get online - the easy way!
You've created your first site or blog and it's now online. Wow!
You've told family members, friends, neighbors - even, quite possibly, anyone else who'll listen - and now you're waiting for the rest of the world to view your efforts. In fact, you'd like as many people as possible to visit, especially if you want to make a little extra money with your site.
Well - we wish we didn't have to tell you this, but it isn't going to happen quite that easily!
Take a guess at how many sites are online in total. You'll never know exactly, because dozens of new ones have been created just in the time it takes to read this sentence. But it's certainly enough to mean you're going to have to help people find yours.
search engine optimization
Perhaps you've you heard this term before (it's often shortened to SEO, just to keep people guessing).
Essentially, it's the art of trying to make a site appear in search engines such as Yahoo or Google - and ideally, close to the top of their lists.
The thinking behind this, of course, is that search engines are the very best way of promoting websites. Everybody uses them to find info online, yet most people won't look far beyond the first three or four pages of results. And with literally millions of pages indexed by the top search engines, that often means a LOT of results to trawl through, so your site could quite easily get lost in a very large crowd.
so how do I go about optimizing?
As we've said, there's quite an art (some would say a science!) to optimizing a site, with whole industries built around the process.
Not everyone seems to agree entirely about how it's done, and you'll even come across contradictory information from time to time.
However, there are definitely one or two things you certainly must do to try to improve your chances of a high page rank. And luckily, our web and blog creation options make optimization as simple as designing the pages themselves.
If you'd like to know more about how search engines actually work, feel free to view / hide the following information
give it a title!
This is the easiest yet probably most important step of all. Quite simply, your site or blog needs to have a title.
If you're thinking "well, I included a couple of nice titles in my text, so that's me done", this isn't quite the same thing (though it certainly helps, and we're pleased to know that you're keeping your content nice and orderly!)
In fact, the title we're talking about is often called a 'page title' or 'browser title' because it appears right at the top of a browser window whenever a page is open.
If you've hardly noticed this before you're not alone - most people don't. But search engines certainly do, and it's the best single way to help them track down your pages.
not just any old title...
Browser titles work in a particular way so you need to think about them quite carefully.
Imagine, for example, that you're a writer and have created a blog to promote your new book, 'Clouds'. That's quite a nice title for a novel - short and sweet, so you use this as your blog title, too.
Try searching for it online. Type in 'clouds', and you're going to end up with millions of search results ranging from weather reports to descriptions of the sky (and much else besides). Not quite what you were hoping for.
The answer is to include specific 'keywords' in your title that narrow the idea of 'Clouds' down to something much more definite.
'Clouds, a new romantic novel by Jeannie Barrett'
This is much better, because most people using search engines type in several words to find what they're looking for. Jeannie's new title means that romantic novel lovers looking for a new read could well find links to her blog, as well as the many fans who simply type in her name. (We made up Jeannie, but we're sure we'd really like her work).
In fact, well-chosen keywords are so important that without them, your title's just not worth having. But don't try to cheat with long lists such as 'Clouds, a fantastic, well-written, exciting, new novel with a host of great characters by acclaimed, best selling author Jeannie Barrett'.
You're more likely to be ignored by search engines (and anyway, you can give a little more detail with something called a page description).
adding page titles in weebly
Click the Settings tab to enter the Edit Site Settings area.
Replace the username in the Title box with your own title.
adding page titles in 350
Select a page to edit, then locate the Page Controls menu in the top left corner.
Click the menu's Properties button (shown highlighted in the image below).
Delete 350's wording in the Page Title box and type in your own.
adding page titles in Blogger
Click the Settings tab.
Type your page title in the Title box provided.
adding page titles in iWeb08
Click the Page Title placeholder in the template you have chosen and type in your text.
meta tags: descriptions
If something called a meta tag sounds a little too heavy, we're happy to tell you that it's not. 'Meta' just means 'about', and it follows that meta tags are pieces of information about your pages - usually to help them work well in a browser.
For this reason, meta tags are generally concerned with technical stuff such as what version of html a page is using, what kind of content it includes and so on.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
Above: an example of a meta tag
Since visitors don't need (or probably want) to see meta tags, they're hidden from view in the html code. In certain circumstances, however, one in particular can be seen. It's known as a 'description'.
Like other meta tags, descriptions aren't visible on pages themselves, but do show up in most search engines as a kind of summary. (If you're not sure what we mean, search for something - anything - in your favorite search engine. Do you notice a few sentences under each link? This, often, is a description written by the site or blog owner).
If Jeannie Barrett, our imaginary author, decided to write a meta tag description for her blog, she might come up with something like this:
This new blog from best-selling author Jeannie Barrett tells you everything you want to know about 'Clouds', her latest romantic comedy.
And that's all there is to it. A short, informative summary that's designed to give potential visitors brief information about search engine results and, hopefully, encourage them to click and find out more.
meta tags: keywords
We've already said that you shouldn't cram your important page title with too much information. However, if you want to add extra hidden keywords to a page, you can do this using a 'keyword meta tag' created just for this purpose.
It has to be said that this isn't as helpful now as it was a few years ago, because most search engines have stopped taking keyword meta tags into real consideration.
But if your web or blog creation tool gives you the option to add them, it's probably worth doing so. Just make sure that they're genuinely relevant to the page and its content.
adding descriptions and keywords in weebly
Click the Settings tab to enter the Edit Site Settings area.
Click the Meta Tags and Footer Code button (shown below).
Add your page description inside the Description box.
Add any keywords, separated by a comma, in the Keywords box.
adding descriptions in 350
Select a page to edit, then locate the Page Controls menu in the top left corner.
Click the menu's Properties button (shown highlighted in the image below).
Delete 350's wording in the Description box and type in your own.
Add any keywords, separated by a comma, in the Keywords box.
adding descriptions in Blogger
Click the Settings tab.
Type your description in the Description box provided.
Add any keywords, separated by a comma, in the Keywords box.
adding descriptions in iWeb08
Annoyingly, it's not possible (at least not easily) to add page descriptions or keywords in iWeb. Don't despair, however - you can make up for this with well-written text.
the right kind of text
One of the reasons meta tag keywords are now of less use is that many search engines concentrate on the page text instead - the words a visitor will actually see.
For this reason, it's very important to add keywords and phrases here, too - especially in the first couple of headings and paragraphs. Obviously, you'll want to try to include them in a way that seems natural. Here's the opening line from Jeannie's first blog (she's learning fast).
The response to my previous books 'WinterWorld' and 'Kimberley' was so great that I've decided to create a writer's blog about my new romantic comedy, 'Clouds', which is about to be published by Turnkey Books.
This intro cleverly includes a lot of the kind of info her fans and other book lovers might search for, such as names of other books, her publishing company, the fact that her blog focuses on writing, and more.
As we've already said, the first few lines of text are generally considered the most important, but it's still a good idea to re-use key words as much as possible in the rest of your text, too.
submitting your site to search engines
These days, search engines are so powerful that if you follow the steps above, sooner or later they'll discover most sites themselves.
However, this can take some time and many people prefer to submit their site to help things along. This simply involves sending your site's web address via an online form (although not all search engines give you this option).
Leading search engines and an essential directory:
Add your site to MSN Live Search
Add your site to the Open Directory Project (dmoz)
This major directory is actually compiled by human editors to ensure quality. For this reason, its results are also adopted by many automated search engines such as Google.
Other important search engines and directories:
Seen by many as a successor to Google
A fairly new engine with a focus on video and image content
Large and well known directory of blogs
Large and well known directory of blogs
It may be some time before you can search for your site's name and see it appear, but it's an exciting moment when this happens. However, details about your site will also need to come up in searches relating to its content, not just its name, in order for surfers to discover it by chance.
links to your site
If other sites include a link to yours, there's usually a good reason. It could be that people are interested in what you have to say, love the design, or find the content useful. And because search engines know this is the case, they will often rank a site with multiple links to it higher in their results.
For this reason, people sometimes submit their sites to smaller directories (a directory is a website that lists sites in various categories) in an attempt to build up their 'incoming' links.
Some directories charge for this service, others ask for a link in return. There are thousands of directories online, and you'll come across plenty just by searching for terms like optimization, or SEO.
However, many SEO experts believe this tactic could actually work against you. Links to your pages, they say, should come from 'quality' sources in order to really count with a search engine. These could include other sites or blogs in the same field as yours, websites with strong reputations, or genuinely specialist or established directories set up to provide worthwhile information about what's online.
Such links can be frustratingly hard to develop because they usually occur naturally over time. However, it's always worth keeping an eye open for popular sites similar to yours, then creating a link to them from your own pages.
Many site owners frequently check their incoming links, and in doing so may discover your site and perhaps link back in return.
Blogs, of course, welcome comments from visitors, and this could also provide an opportunity to mention your own blog or site. Make sure it is appropriate however, or it may well be removed.
word of mouth
Even in the cyber world, human opinion counts for a lot. Even the best optimized sites aren't truly popular until people start to use them.
At the start of this section, we mentioned that after you've created a site - especially your first one - your instinct is to tell absolutely everyone about it.
We were kidding a tiny bit, but word of mouth is still the greatest advertising tool, and actually it's a great idea to let others know about your project (email is particularly good if you include a link for people to check out straight away).
You might even want to take things a step further: have cards printed, create a bumper sticker with your site's address, distribute a few t-shirts, and so on. Every little helps.
And on that note - if you'd like to link back to us, feel free to do so!
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