Opinion About Building A Website
First of all you need to chose what content your website will have. Basically it should be something you’re good at. For instance, if you’re passionate about graphic design, you can add tutorials for the programs you use (Adobe Photoshop, Corel Draw, etc); if you’re passionate about history, you can build a website with important events from history, profiles of different important figures from history, etc; and so on… you get the idea.
Design vs Content Easy win… only a n00b can really think deep about that. Content always comes first. This don’t mean your website should be slack with no graphic/visual elements at all. Just keep it clean, don’t add graphic unless it’s needed, don’t add flash or java scripts in excess. Make it load fast, easy to browse, readable. As much as possible make sure the scroll bar don’t show… a lot of surfers don’t bother scrolling down. You may wanna learn about SEO (Search Engine Optimization)… do some research on this matter. I don’t get in the details of building the actual website, there’s lots of programs to help you do this… Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive, etc. Chose whatever you’re comfortable with and do it.
Now… you already have a website up and running, the content is added… what next? Traffic! Biggest problem of all… driving quality traffic to your website. Now it’s the time to search the web looking for possible sources of visitors. And also now it’s the time when you will get drowned in spam emails. Advice: don’t ever pay for directory listing. It’s useless, all you will get is bot traffic. Instead list your website in search engines… Google, Yahoo, MSN and the more obscure ones you can find. Of course, if you can afford, go for payed listing… in Yahoo you can buy links from 30 USD/month and in Google for 50 USD/month. If you go for payed listing, be careful about the keywords you chose… if you have a website filled with Photoshop tutorials, you don’t wanna pay for visitors looking for Corel Draw tutorials. Page rank should be your main concern… I will cover that later.
Another free way to drive traffic to your website is to promote your articles/tutorials in bookmark services such as Digg, Shoutwire, Technorati, etc. Do whatever it takes to have your articles promoted to the first page on this services. Cheat, use proxies, call your friends to create accounts and digg/shout your articles… it don’t matter as long as you don’t get caught.
Link exchange is something you should keep in mind, but not too much… get link exchange with websites related to yours. I’d recommend to study a little bit first that website. It’s no use if your link will be on some page no one ever open and that won’t help you get higher rank in search engines.
Let’s talk a little about this rank… when you search for something in Google for instance, you get a list of web pages containing your keywords. The page rank determines the order those pages show up in your results. The higher the rank, the higher the position in results. Of course you will want to have a place on the first page, but who doesn’t? How you get there… that’s a whole different story. For a long time search engines don’t even look in meta tags for keywords… strange, that’s something not everybody knows yet. For this reason, there’s no need to fill your meta with hundreds of keywords cause no search engine will look there. Instead they look for keywords in page content, so if you want your page to show higher in search results, make sure to repeat keywords as much as possible in page content. Second… a dynamic page will always get higher rank than a static page. If your page content is not changed for a long period of time, don’t expect a high rank. To counter this, use dynamic content somewhere in the page. Third and last thing I wil talk about is links to your page. The more links the search engine finds on another websites, the higher the rank of your page. Importantly , quality websites with the link submitted within content is essential. That’s the reason a link exchange won’t get you higher ranking. The search engine won’t count a static link, but it will count a link inside an article/tutorial like this one
That’s about it… my opinion on building a website and drive traffic to it. I will cover the money making process on another article, cause that’s a long story to tell.
Source: http://www.dotfree.eu
Tags: opinion, traffic, website