Many ways of making money involve creating some sort of website or blog - whether it’s a simple one page website or a large multi page site – and what that website needs is visitors… if you don’t get enough visitors, you won’t make money. With any website or blog, first step should always be SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation… creating your website, using search engine SEO techniques, that give you the best chance of coming high up in the search results.
The Basic Website SEO steps
Keywords and Phrases
Create a list of keywords and phrases that you think people might search for. Spend a lot of time on this. What would people type into the Google search box if they wanted to find a website like yours? Get more ideas by asking other people what they would search for. Single words? Which ones? Multiple word phrases? What are they? These are the keywords and phrases that you need, so, write them all down. Make a big list. Then identify what you think are the main ones. You will use this list of keywords and phrases in all of the following steps.
Domain Name
You need to choose a domain name that is made up of your main, big, keywords. If your website is going to be about, say, ”underwater basketweaving” it’s no good having a domain name like www.pjenterprizes.com because that doesn’t contain any of your keywords. Much better would be something like (you guessed it) www.underwaterbasketweaving.com or www.underwater-basketweaving.com
Web Pages
Within the context of your website, you should have each page targeted at a particularly good keyword or phrase.
Page Filenames
Obviously the homepage of any website must have the filename index.htm or one of the few variations which are allowed. However, your other webpages can be saved with any filename you want so you should choose the filename to match the content of that page. So a webpage about basket weaving materials could have the filename basketweavingmaterials.htm or similar. Something that contained some of your keywords.
Page Title
This does not appear anywhere on the page itself but appears in the title bar of the browser and on the tabs of a tabbed browser. Each page should have a different title and that title should reflect the content of the page AND be made up of your best keywords for that page.
Meta Tags
Some people say that these are no longer that important, but they certainly won’t do any harm and may just help – so, put them in. There are two main meta tags – “keywords” and “description”. If you don’t know how to put these in, just view the source code of some other webpage and you will see them in the head of the page code. They look like this: <meta name=”description” content=”Blah blah blah” /> and <meta name=”keywords” content=”blah,blah,blah” />
The “keywords” meta tag should contain a comma separated list of all your keywords that relate to that page. The “description” meta tag should be two or three proper sentences that describe that webpage – again, full of your best keywords and phrases for the page.
Main Headings <h1>
Each page should have ONE <h1> heading, again full of your biggest and best keywords. It’s no good having a flashy banner/image at the top of a page at the expense of having an <h1> heading. You need a main text heading, even if you have a banner. See how you can display a banner or image instead of an <h1>
Sub Heading <h2>
You should have one or more <h2> headings (using keywords) which can be used to split up the page into sections.
Body Text
Obviously, the main paragraphs of text should contain all your main keywords, repeated as often as is sensible. DON’T over repeat words and phrases as this is seen by Google (and others) as “spamming” and your money making website will be penalised in the search results.
Image Filenames
All the images you use on your website should have sensible filenames, using your best keywords. You might have an image called basket.jpg or basketweaving.gif but not img123.jpg or xyz.gif
Alternative Text (for images)
Use the “alt” attribute for all your images. This provides a text alternative for the image if anything goes wrong with the image itself. Again use keywords and phrases. On most browsers, when you hover your mouse over an image a box will pop-up displaying the alt text. However, on some browsers this doesn’t happen so you can also add a title attribute to the image, containing the same text as the alt.
Main Menu
DON’T use buttons or graphics as your main menu. They may look good but they are meaningless to search engine spiders. Always try to use text, just plain words, in your main menu. If you are good at web design and know a bit about CSS (cascading style sheets) you will be able to style the text links in your main menu to look like they are buttons or graphics. That way, you get the best of both.
Text Links
Don’t have generic text as link text! In other words, don’t use “click here” or “More info” or “Page 2″ etc as a link to another page. Instead, use keywords and phrases like “Basketweaving Materials”, “Underwater Weaving” “How to weave” etc and make them links to your other pages. This applies to your main menu AND you should have links to your other pages within paragraphs of text in the main body of the page.
Content, content, content
You must have heard the phrase “Content is King”. If not, let me repeat it… “Content is King”! To have a chance of getting your website anywhere near the top of the search results you need to have good, ORIGINAL content – and lots of it. Write stuff yourself so that it’s unique. Text content: that is what is important. Search engines (rightly) assume that when someone searches for something… it is information that they are after. Images might help – they certainly make webpages LOOK more interesting, but it is the text, the actual words on your webpages that provide the information… the content, what the searcher is looking for.
Avoid Flash! Animated stuff, flying about, might look good but it doesn’t actually provide any real content. There is no point in having one of the best looking websites in the world, all whizzy and sexy, if no-one ever finds the website. Your friends and family (if you tell them how to find your website!) might think you are very clever but very few other people will ever see it! To me: Flash means “nothing there”. Nothing there that a search engine spider can see. Nothing there that tells a spider that your website might be of interest to someone searching. Flash… who needs it?
Keep it simple, keep it text with a few relevant images. Give search engine spiders something to get their fangs into, something that they can tell searchers about – by moving your website higher up the search results page!
Warning about keywords
Don’t overdo it! Yes, you want good content with all your best keywords and phrases scattered all over your pages, especially in the places mentioned above, but be careful… don’t just repeat keywords over and over again. This is called “keyword stuffing” or “keyword spamming” and the search engines really, really don’t like it and will most probably downgrade or suppress your place in their index. They may even throw your websiste out of their index altogether. Once you are banned for this type of bad practice it is very, very difficult to get back in again so it’s just not worth this risk. Do it right, or not at all.
Don’t repeat keywords and phrases over and over again by displaying them in the same colour as your background colour. Search engine spiders are clever enough to spot that: to spot that some of your text is the same colour as your page background. At worst you will get penalised or thrown out of their index, at best you will get your website ignored. If the search engine doesn’t spot what you are doing straight away, it just takes one competitor of yours to tip them off and bang – you will get dropped like a stone.
If you do it right, your websites can make you money. If you do it wrong, they might start making you money but once you are rumbled your money/income will disappear overnight. Why take the chance? Do it right!
If you just remember you are writing your webpages’ content for visitors – actual human beings – and not for search engines you won’t go far wrong.
Choosing the best keywords
See our article search engine optimization keywords for the best ways of choosing the best keywords for your website or blog.
Summary of SEO
Obviously, the whole idea of search engine optimisation is to structure the content of each of your webpages so that they convince Google and other search engines that the page IS a relevant resource for the phrase being searched for. If you fail to take all this into account, your pages will never appear anywhere near the top of any search results page.
If you DO follow these basic SEO guidelines you will be well on the way to getting your webpages high up in the search results, getting lots of visitors and making money from your website.