SEO, how to make your site more SE friendly
Jun 16th 2008, 03:19 AMOne of the things I first learned when I took my first class on "how to build a web site" a couple of years ago was that I should have everything gathered up and organized that I want to use on my page before I started building it. I was told to have it all planned out on paper before I ever started to build it in my editor.
The problem I ran into was I didn't know where I was going with the site until after I got started. One reason for this was that I didn't know what affiliates would except me. My main reason for building my web sites was to make a living off of them. First I would find a domain name that a lot of people did searches on. It also had to be a topic that I was interested in myself so that I had some experience about my topic to start off with. I also had to do research on that topic to find a lot more information on that topic so that I could give people something of interest to read and also point them to more sites where they could find out more in depth information on different subtopics within my main topic. I get ideas for more pages depending on what I find that is interesting to me and hopefully interesting to people who come back to my site and work in my affiliate ads as well. What kind of affiliates that are interested in me advertising for them influences me to add pages that will highlight their products and be products people finding my site will be interested in. Then keep track of what products sell and go with that. Sometimes what I think will be a big hit and promote doesn't do much on my sites so I switch with what does to well. This keeps me happy and the folks that I'm affiliated with happy.
I started my AnimalPicture.us site with my index page ( home page ) about all kinds of animals. My original idea was to put up a variety of animal pictures and lots of great links where people could find different kinds of information about animals. While looking for animal pictures ads to put on my new site I realized my index page was getting too big so I started a second page giving it the same name for the title. While I was building it I decided to make the new pages individual animal pages. So I changed it to one kind of animal, Penguins. I changed the title at the top of the page to Penguins, but the URL name stayed the same. http://animalpicture.us/Animal_Picture_us.html
Once I decided to make my web site in this style I made the next animal page about elephants. Now this time I knew exactly what I was going to make the page about so when I build it the URL is http://animalpicture.us/Elephants.htm
It never occurred to me at first how the search engines might look at my site pages. I have the index page as animal picture and that is good because that is what it is about but now I have this Penguin page with nothing about Penguins in the URL, even though I changed the title of it to Penguins. So that page may not help me, and could even hurt my ratings over all. When a search engine indexes your site and pages on your site they take into consideration your URL, the title of your page and the content on your page. To get a good rating all these should match up. Your page URL is going to show up in the search engine results so it should have the title of your page within it. Plan your site out well from the beginning for best results. Have your overall plan in place then build your site. Lay it out on paper first then organize what you need to do to build a great looking and search engine friendly site.
I'm learning what to do as I go along. One thing I have learned is to make your pages with the search engines in mind. Most of your traffic is going to come to your site by way of the search engines. The more traffic you have the more likely you are to make a sale. The more relevant your site is to what that traffic is looking for the more sales you are going to make. To succeed with your site learn as much as you can about how and keep the search engines looking favorably at your site.
Here is a site that will give you a lot of good information on SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) tips.
Tags: SEO web sites URL's

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