Do you want visitors to come to your website? Why else would you build it. If you build it they will come is just not the case in building websites, unfortunately. So unless you learn how to promote a website, your website will not achieve the kind of results that it should.

There are many important factors you should understand and learn in order to get your website ranked high on the result pages of a search engine. And it pays (literaly pays) to learn more about the most effective promotion method, search engine optimization (SEO).

Most important tip on how to promote a website is that you should and must understand how to improve your website’s ranking when an organic (natural) search is made. This is different to paid advertising which is another method of making your website more visible. You can do this by incorporating search engine optimization (SEO) strategies in your webpages.

First strategy is that for each webpage that you create write a title that is keyword rich. A title must consist of between five and eight words. A provocative title will certainly help in getting better results.

Secondly, create descriptive META tags. This is a description of your page and should be a sentence that describes what the content of your webpage is about. This sentence should be no longer than 255 words and the first sixty should be made as attractive and provocative as possible.

Next, create headers that contain your main keywords. These will help you get your page ranked higher on a search engine. It is also important to position the keywords in the first paragraph of the main text of the webpage. Search engines will look here to see whether there are any vital keywords in the webpage. However, be sure not to try and stuff the keyword artificially and also remember that more does not always mean better.

When creating an ALT Attribute of the image tab, make full use of keywords that are relevant and very descriptive. This will give the search engine clues about your website and it also helps to get the page ranked higher with the search engine. And name your images using keywords related to the page in which you display the image on.

When using hyperlinks, include some keywords in them as the search engine will always look for clues to find out what the main focus of the webpage is.

It is also necessary that visitors to your website find it easy to navigate around your website. In addition, to learn how to promote a website, also requires understanding the importance of making the website navigation system as search engine friendly as possible. Try to minimize use of Flash and JavaScript which are good for human visitors but not very helpful when it comes to search engines.

Develop a site map which has links to different pages on your website; this will help visitors and search engines find your pages easily, and this can be especially handy as you website grows.

Finally, develop keyword focused webpages relevant to your overall site’s theme. Avoid drifting too far from your website’s theme. Search Engines will be confused and won’t know what you site is about and therefore can effect your website’s ranking. The more closely related your webpages are the better.

Web sites are one of the most effective marketing tools any business or individual can use to reach the masses with their messages, products or services. Web design can be a fairly expensive process though and doing it yourself has always been the realm of professional designers and developers. This is no longer the case though with the range of web design tools available to those who want to know how to design a website but have no programming skills.

Before we look at these applications lets have a quick look at what a web site is and how it works. Web sites are basically no more than documents that contain all the text, graphics, flash animation objects, and links that you see on any website you open.

These documents are stored on the servers (computers) of the relevant Hosting company such as Bluehost or SBI, both of which are great hosting compaines. So if your website is hosted by Bluehost your web document with all the relevant goodies lives on Bluehost servers.

A website needs a domain name which is no more than an address for your web document. This consists of a numerical identifier and a name that you choose. This name should ideally contain some strong reference to what your site is all about as it is one of the most powerful “map points” that attract traffic, or people browsing the net, to your site. So a domain name of lawnmowers.com is not going to be very effective if your site deals with carpet shampoo.

The content or text on your site is the other powerful business magnet in your web document. If this text contains many relevant “key words” such as carpet, carpet shampoo, carpet cleaning etc than the mechanisms (search engines) that allow potential customers to find you will be able to do so easily.

Just remember, the net is a very densely populated place and you want people to find your carpet shampoo before they discover the competition so SEO (How to Optimize a website) is an important part of structuring your web content.

Now this is all usually driven by blocks of HTML (hyper text markup language) code which is a scary way of saying a programming language that all web browsers understand. Normally you would have to have at least a working knowledge of HTML coding to build a website. This has changed though and with the advent of programs such as Adobe Dreamweaver, FrontPage and GoLive which make the job far easier.

Both Bluehost or SBI for example offer tools and automated systems that build the site for you so you can focus on creating your content and your business. Both of them make building a website so easy that you will be left wondering why you didn’t do it long ago.

These systems use drag and drop protocols that allow you to simply create a design custom to your business. It will automatically generate all the necessary HTML code in the background for you. SBI for example goes as far as optimizing each page for you.

Web site design is a huge subject that would require a novel style instruction manual, but the good news is that with these website hosting companies these days, even a total novice with no knowledge of how to design a website can get the job done just fine. You may not have the raw power and flexibility to build a site from scratch, but you can still get a result that looks great and is optimized.

The fact that a web presence is one of the most effective ways of getting exposure for you, your products or services is old news but does beg one question. How do you advertise the advertising? How do you advertise a website so that it is found by the searchers and search engines? Well, there are several ways of doing it that can work out to be quite expensive but if you follow these basic pointers on how to advertise a website for free, you can get a lot of exposure for your site without paying a cent.

Concentrating on your SEO efforts is probably the most effective way of doing this and should be the first thing you consider. SEO (search engine optimization) is basically the practice of inserting keywords relevant to your business into the HTML meta tags on your website and in the content of your webpage. These keywords should be the focus of  the actual content or text of your site, particularly your landing or home page.

So, if you are having someone do your content and site development for you, make sure they pay attention to this point. If your SEO is up to scratch then your site will attract far more of the right kind of traffic (targeted trafic) and your page rankings (how close to the top of any search result your site appears) will improve which will attract more traffic and so on. Once your site is as “visible” as possible to search engines it becomes a self sustaining, daisy chain process that will greatly boost your sites efficiency.

Put your website URL (website address) on all your other advertising. If you are distributing flyers or pamphlets or advertising in newspapers and magazines, make sure that your website is listed prominently. Most people who receive a flyer and are interested in your product or service will immediately look for a web address. This can be an immensely powerful advertising strategy.

Post your site details on every possible free online business directory you can find. Many potential clients visit these first before they do a generic search for a product. Many businesses, both off and online, attribute a substantial part of their trade to directory queries so don’t neglect this one.

Blogs have also become a super tool when it comes to site exposure. A blog (short for weblog) is a social platform where you can air and debate your thoughts, post business relevant articles and generally spread the word regarding your business. You can either have a blog hosted for free by companies such as Blogger or start your own on-site blog with free software applications such as MediaWiki.

Another new kid on the block regarding media exposure is the podcast. These are basically talk show format audio files which allow you to pitch your website and post the audio files to directories such as iTunes. Free podcast applications can be found readily online and should be considered as many web surfers prefers tactile audio or visual information.

Other ways of getting your site advertised are reciprocal links which is basically the practice of allowing others to advertise their site on yours in return for a like courtesy, email lists, article directories and complimentary business alliances. All are effective but should be considered only after you have carried out the basic points listed above.

So if you are wondering how to advertise a website on the cheap, follow these basic tips and you are sure to get the good word out there in no time.

The more traffic that a website can attract to it, the better the website will perform. Which is a good reason to learn how to optimize your website. Search engines have become very popular today and this in turn has led to a mushrooming of an entire industry that deals only with ways of optimizing websites. This has also given rise to a new breed of professionals who are out there willing to help website owners with getting their websites ranked higher on a search engine.

However, you can also learn how to optimize your website and in fact with the help of a few basic tips, it is easy to learn how to optimize your website.

To start off, you should begin targeting one keyword for each webpage. Create keyword focused pages or posts on you website. Avoid making a very common mistake which is to cram too many keywords into each page. The right way is to focus one keyword per webpage which has the effect on focusing attention on just one topic.

Include that keyword within the first hundred words on your webpage and also in the title of the webpage. But don’t overdo it in this first 100 words. Once is enough and only if it makes sense in the context.

The keyword must also be placed in headers within the text on your website. The page must start with a headline and this headline is considered to be the most important part of your webpage. This is why you need to include the keyword in the page headline but without making the headline and headers too long.

The next thing would be your Meta tags. An HTML Document has a head tag at the top of the source code. Within this head tag you can insert a page title, a description and a keywords. These are Meta tags and are very relevant to Seach Engines. Each of your webpages should have a main keyword and up to 4 additional keywords. Adding and tweeking the Meta tags requires modifying source code (the HTML code).

Make sure you insert the main keyword into title tag. In addition to the title tag add the main keyword to the description as well. Also include it in a list in the keywords. You can combine it with 4 other similar keywords which are synonyms or related keywords. But don’t add more than 5 keywords to this list.

Once your page is done and is optimized using the tips above, you must list all the vital keywords into back links to your website. It is normal for search engines to factor in the words that are used in title tags of links that are pointing to your website or webpage. This applies to internal links (links from within your own site) and external links (links coming from another website). So, by judicious use of keywords in back links it is possible to get your website optimized for all the major search engines.

As long as you follow these simple steps, you will be able to not only learn how to optimize your website but also get good results by using all the tips mentioned above.

When a visitor lands on your website, all of the objects or components of the page have to be downloaded via HTTP requests. These components include the HTML page, CSS stylesheets, javascript files, images and Flash.

The more components there are and the larger the components are, the more time it takes to load the page. So the best way to speed up website load time would be to reduce the number and size of objects and components per page.

There are several ways to reduce the number and size of objects and components on a website.

1. Combine CSS and Script files into one file instead of multiple files. By combining files you reduce the number of requests which in turn speeds up the load time.
2. Reduce CSS file size to less than 20K. Delete white space that’s not needed and use containers efficiently by targeting large chunks of HTML and avoid the need to use extra classes and styles.
3. Optimize your images by reducing the size of the image. Reduce the file size of any image to less than 100K. Anything over that will slow down load time.
4. Reduce the number of images per page. Combine multiple images to image maps if possible. The total size of the image map maybe the same, but there will be fewer HTTP requests.
5. Eleminate navigation images by using CSS techniques to achieve colored backgrounds, borders, spacing, roll over effects etc. avoid using images for navigation whenever possible. This can greatly improve your website load time, especially if you have lots of navigation items.
6. When an image is embedded into an HTML document with the img tag, this can increase the size of the HTML file. Sometimes this is very necessary. But avoid this for images that are displayed on all of your pages. Instead use the background property in CSS to display the images.

By reducing the number of files and reducing the size of your files you can reduce the number of HTTP requests and improve your website load time.

Creating sitemaps is important if you want your site to be indexed by search engines. If you want anyone to find your site on the internet through search engines like google, yahoo or MSN, then you need a sitemap.

A sitemap is basically a list all pages on your site, and other information about each page such as: when each page was modified, how often a page is modified, and how important the page is to the overall site.

Does your site need a site map?

If your site is new and you have no links or very few links pointing to it then yes you need a site map. Search engines follow links from one page to another to find your site and your web pages.

So if your site doesn’t have any links from other sites then it’s hard for search engines to find and index your site.

If your site is mature and has many links pointing to it, a sitemap may not be that helpful but it won’t hurt. If you have a lot of content pages and they aren’t linked well then a sitemap can be helpful.

How do you create a sitemap?
The best thing to do is create a sitemap that follows or adheres to sitemap.orgs protocol. This is used by all the major search engines: Yahoo, Good, and MSN.

You can create your sitemap manually or use an automated service to create your stemmap.

Creating Sitemaps Manually

The following is based on sitemaps.org protocol. which is the accepted format for Yahoo, Google and MSN and any other members of sitemaps.org.

1. Create a new text file and name it with “.xml” extension. For example cbw-sitemap.xml
2. Add the following 2 lines of code to the top to the file.
   <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

   <urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>

3. Then add the url for each page of your site including the index or home page ..
   
   

   <url>
   
   <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/ </loc>
   <lastmod>2009-10-01 </lastmod>
   <changefreq>monthly </changefreq >
   <priority>1.0 </priority>
   </url>

   For more details on the above xml tags visit sitemaps.org.

4. Then add the closing urlset tag to the end of your file.
   

   </urlset>

5. Save the file and upload the it to your site. Make a note of the url. Example: http://www.yoursite.com/your-sitemap.xml .
   
   Then submit the sitemap to each of the main search engines.

A client asked “How do websites use cookies?” and I thought I’d just write an article explaining this in a little more detail since there is no short answer. But the technicality of how it works would require much more detailed explanation.

So what is a cookie anyway? Many people think that cookies are programs which are saved on their computers by websites that they visit, and that these programs can access personal information.

But cookies are not programs and they cannot access your personal information on your computer. Cookies are simply text files that are stored on your computer by a website that you’ve visited.

These cookie files store information to the website you’ve visited. Information such as user id’s, session id’s, a session start time etc. This information is stored so that a website can retrieve it the next time you visit.

For example when you visit a website and sign in, the cookie file it stores on your machine or computer may contain your user-id, session id and the start of the session. Then next time your visit the same website it can access this cookie file and retrieve the data.

A website can only access the cookie file it created on your machine and cannot access cookie files from other websites.

So how do websites use cookies and what do they use them for? Well they use them for many reasons but here are some common ones.

1. They help with getting an accurate count of unique visitors versus repeat visitors and how many time a visitor has visited the website.
2. They can be useful for sites that allow user customizations like Yahoo and MSN. When you set your user layout the cookies contain some information that helps the website remember this the next time you visit.
3. Shopping sites use cookies to store information about your cart, for example when you visit a site and add things to a cart, it stores this information so if you don’t complete the order and come back later your cart is still there. Some sites keep this information only for a period of time and then it expires.

The way that websites use cookies is by storing information from your actions on the website, like what pages you’ve viewed, what products you buy or any information you give via a form on the website.

Most of the information is stored on the websites database and the only thing stored in the cookie file is a unique id that helps the website find the related information in it’s database.