Help to make a website

Last week, we took a quick look at backlinks and how pertinence and relevancy were central to the way search engine algorithms analyze and rank pages for keywords. When you make a website, it's vital to ensure your pages can be understood by search engines and ranked correctly, to ensure the site is “visible” on the web.

We'll take a look at how you can use the website builder tools integrated into doomby's free website maker to optimize your pages automatically a little later on, but today we'll be focusing on backlinks, and the way they are used by search engines to rank pages.

As we saw last time, one of the first things to do when you make a website is to ensure that search engines, like Google, Yahoo and Bing, know your site exists. Although search engines routinely scour the Internet to update their databases with new sites and pages, this process isn't instantaneous: the fact that you have chosen to make a free website (or to make a pro website for that matter) doesn't mean you'll instantly appear in search engine results once it's online. And it won't make a difference whether you use a free website maker or have invested huge sums of money in expensive website builder software and hosting – search engines will include your website in their results pages when they're good and ready.

Though submitting you website and its sitemap* to search engines is one part of ensuring your site gets listed as quickly as possible, being listed is only the first step on the road to search engine success: it's one thing to figure in Google's database, and quite another to get to the number one spot, on the very first page. One of the ways to get there is to build backlinks.

We've often discussed the importance of SEO techniques when you make a website. We've seen, for example, how you can use the website builder tools that are part of doomby's free website maker to help optimize your website for search engine results. Today, we're going to get back to basics and answer some of the questions beginner webmasters often ask.

This is the first in a series of articles on SEO and search engine basics, and is the perfect starting point for those who've just begun to create a website, and are wondering how search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Baidu go about deciding what to list, and where to list it. The aim of the these articles is less about how to make a website, and more about how to get your website found on the web.

Website development can be a whole lot of fun, but does your website management ever get you down? Do you find yourself spending a lot less time these days doing useful stuff with your free website maker than you do cleaning up the messy leftovers of serial spammers? Like most of us, lately you've probably found out a whole lot more about Viagra, online pharmacies, fake watches, handbags and shoes than you'd really care to know. Not that these aren't potentially fascinating topics, it's just that you've probably got more important things to do with your time, like staring at navel lint, doing laundry or checking out the neighborhood wildlife. If it makes you feel a little better, you should know that you're not alone in your suffering: estimates are that around 80% of all emails sent worldwide are spam, and dealing with them has become a multi-billion dollar business.

Wouldn't it be great if you could manage the spam that starts seeping in when you create a website or make an online shop, via comments posted on your forum or blog, your online store or in web page comments? And wouldn't it be even better if you didn't have to do anything at all to manage spam, and if your website just took care of it all for you?

One of the neat things about working behind the scenes at doomby is getting to chat with our members. Whilst it's always great to connect with someone new, it's also – dare I say it – fun to find out something new every day about what drives our webmasters, about how to make a website, or just to discover new website builder tools.

We often get asked for advice on how to edit a photo, make an online form or the best website to make a favicon. And not a day goes by that we don't give tips on how to find webmaster tools or other free webmaster resources.

Here are a some of our favorites:

Getting busy is easier as the weather warms up (sorry southern hemisphere friends), and now is as good a time as any to start to make a website, or to spring-clean your existing one. Whether you're just starting out or already a seasoned webmaster, you'll always need to be thinking on several fronts as you create a website and develop your content. Obviously, your website design is an important part of ensuring people stick around long enough to get to the good stuff: your killer site content. But you also need to keep these two elements in sync with the way people actually use your website.

Getting a site looking great and filled with fascinating stuff is next to useless if people run away in frustration just after they arrive – your visitors need to be able to find content and navigate through your website as easily as possible. Keeping your site content, its aesthetics and ergonomics in balance is one of the keys to dealing with a bouncy website.

In the race to be Google's best friend, having less bounce to the ounce helps. Among the many criteria that are (allegedly) taken into consideration by Google (and presumably those other search engines as well …) is a website's bounce rate.

The internet is truly remarkable. Just think about it: 99% of what you'll find online serves no practical purpose at all. Yet that's the stuff most people spend their time watching - a lot like TV. If you want to make a website an overnight success, forget about adding free forums or wondering how to make a blog and build a following; it'll take way more than a couple of hours to build a sizable audience.

Got a great idea for how to make an online store a roaring success? Well, sorry, but that isn't going to get you millions of hits before sunrise. And no, if you're out to break a world record for building a massive following for your free website in as little time as possible, you don't have to take your clothes off, nor anyone else's for that matter.

To make your own website a true internet super phenomenon, you just need one thing: Jedi cats.

Partly inspired by the lasting image of last week's illustration (I swear that'll be engraved in my memory forever), and partly because my internet connection is going haywire, I thought I'd write a little about getting the most out of your online store. Specifically, how to ensure your e-commerce website attracts customers willing to stick around long enough to buy something. If you're making a business website, and your goal is to use it to sell stuff, then the last thing you want is for people to do a WIWO (walk-in, walk-out – and yes, I made that up) within the first few seconds of their arrival.

First impressions last, and getting your visitors to hand over their plastic means you really need to make sure you know how to make a website that inspires confidence – it's not enough just to have great stuff to sell.

No, a catchy title isn't the one I had in mind, but that was a pretty good one for starters, right? On the other hand, the picture on the right has a lot more in common with today's post than may first meet the eye ...

I've been doing a lot of surfing over the last week, going back to get a fresh perspective on some familiar things. Bossman (the elder) has been doing something similar, though his reflective retro trip has involved listening to such classic 80s musical greats as "Ghostbusters" and "Final Countdown" (not that I'm complaining – it makes me feel way younger than I have been of late).

One of the things I noticed during this week of “revisiting old things in a new way” was just how websites were marketed, and how I responded to that. So rather than talk about how to make a website this week, I thought I'd step back and talk about how to make a successful website, and what SEO has to do with making it a success.

No, this is not a discussion about lexically challenged motor-heads, but rather the follow-up to last week's fireside chat about SEO keyword choices. Now that you've got your key search terms figured out, you really should take some time to figure out how you're going to use them in your writing.

Remember, keyword choice is just as important for those looking to make a website for personal reasons as it is for business websites (unless you want to make a secret website, and hey, each to their own).

You'll often come across the term 'keyword density' when researching writing for the web. As the name (hopefully) suggests, it describes the relative frequency of your keywords as they appear in your content. And like salt, sugar, butter, sex … whatever, too much of a good thing is bad for you. But too little leaves an 'emptiness' (as in, no visitors).