1. Good niche website

Searching a good niche is, matter a lot for making your website different such that it can attract many visitors to your site also you should be prepared and develop yourself in this field. By using a different niche, you can get traffics from many other professional sites.

2. Site for SEO

When you are developing the website keep the SEO guidelines in mind and design the site making it search engine friendly. Your site should be neat and clean and should be easy to crawl by the search engine spiders.

3. Keyword Research

When your site is ready, searching for the keywords for the sites is very important. Do not go for the most searched keywords on the other sites. Since, there is very tough competition for the short keywords. Do not go for the short keywords as they are very common go for the long tail keywords that are not mainly used in the search engines. Using an effective keyword in the site will work more when the user is searching for the specific keyword. There are many keywords search tools available you can try one of them.

4. Content for the site

Try to make your own content for the site and put it in your language. Do not copy content from the other sites. Search for the site and take reference from the other site how the contents are made and written, make unique contents and make them more interesting with images in it, google loves the sites with good contents. So that visitor can see the articles as well as the images on the sites, because of this you will receive high traffic to your site.

5. Article Submission

When you write the articles for the website submit them to the articles directories such as Ezine articles, Content4reprint, goarticles and many more. This will work as a popularity of your link. When your articles are of great educational purpose then many webmasters from the other sites will use them and link back to your site.

6. Submitting site to web directories

Submitting your website in the SEO friendly directories is used to get link popularity. Also make sure to read the guidelines for the directories when you are submitting the site in the directories, there are some disagreement on the paid directories submission but google like the paid directories submission such as Yahoo directory.

7. Learn Search Engine Optimization SEO

As it is said that your site should be natural so that it will attract more visitors with the really natural contents visitors will come and read your articles and may vote them. Therefore you do not need to implement the SEO tips and techniques. However, you should be skilled all the search engine optimization methods and decide what is best and worst for your website. Using the recommended SEO software will ease all the repetitive and additional work that take more time.

The web was once the playground for the rich. Now it has been thrown open in recent years to anyone and everyone with a working computer. During the 1990’s it used to cost someone over thousands of dollars to start, design and operate a working website.

But in contemporary times it costs around a few hundred dollars, and at times not even that much. With the tumbling price of entry into the web, innovation has come pouring in into this still new medium of art and expression.

While in the 1990s, only a handful of geeks could code complex websites in the still nascent HTML language, using tables for design, recent work has opened up the field and handed web authors powerful tools to express themselves. Cost does not seem to be a significant barrier anymore. Artists of all kinds and discipline have come pouring into the web, bringing with them their art and creativity. In recent years the Web has become a melting pot of art, design, and cutting edge technology, and the results are clearly showing. The Internet is swarmed with innumerable websites of top quality design and interactive interfaces that instantly attracts users.

With the beginning of the new century, what emerged was the need for greater interactivity in a web page. Users are no longer content with just clicking links on websites and letting the webmasters guide them through it. They want a greater control of the whole thing. Users are constantly looking for an interactive, impressive experience that brings them closer to the site, and makes them enjoy it. It is all about how the user relates to a website.

Through the advent of Flash media, and also with the integration of audio, video and other forms of moving art media, the web has successfully transformed itself into an engrossing medium. The Web now transports users into a completely different world and makes web surfacing an enjoyable experience.
Web: The early days

Since its inception in 1989 by English Physicist Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web, now commonly referred to as the Internet, has been a place where expenses mattered. Back then modems were costlier than computers, and computers costlier than we can possibly imagine today! The web was a restricted place, available to the select few, rich enough to afford a computer and a modem. And the speeds connecting to the web, of course was extremely slow. A mere 2kbps modem line was considered a luxury in those days. So it is not hard to believe that most (the handful that were) websites were mainly text only, catering to slow speeds, and with limited graphical element in them.

The first graphics capable browser did not come on until 1993. From then on, slowly and steadily, small graphical elements were introduced. Web Design was, at that time, just a way to display the text on the page more pleasingly to the users. Without WYSWYG editors, the development of websites and the maintenance of them was the domain of a few skilled developers, capable of hand coding HTML pages in Notepad, or some other text editors.

Gradually with the introduction of slightly faster modems, and the falling of prices of modems and computers in the mid to late 90s, the web started becoming more accessible and was not a stronghold of a selected few. With such rapid developments, came tools such as Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dream weaver. Then appeared a revelation in the field of web design, and with that came up browsers like Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. They were designed to handle images and texts with panache.

Website design started to be taken more seriously, with people using “tables” to spread out web pages and display them properly and in accordance with some design principles. It was not until the advent of “broadband” and it’s entry into the worldwide market that the web began to emerge as something greater than just a collection of images and text into something more profound and complex.

The changing and developing face of the web.
Web design, as something more than merely the process of having text and images laid out, did not occur till the advent of broadband. In the early days of broadband, web authors suddenly came to realize that a lot more power had been handed over to them and that they could now transfer more data to serve each web page. With this realization, the web took its next big leap with the start of using images as more than just aides for the text. Images were now being used as helpers in designing a website, with actual design precipitating from mainstream media.

In the mean time, Macromedia had also released Flash which had previously been used to provide a slightly more graphical version of the website, if, albeit at the cost of time taken to load the site. With broadband, Flash really hit the mainstream, and designers used it to create more and more interactive web sites. Flash was suddenly everywhere on the web, and with Flash enabled browsers, web sites were able to incorporate more graphics rich web sites which catered to their users.

With the access of broadband, even normal HTML started to grow and evolve. And with CSS version 2, a new way to style and design web pages were born. This allowed web designers a better opportunity to design more and more complex websites with an entire library of layout techniques came up at their disposal, and with images now firmly being used as aides in design. HTML also expanded itself to support video and audio, and together with Flash, formed the foundation of what was to become the design form of the new century.

With the breakthrough innovation of a communication system like the Internet, what emerged for website designing was phenomenal. Based on a brilliant principle of interconnectivity of computer networks worldwide, the Internet became an indispensable tool in the modern day and age. The gradual emergence of the Internet as such a powerful device was crucial in defining and shaping the process of website designing.

What attracted many of the designers to innovate and come up with groundbreaking ideas was a quick and effective system by which everyone remained interconnected. From the 1990’s onwards the Internet became more accessible to the public, the World Wide Web and its plethora of millions of websites created an immediate demand for website designing.

Website designing is to a great extent about the aesthetic aspect. This aspect received a considerable impetus with the emergence of Adobe Photoshop. This graphic editing software created ripples in the world of computer technology and today everything related to visual design is usually always associated with Photoshop. What began as the brainchild of Thomas Knoll, carried forward by his brother John Knoll became new age phenomena for the world of visual art. Still considered the best graphic editing software, despite its quite steep price tag, Photoshop made things relatively easier for web designers.

No discussion on the evolution of website designing can possibly be complete without the mention of Adobe Fireworks also referred to as Fw. Adobe Fireworks gradually became an absolute essential when working on vector editing. Fireworks came fully loaded with a hoard of special features that made web designers sit up and take notice. While there is some skepticism over the use of Fireworks by devoted followers of Photoshop, it is difficult for anyone well versed with the process of web designing, to not appreciate its specialty in the field of vector editing.

With developments of such epic proportions in the field of computer technology it became more and more apparent to companies all over the world that the World Wide Web could be used as an exceptionally powerful medium to showcase their products. There came about a mad rush for setting up all kinds of websites, what emerged was a whole range of ideas that could be molded into creating stunning websites.

Like advertisements that have become an essential feature for marketing products, the Web has become a powerful tool where ideas can be sold and bought in seconds. Companies from across the world realized that a website can become their identity, their way of reaching out to millions all over the world. Soon enough there was a shift of emphasis to website designing.

Pros in the business keep harping that a website is nothing like an advertisement although it is wrongly conceived so. They are right because even though a website is a powerful marketing advice it has a lot more to it than a mere marketing strategy. When website designers recognized this factor they come up with faster and better innovative ideas to take designing to a whole new level. As the best minds got to work what emerged was a distinct division of websites that relied heavily on its textual content and those that valued its graphic content. Most designing honchos today still believe that too much graphics and flashy images are difficult on the eye. While many prefer a simple style of design, with effective backgrounds and crisp content, there are a host of websites with little information but a lot of flashy image and content.

Going back to basics has become the new mantra with more and more people preferring to hand code their website in HTML. The process of development of website designing has been extremely enriching. People learnt from their mistakes and were ready to acknowledge the loopholes in their work.

The extensive spread of fast immerging websites gave designers ideas on what works and what does not. It was soon established that a website must speak to its reader. That it is much more than just a virtual experience. Designers began to realize the importance of incorporating some simple but workable aspects into their design. They got rid of too much cluttering and crowding; well-spaced sites that are not over crowded are examples of websites that work. For a long time now, website designers have been harping on the need to create proper navigation systems on websites.

The best in the business keep saying, make your websites user-friendly, for, that is the key to a successful website design. Earlier websites often packed in too much information and the user was left confused about the purpose of the website. If it takes a person too long to figure out the purpose of a website, chances are the website designer’s career is heading for a major crash.

Today a beginner in the world of website designing can find a multitude of links, tips, blog posts, and advice on what is right and what is wrong in the art of designing a website. While it might be extremely difficult to get it perfectly right at the very start, quick online guides can prove to be effective in taking the first few steps to launching a website.

After plenty of debates and discussions on what to do and what not, a more or less common consensus has evolved over the last few years on the basic principles to follow while designing a website. It seems that it has become essential to keep a website simple. Pop-up windows and flashy animated images flying around randomly in a web page have been recognized as common nuisance.

A lot of importance has been placed on the Typography aspect of web design. How important can the font of a website possibly be? Extremely. It is a single most important feature in web designing that can make or break your site’s appeal. It seems that pros at work keep harping on the importance of using content that matters and dispelling with useless extra information that only confuses the readers. Not only does the font matter, its size and color are important aspects that need to be looked into. A clean, well-organized layout has been recognized as key factor in making websites successful and an instant hit with the average web surfer.

Impact of Social Networking on Web Design

Apart from technological developments another important 21st century emergence that has created an important impact on web design would certainly have to be the growth of social networking sites. Social networking is a new phenomena, that has helped increase communication between people from everywhere and helped individuals benefit from the process personally and professionally. Social networking sites aim at roping in individuals who can create public or semi public profiles and use the site as a platform for developing their work or strengthening personal relationships. Facebook, Orkut, MySpace and Bebo are just some examples of an online trend that has suddenly taken the world by storm.

The sudden rage of social networking led to the development of websites that began to be specifically designed to cater to groups of people who were looking for user friendly sites that could help to guide their networking ability in the right direction. A whole new generation of website designers came up with ideas that worked and designs that were built to become a hit. One of the most popular would have to be the photo management website Flickr.com that has become an example to aspiring designers all over to keep website design effective, simple and usable.

With millions of users working on their profiles everyday, social networking sites must be custom made to work twenty-four into seven. Frequent changes in the web design are also another healthy way by which social networking sites keep a hold on their subscribers.

Not only do social networking sites need designs that are attractive, but also those that work to deliver. Most of the networking sites enable their users to keep numerous friends, to display their profile publicly or otherwise, carry on a systemized mode of communication with their contacts, while have their privacy maintained and security guaranteed. The integration of so many features within a website obviously and without a doubt requires carefully planning and unique concepts of design. Its not easy being Mark Zuckerberg, obviously one has to have real talent to create such an online rage in the world of networking.

From the initial inception of what is considered to be the beginning of social networking site, which was called SixDegrees, social networking has certainly come an extremely long way. With the launch of MySpace in 2003 a new era of social networking had started. It appears that while expanding their hold everywhere these social networking sites experienced some difficulty, as it still does, often getting banned in some countries. However much credit must be attributed to the innovative designs of such social networking sites, which has opened up several new vistas for expanding work in the field of web design. Social networking most certainly created an extensive demand for a plethora of web pages that had to carefully designed and implemented to create websites that appeal to the masses.

Interacting with a Website
The gradual evolution of website designing has gone into making the website as something more than just a page on the Internet. The website can almost be described as a living, breathing aspect of everyday life. People use websites for all sorts of reasons. It is the fastest way to buy and sell ideas, and conceptions, to reach out to a large group of people or to just bring about change in a society that constantly wants something new. It can be safely said that a website, or the Internet, has become an integral aspect of our life. What makes the website work is its design. Therefore it can be considered to be an art form that needs mastery over a variety of skills. A website designer must be able to visualize, he has to be creative and ready to take risks that can turn into achievements, he must have more than just mere technical skill. A web designer is a package of several qualities, all put into one. He must create, design, visualize and implement. It is most certainly not an easy task, and there are so many points to keep in mind that it can become complicated.

However, website designing is not something to be feared. Over the last few years of it’s evolving, a lot of factors have become obvious to the ordinary designer. There are hundreds of tips and tricks to choose from, to perfect the design. And everyday new tools and features are being launched and introduced to make the designer’s work easier but more challenging. This is possibly the best aspect of design, it constantly challenges but the end result is undoubtedly very gratifying.

With technology and opportunity today, almost anyone and everyone can take the initial baby steps into setting up their own design, but the work requires dedication. What helps possibly, is the long process of development that website designing has seen over the last few years. Landmarks in its history as well as failures can go an extremely long way in teaching a website designer a lesson on the pros and cons of making decisions or taking risks with their design. With a brilliant line up of designers dedicated to the cause of enhancing the experience and process of website designing, it can be hoped that this form of design has a bright future ahead and has a long way to go.

SIDE NOTE

If you own SBI or you are planning to use it, you do not need to worry about the technical details in this part. SBI takes care of all the ‘tech stuff’ and the analyzing and optimizing of pages is done automatically, and the pages comes out ranking very well in the search engines. You will still get big value from reading about the off page optimization factors.

As we touched briefly in some of the parts before, SEO efforts are necessary to give your site best possible possibilities for ranking high on the search engine results pages (SERP). Getting into the top of the ten first results is the major goal of all SEO efforts. That means you are on the first page of results that comes up when someone makes a query and it is more likely that they will find your site and click thru to it if it is in the top ten somewhere, instead of on result number 599. No one goes that far in the list of results to find what they are looking for.

But you need to be patient in the start, do not expect to see a lot of traffic from search engine referrals in the first months. In that time the other traffic building methods are more important.

Basic SEO:

There are two major parts of SEO; on page optimization and off page optimization.

The on page optimization is optimizing all the ranking factors that are on your website. The off page optimization is the optimization of all the ranking factors that are not located on your website that the search engines use to determine the ranking of a website.

Optimizing on page factors:

When you have chosen your main keyword that will be the search term that you want your page to be found by, you will need to include that keyword a few important places where the search engine robots will look for information.

The robots (spiders, bots) will place special importance on the words in the title, description and headline of your document. It is important that you include your main keyword on all of those places. Even so, it is important to remember that you are writing both to satisfy the robots and the human readers, so short and descriptive sentences are the best. If you place keyword, keyword, keyword , it will look strange to a human reader. You just need to learn to convey what you want in as few words as possible.

Title tag:

Preferably you should place your keyword as the first word in the title tag of your page, and use as few other ‘filler’ words as possible.

Description tag:

In the description of your page be short and precise, and be sure to include your keyword once, at the most twice. In the description you can also place other secondary keywords or keywords that are related to your main keyword.

Keyword tag:

The effect of using the keyword tag has been discussed, because some search engines are said to not honor the keyword tag because it has been misused for spamming. Other search engines seem to honor the keyword tag, so we will put it in to be sure. Do not overuse it though. Put in only a few keywords or key phrases and do not put in 50 different keywords. That would be spamming.

Heading tags (h1 tags):

In the heading of your page you need to include your main keyword. This along with t he title tag is what says the most about what the content on the page is to the search engines robots. If the text is longer use also sub-headings (h2/h3 tags) containing your main keyword, and/or a variation of your main keyword.

In the text:

Throughout your text you need to sprinkle in your keyword here and there, preferably in the start of the text and close to the end of the text. Some SEO’s will give you a percentage of how many times you should mention your keyword in a text depending on the length of the text. You will not get that here, but it is important to mention the main keyword in the first couple of sentences. Put the keyword towards the end of the document too.

Bold/Itallics/Underlined

Also put your keyword in bold, underlined or italics once or twice on your page. Do not over do it, because if you do it will also be seen as spam.

Off page factors

- The off page ranking factors are:

- The number of sites linking to you

- How relevant to your topic these sites are

- The title of the page where your link appears

- The anchor text used in the link to you

- The amount and types of sites that are linking to the site that is linking to you

- The number of links on the page where your link appears

- The Google PageRank of the site that is linking to you

First a simple explanation of PageRank from Google itself:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

The simplest way to keep track of Google PR is to download the Google Toolbar. That will show the PR of each site you visit and it will also give you another neat feature which is showing how many backlinks a site has. If you hold the cursor over a domain and right click you will get a menu that

The number of sites linking to you

You would want to have as many websites linking to you as possible. That means that your site is popular and that will increase your ranking. But there is also differences here, sites that are more relevant to your subject and has a high PageRank and few links out will be worth more then a link from an irrelevant site with a ton of links out and no PageRank. But as a general rule we can say, the more links the better.

Please be aware that this linking need to come in a natural way and not 1000 back links in the week after your site has been indexed by the search engines. If you build your links to fast, it will make your site seem manipulated, and the back links will not be credited. In the worst case it will get your site dropped from the index of the search engine. A rule of thumb can be that you can build more back links if the site has got a lot of new content and is updated often.

How relevant to your topic these sites are

The more relevant to the topic of your site the pages with your link on are, the better it is. Stay away from FFA’s and Webrings that are just constructed to artificially increase your PageRank.

The title of the page where your link appears

Other important factors are the page title of the page that is linking to you. If it is similar or a variety of the keyword you are using it is seen as more relevant.

The anchor text used in the link to you

The anchor text that is used in the links that are pointing to your site is also an important ranking factor. The anchor text describes the link you are clicking on. It is the actual text that is made clickable in the link.

As an example we can use ‘click here’ this is the most common anchor text on the web, but as you see it does not give you much information about where it is leading and what the information on the page it is leading is about. The anchor text give both search engines and humans a clue of what they will meet when they click on the link.

On the links where you have influence over how the link is displayed, you should make sure that the anchor text on your links contains your main keyword. The links where you have influence is:

Internal links on your site

Reciprocal links

In the resource box of your articles

In directories where you submit your site

It is good to make some variations of the anchor text, so the search engines do not consider it as manipulation. If all you inbound links only contains your main keyword it seems unnatural.

When you are doing reciprocal linking it is good to provide the html code for your reciprocal link. Then you are in full control of which words are the actual link. The internal linking strategy is important, and the ‘votes’ that you give yourself counts as much as external links. Remember to use keywords as anchor text and not ‘home’ or ‘page 2‘or something similar when you link to your internal pages.

The amount and types of sites that are linking to the site that is linking to you

This is not a factor you can do, much about, but what you can do when you seek out linking partners is to look for sites that have a lot of back links to them. An explanation of how to do this is given in the research section on page 9.

The number of links on the page where your link appears

This is a factor that is important when seeking out link partners. Look at their links pages and see if they have many links on them. Above 100 is no good, less then 50 is good and the best would of course be if there are as few as possible links to other sites..

The Google PageRank of the site that is linking to you

A third factor you can not do much about, other then to look for the sites that has the higher PageRank when you are looking for link partners.

Searching for link partners and or one -way links:

A great way to find sites that will include your link either for free or as a link excange is to do a search query in Google that searches for submission forms:

Try one of these searches including the ‘allintext:’ command, and just change ‘keyword’ with your main keyword:

allintext: “submit a site” “keyword”

allintext: “add-a-link” “keyword”

allintext: “submit url” “keyword”

allintext: “add url” “keyword”

allintext: “add your site” “keyword”

Another query you can try is this:

Keyword “Please also suggest my link to the LinkPartners.com Directory”

Write it in the search field exactly as it is written above, you only need to change ‘keyword’ with your own keyword. That will bring up all the sites that uses your keyword, and has a link submission form from LinkPartners.com

The best places to look for link partners:

SiteSell Value Exchange

Linkmetro.com

Buying backlinks.

If you are going to buy backlinks there are a few things to watch out for. Lately it has become publicly known that Google discounts links that are recognized as bought links. The links can be recognized as purchased when they are placed in a section of a website that says ‘Sponsored Links’ or ‘Our Sponsors’ and so on. The best way to get a link displayed is without it being marked as sponsored. An example would be an in context text link with your keywords as anchor text.

Point to check:

Whenever you buy or exchange links, submit your site to directories or submit articles, press releases, or testimonials where your link will be displayed you should check that the links is displayed correctly and is possible for the search engines to spider.

If you are about to exchange links with a website always check that the site is indexed by the major search engines and is not using cheating methods.

The methods for cheating can be:

Disallowing robots via the robots.txt file

Using ‘nofollow’ and/or ‘noindex’ meta tags on the page where the link is displayed.

Using ‘nofollow’ and/or noindex’ attributes on the outgoing link itself.

Hiding the link in a JavaScript

Disallowing robots via the robots.txt file

Disallowing search engine robots of spidering the links/resource/directory pages where your link will be displayed. This is done via the robots.txt file. An easy way to detect this is to write in the domain like this in the address bar of your browser: http://www.example-domain.com/robots.txt

If the text you read looks like the example below and your link will be displayed in the links section, it is not ok:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /links/

The user agent means for which robot the instruction is meant for (* means all robots). Disallow means which directory the robot is excluded from. In the example above, robots are excluded from the /links/ directory. If there is nothing written in the disallow section, robots are allowed to spider the whole site.

You need to check that the directory where your link is going to be displayed is not disallowed. If the website you are checking does not have a robots.txt file, you will get an error page or get redirected to the home page.

There is much more to know about robots.txt files and if you come into situations where you have questions, this is a site with great information: http://www.robotstxt.org/

Using ‘nofollow’ and/or ‘noindex’ meta tags on the page where the link is displayed. To check if the site you are exchanging links with is using ‘nofollow ,noindex’ in the meta tags you need to view the source code of the document. You just go to the toolbar of your browser and click on ‘view’ and then click on ‘source’. Then you will see the raw html of the page displayed. You will find the meta tags are at the beginning of the page between the <head> tags, and if they are using the exclusion tag it will look like this:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

If you do not see it, or you see what it shown below, it is OK:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, FOLLOW”>

Using ‘nofollow’ attributes on the outgoing link itself.

To check if the site you are about to exchange links with is using ‘nofollow’ attribute on their links, you need to check the html code (view source) of the page where the links are displayed. If the links on the page where your link will be displayed has a ‘nofollow’ attribute on them, the link will not be followed by robots, and will not be credited when linkpopularity is counted. If it is used, the links will look like this:

<a href=”http://www.example domain.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor text</a>

If the links looks like the example below, it is OK:

<a href=”http://www.example-domain.com/”>Anchor text</a>

Hiding the link in a JavaScript The search engines does not read JavaScript very well, so links embedded in scripts does not pass page rank. The best is to get full direct and static url’s pointing to your site. There are many more factors involved in gaining backlinks, but the above mentioned are the basics. I would strongly recommend reading both Search Engine Optimization Made Easy by Brad Callen, and reading Make Your Links Work by Ken Evoy. The y are both short, simple and to the point. It is the best information you can get, and the absolute best part of it is that they are both FREE!

What not to do in SEO :

- Hidden text

- Meta tag stuffing

- Title tag stuffing

- Alt tag stuffing

- Linking to link farms or banned sites

- Do not use cloaking or sneaky redirects

Important for all who wants to do SEO: Read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and follow them. A great article on SEO: http://www.seomoz.org/articles/search-ranking-factors.php