errors, or broken links. Nothing is more frustrating than clicking on a link and then find out that the link is broken or leads to a different page than the page you were actually trying to reach.

Monitor your site on a regular basis and make sure the links and content is working and up to date. There are even automatic link checker programs that can be used for this purpose.

One last thing; if visitors can see that you are available to contact, they will be much more likely to trust you and click on your links. Therefore include contact information, maybe even a picture of your self, so people can easily contact you.

To Your Success,

Costa Dedes

http://www.costadedes.com/

*IMNewswatch would like to thank Costa Dedes for granting permission to reprint the latest article.

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