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Marketing your website - Getting Visitors!

When you have visitors coming to your site, those visitors are called “traffic” in Internet terms.

The cool thing about traffic is that the rich get richer! High traffic leads to even more higher traffic.

Once you get a decent amount of traffic, your traffic will grow each day. It will grow and grow and grow. But when you are just starting a site, getting high traffic is a difficult.

So, the question is:



How to have high traffic levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?
You have to have great content on your site. You have to have great content on your site. You have to have great content on your site! We have repeated this 3 times because this is the key to success. This is the key to traffic.


If you have good information on your site, the popularity of your site will grow. It will grow slowly, but it will grow! As mentioned earlier, if you just keep adding good content to your site day-after-day for a year, you will have a very successful, very popular site.


Initially, forget about everything. Think only about making you site popular. Concentrate on writing great content. Don’t even bother putting up something if you feel it’s quality is not good. If you are able to create good quality content, consistently, people will start to recognize your site as the place to go when they want quality information. Over time your traffic will gradually increase. You will see your traffic increase every month.



“Links”
Initially, you will have to try to get as many links as you can from other sites. Links are the best way to get traffic when you are just starting out a new site. You need to get other sites to link to your site. This is the way in which you are going to get your first readers.


If a popular site or site with a large amount of traffic, links to your site, then many people from that high-traffic site will click on the link and come to your site. Generally speaking, you want to get links from sites that get a large amount of traffic.


Basically, you want to advertise your site on other sites. This is how you will get your initial traffic.


Why would other sites and sites link to you?
If you have a site that is about real estate and how to buy land, then a property site will probably be interested in linking to you because the information on your site will be useful to the property site’s readers. For this too, you need to make sure that you have good content that is worth reading.


Getting other people to link to you is generally a pretty difficult. People will not just link to you for no reason. You will have to show people a good reason why they should link to you. You will have to be creative here. Also do not be disappointed, when people do not shown any interest in linking to your site.

You just have to keep trying. Two out of ten people might agree to link to you initially, but don’t be afraid of asking.


If you find a site on the Internet, whose users would be benefited and interested in the information on your site, then that would be a site that will probably be interested in linking to you. Obviously, if you are in the exact same field as that site and both yours and the other site are offering the users, the exact same information, you will not get a link from that site because you will be that site’s “competition”.


In any case, assuming you find a site you like and you want a link from it, all you have to do is go to the “contact us” page of the site, find the e-mail id of the owner or webmaster of the site and send him an e-mail saying that you would like a link. Try to write a good letter convincing him that he/she should link to you because it will also benefit him. However, keep the letter short and sweet.


Most webmasters and site owners will only link to you if you give them a link back. If they are going to send you some of their traffic, then they want some traffic in return. If you don’t mind giving them a link, then they probably won’t mind giving you a link so long as your site is moderately decent.

This is called “reciprocal linking” or “link exchange”. Generally, people have a “Favorite Links” or “Useful Links” or just “Links” page on their website. They use this page for reciprocal linking. They give other people links in this page and in return they get links in other website’s “Links” page.


Unfortunately, links from the “Links” page will get you very little traffic. If you want to get decent traffic from a link, you need to get a link from a page that gets a lot of traffic.



“Cheap” way to get links when you are just starting out:
Find forums, message boards, chat room’s etc. where people would be interested in reading what you have to say. For example if your site is about your experiences in the stock market, find a forum about the stock markets. When you find someone looking for information or asking questions whose answers are available on your site, send them a link telling them this is a good place to find the answer they are looking for.


Check out Yahoo Answers! If you are not familiar with the concept, on Yahoo Answers, there a thousands of people asking questions each day and thousands of people giving them answers. If you find a few people asking questions whose answers you know and are on your site, give them an answer and a link to your site.



One more reason why links are important!
Search engines, decide the worth of a site by looking at the number and quality of the pages that link to it. From the point of view of the search engines, if you have more links pointing to your site, you must be a good site because no one will link to a stupid site.

They use this basic thinking to run their search engines. So if you have a number of links pointing to your site, you will be considered as a good site by the search engines. You will show up in their search results. However, don’t get links for search engines, get links for getting traffic.


Maybe all these concepts are new to you now, but you will start to understand them better once you get into the game. An excellent resource to really get into the game of website design is WebmasterWorld. Webmasters, and site owners from all over the world meet at this forum and discuss various topics. You must definitely join this forum. I am there too, my nic. On WebmasterWorld is “must_learn_more”


(Once you set up a site, write a small article about indiahowto.com on your site and send this site some of your traffic as “Guru Dakshina” – Thanks ;-)


So now you know all the basics of web development. Congrats, if you read this huge article. It covers all the basic skills that are required. I hope you have benefited from it. Read more...

Paid hosting – Setting up a “.com”

The first step to setting up a “.com” is to buy a “.com” name for yourself. Sometimes, this can be a very big problem. For common topics, it is very hard to find the “domain name” you are looking for.


(In case you don’t know, “domain name” is another way of saying website address.)

But before you make any choices about the domain name, it would be good if you take a look at these basic domain name selection guidelines. Sometimes a bad domain name can be very bad for your website.

Here are the basic guidelines:
Make it relevant to your company, product, or project so it's easier to remember.
Keep your name short and simple if possible-around 5 characters
Include keywords in the name
Remember the Internet is global in nature. Try to choose a name that people all over the world can understand.
Avoid tying your name to a calendar year, unless its for a product launch.
Avoid Trademarked Names. Like coca-cola.
If your company has a strong brand or is trying to get a strong brand then forget all about keywords, make you domain name your brand name.
These are just general guidelines. Keep them in mind when selecting a domain name. But if something makes more sense, or the name that you were going for is already taken then you might have to improvise and compromise.

Also, there are many possible domain names other than “.com” There are “.org”, “.tv”, “.biz” and all sorts of other names. Choose these only if really required. For example suppose you want the domain name www.cake.com and unfortunately the name is taken, and you cannot go for any other name then and then only go in for something like www.cake.org


Generally try to buy a “.com” name only. People know about “.coms” people don’t know about anything else.

So, using all the above given guidelines you have selected your domain name. Now what? How do you buy it?


How to buy a domain name?
This is pretty simple. There are thousands of people who are selling domain names. You could go to Rediff, Indiatimes, Net4India and a whole lot of other companies. I cannot suggest any one company in particular for buying a domain name. All the companies I have stated above are pretty big companies that are as good or as bad as each other, so whichever one you go for things will be fine!

All the companies have random prices. Some are high. Some are low. Some are in schemes and offers! (As if they are selling soaps!) They seem to be based on nothing in particular. Select which ever company from the above list you trust and is cheapest and go for it.

It is generally a good idea to buy the domain name from the same company, you want to host your website at. So if you buy the domain name from Net4India then host your website also at Net4India.

I have selected Net4India mainly because it has an office in Pune (where I am located) and I can go sit on their heads if these is any problem! Besides that, Net4India is pretty cheap also and it’s servers are located in Noida, Delhi.

This is good from the SEO point of view. If your website on servers located in India, the search engines think that the website is Indian and your website shows up in the “pages from India” results. Net4India does have a few minor problems from time to time though. In any case, you too might want to go for Net4India.)




Buying the domain name:
To buy the domain name you just have to go to the hosting site (Rediff, Net4India, Indiatimes etc.) check availability for the domain name and book it. As soon any you pay the money the domain name is yours. It’s not very hard to do.

However, it would be good to do this swiftly. Decide your domain name offline and then just go online and book it. If you check the availability of a domain name two or three times, before booking it, there is a possibility that it will be gone. There are people out there who make money from buying domain names people are interested in and selling it at a much higher price. So basically do the whole domain name buying process quickly.


Buying hosting space:
If would be a good idea to buy hosting place from the same people you bought the domain name from. Here also there are many people offer this service. The service is offered at a whole range of prices. We recommend that you go in for an offers like, book web space and get a domain name free. They will link the web space to domain name you select and everything will be fine. Try to get a good offer with one of the big companies stated above and take it.

The process of buying web space is also pretty simple. Just go to the hosting website, book the plan, pay the money and you are set. They will handle everything for you.

Finally you will have to put your website up on the Internet. You can do this using FTP or browser upload methods that were talked about previously. Once your website is uploaded, you are set. Congrats! Read more...

Uploading Your Website

Putting up your website is pretty simple, use your username and password to get into your account that your hosting website has given you and upload your website on the Internet.

There are generally two kinds of upload methods. These are:


FTP Uploads
Browser Uploads

Browser Uploads
Most people who are new to website development, find the browser upload method far more easy to do. Once you sign into your account with the username and password, you will have to find “Upload Files” or “Upload Website” or something like that. Click on this. If they allow you to “browser upload” your website, they will ask you to select the files that make up the website on your computer and upload them. You select the files using the "Browse.." button and then click "Upload".

This is quite easy to do I am sure you will figure it out. The whole process is very similar to uploading an attachment, when you are sending and e-mail.




FTP Upload
In some cases however, you have to FTP upload the files of your website. To do this you will need an "FTP client". You can find one on some "Digit" or "PC Quest" kind of CD’s. If you can’t find one there, go to www.download.com and search for “Cute FTP” and download it.

Once you download and install the FTP client, the FTP client will ask you for some information.

Generally the:


Host/IP/URL
Username
Password
(And sometimes port!)

It should be easy to find out this information from the hosting website. After you sign in, this info should be available in the “Upload files” type section.

In case you cant find this info. anywhere, just send the hosting website a message though their “Contact Us” page saying that you want to upload files and so you want the following information:


Host/IP/URL
Username
Password
(And sometimes port!)

If the hosting site does not have a “Contact Us” type of page. Forget that hosting service. It is most likely some kind of fraud.

Once you obtain this information, you can feed it into the FTP client program that you have. It will connect you your website and you can upload the web pages.

If all this sounds scary don’t worry. This is easy. When you do it will happen.

Once you put your website up its on the Internet for the whole world to see. Congrats!

But you probably have a very long website address still. Let us try to solve that problem now.... Read more...

Designing a search engine friendly website! - SEO

What is the meaning of search engine friendly?


Search engines are funny creatures. They like certain sites and they do not like other websites. They are a little like women. They are hard to please and it takes time and effort to figure out why exactly they don’t like you. (Sorry all the women who are reading this.)

If Google for example, likes your site, your site will show up in the Google search results then you will start getting many visitors from Google. This always a good way for a site to get it’s first visitors. You want Google and other search engines to like your website. So you have to design it in a particular way so that you make it easier for the search engine to like you.



What do you mean?
You see, when a search engine first finds your site, it wants to know what your website is about. If they know what your website is about then they can display it when someone is searching for the information your website provides. So, to figure out what your website is about, they look at certain pars of your web page…like your title, heading etc. On seeing these things they know what your site is about so they can show your site when something related to your site is searched for.

So, when you design your website, make sure that you make it as easy as possible for the search engines to know what your website is about. This is called “SEO”, Search Engine Optimization.

There are whole companies who are dedicated to SEO and pleasing the search engines. SEO is a art and people are studying it all over the world. It’s like a business and a game to get your website to show up in the first page of the search results at Google.

There are some very important things you must do SEO wise while designing your website. But before we go into them, let us go into the concept of a “keyword”





What is a “keyword”?
When you have a website about “caps” for example, you want your website to be the website that shows up when some one goes to Google and types “caps”. If you have a website about health and a web page about “cancer” then you want this web page of your website to show up when someone goes to Google and searches for “cancer”. This is basically a keyword.

A keyword is the word that you want your website or web page to show up in the search results for. Search Engine Optimization is all about putting the “keywords” in the right paces when designing your site.


So when making your web pages, fists decide, “What is the key word for this web page? For what keyword should this page show up in the search results?”

Once you decide this follow the SEO guidelines:



The SEO web design guidelines:
Put the keyword once in the “title” tag of the page.

Put the keyword once or twice in the “description” tag of the web page. (By the way, you must unique title and description tags for all your pages.)

For all your pages, the heading of the page must be done though the “H1” tag. The keyword must be there in the H1 tag.

The file name of the web page must contain the keyword. For example, the keyword of a page is “lung cancer” then the file name must be “lung-cancer.html”

These are the basics of SEO. You should try and follow these rules. There is mush more to learn and I will tell you about it as we go along. For now, from the design point of view this is enough.

In some cases, it may be so that your visitors may get confused if you use a particular “keyword” in the heading etc. then DO NOT use the keyword just for SEO.

The VISITOR is more important. The VISITOR IS MOST IMPORTANT! DON’T CONFUSE THE VISITOR.

SEO is important, but don’t confuse the visitor. The visitor is more important.

(If you don’t know HTML, some of the above things might not be understood by you. Once you know HTML, this will make more sense. So go learn HTML)

Okay, once you follow all this, your pages should be ready and your website should be ready to go. So in the next section we will show you how to put your website on the Internet though free as well as paid hosting. Read more...