web site hits
Szandor:
Last post was a while ago, but this is my area of expertice and I feel a few things should be mentioned here. Hopefully you'll find it useful.
First of all, go get Google Analytics and set that up on your website. It's free and it gives you all the statistics you need to analyze the useage of your website. Just counting hits will do you nothing, you have to see if the visitor was a search bot or a real person, if that visitor stayed and continued to other pages or went away at once and other such data. Getting some real statistics is key to knowing how you should work with the site.
For each page, write four or five keywords. Not more. Every keyword you add will "water down" the overall effectiveness of the keywords. You can think about it in terms of percent: All keywords have a 100% effectivity, but since most people will only search for one or two keywords at a time you can never expect that turnout. Each keyword is worth (100/[# of keywords])% and already at five keywords, that's 20% per word. Some people load up on lots of keywords to try and get many visitors, but if you add 50 keywords, each individual word will only be worth 2%. Also, and this is very important, the keywords are USELESS if they are NOT in the actual copy of the page! Google will look at the contents and the met-keywords and if they don't match, the site is not deemed interesting for Googles customers (the people using Google to search) and is given a low ranking.
Let's take "bedrockgames.net" as an example. The first page contains 50 keywords including variations, but the only visitor visible text is the menu, an ad for RPG-life and an ad for Intuit. This is actually worse than not having any keywords at all. I'd recommend cutting down the amount of keywords to about five and then writing some nice copy that explains what the site is about, making sure that the keywords are featured in the text. Also, "Bedrock Games" is not a keyword that needs to be added or optimized, it will do that automatically since few others will use the name anyway.
When deciding on keywords, use words relevant for the page that you believe people will actually use when searching. For example, the keyword "muslim" is probably not relevant because people searching for "muslim rpg" or similar are probably not looking for a terrorist game. Getting a lot of visitors is useless unless those visitors are interested in what you're offering.
Next, write some good copy. Each page should have a nice full text that let's the visitor get a good feel for where they are and what they're looking at. Sometimes that text needs to be short (one paragraph having only two or three sentences) but mostly you want to add a decent amount of text so that you use about 200-400 words. If you need to write more, try to break it up into more pages.
Use semantic HTML! Do it! No table based layouts, no wierd use of elements, NO MS WORD! To get the best results you need perfect control over your code, and that can only be achieved by knowing how HTML works. If you can't write good HTML (or get someone who can to write the code) your site will suffer for it. Here are a few starter points:
Use the h-elements for headings, not a p-element with a different style. Keywords in headings are given extra attention by Google and you will miss out on this if you only use p-tags.Never use the font-tag, use an external CSS instead. The code/text ratio is important.Google cannot read images - use plain text everywhere. If you must have an image with text for some reason, use an image replacement technique to get the text too.When CSS is off, the page should look unstyled, but structured and readable. When images are off, the page should still be readable.If it looks good - it might still be crap. The code is important, don't just fall back on "it looks good to me" because Google will not care about the looks.Use a text editor when writing your code and avoid WYSIWYG editors. Clean code comes from clean tools.Use ONLY semantic markup and let your CSS handle all styling.
What tag to use where is actually quite simple to figure out. Pretend your site is going to be printed on paper, how would any piece of text be described then? A navigation menu would be described as a list of menu items, so any meny should be a list. A paragraph is a paragraph, a heading a heading and a table should only be used in the code if what you're creating is readily evident to be a table in print as well. Do you need a text-box or something like that? Use div-tags to group together your content and style those divs. You can even get frame-like layouts using divs, but you have much more control than with framsets.
Last, I would recommend always using XHTML 1 strict when coding. It triggers stuff in IE to make it behave more like it should and will ease some pain when coding. Also, always validate your page and correct any mistakes. I've seen too many people complain about their layout not looking the way they want in all browsers and then finding out they have not validated their code. It's simple and very useful.
Now, I know a lot of people out there have some knowledge about HTML and want to use it, either because of the ego-boost or because they can't afford a professional solution. That's prefectly fine, I don't expect everyone to become HTML-pros over night. A part of this hobby is doing things yourself and you won't learn anything if you don't. Therefore, even though my above text might seem harsh to some, I'm not in any way against people writing their own websites, even though they have no skill in HTML or layout (and I could write SO much more on layout...).
Good luck, and have fun!
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