Some website tips and tricks

[julieHB]

Here come some hints


In web site optimisation and seo (search engine optimisation) it is essential that you have good keywords relating to your subject if you want to be found by customers, and also if you want to be ranked high with f.ex. Google.  There are several tools to help you find good keywords, Wordtracker and Overture are two.  These cost money, but will let you try for free with limited results shown.  There is a site called www.submitexpress.com that offers several free tools.  I ran a quick test, comparing "artisan lamp work beads" and "handmade glass beads": wordtracker came up with 0 estimated daily searches for the first, and 32 for the latter - maybe worth a thought  

When you have found good keywords the next thing is to optimise your page for those words.  Here are some guidelines that I picked up from somewhere (this is a bit technical, don't know how much you know about html code...):

Pick 2-3 keyword phrases from our recommended keywords and include them anywhere possible in your website. This way, your website will be optimised according to those keywords:

1. Include the keywords in your META KEYWORDS and META DESCRIPTION TAGS:
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" content="YOUR KEYWORDS HERE">
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" content="YOUR DESCRIPTION HERE">

2. Include the keywords in your TITLE TAG:<TITLE>YOUR TITLE HERE</TITLE>

3. Include the keywords as part of HEADING TAGS:<H1>ADD YOUR KEYWORD TO HEADING TEXT HERE</H1>

4. Include the keywords in the BODY text that is visible to your visitors.

5. Include the keywords in the IMAGE ALT tags in your site:<IMG SRC="IMAGE_PATH" alt="KEYWORD HERE">

6. Include the keywords in the Hyperlinks and Hyperlinks Text on your site and if possible, change the names of your inner pages to include a keyword:YOUR KEYWORD HERE(this is the Hyperlink Text)

7. Insert the following META ROBOT to assure proper indexing of your homepage as well as proper crawling of your inner pages:<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW">

8. Please note that in addition to optimising your homepage, it is recommended that you optimise your inner pages as well. Each page of your site should have its own set of keywords, ones that are related to the page that they appear on.


Looking at your site one can see you have not included any keywords in the <META NAME="KEYWORDS" content="YOUR KEYWORDS HERE"> (pt. 1 above).  Also, you have not filled in the IMG alt attribute for all images.  These should be descriptive comments about what the image shows, and not only the name of the piece of jewellery.

Right, when you have optimised your site, it's time to verify the site with Google (and Yahoo).  I have used a tool called Google Webmaster Tools a lot (http://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/).  It gives you help with creating a site map; verifying your site, give you statistics from your site etc.  To create an account with them is free.  And if you register with Google Analytics they provide you with daily overview over visitors, whether they found you through a search engine, or if they found you through a link.  Also which search phrases that were used.  All good info.  


Links: All incoming links are good news.  As Buzzybeads says, swap links with related sites.  Also, you might try to find sites that are your targeted customers, f.ex. beaders and jewellery makers to swap with.  Other good places for quality links are web directories.  The Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) is the worlds biggest web directory, has a high quality status, and is free!!  All search engines pick up links from this one.

One of the HOT areas in getting high rankings with Google is web article writing.  There are several places where you can submit them (Google "submit web article" and you'll see heaps of them).  I have not done this myself, but it is not difficult to see how an article with a link to your site will spread out and increase your inbound links rapidly!

If you want to spend money on adverts, make sure you are very specific on where and when.  Google ad words can be very efficient, but the money can run out pretty fast.  You may want to limit your adverts to crafty/beady/glassy sites.


Phew, I am sorry if this was all a bit more than you wanted to know      I do tend to rattle on a bit...

Good luck!
Julie

[Ilona]

Hi Julie,

What great info

But where do you find the META KEYWORDS and META DESCRIPTION TAGS?

If i can find where to put these I will have a go this weekend.

I am sure I can't be the only person that does not know about this.

Ilona

[julieHB]

Hi Ilona,

Most people don't know about the HTML code, that is why they choose a program like mr.site when they want to make a website; and it is certainly a great help when you want to include paypal facilities as well.  If you want to look at the HTML code for your site, click on PAGE - VIEW SOURCE in Internet Explorer.

I don’t know what the mr.site editor looks like, but I imagine you can do it all in there. So I sent a mail to their support team yesterday, and this is what they answered:

Hi
Thanks for your mail.
1.   We have a HTML editor with all advanced tools present for any editing.
2. In Basic package you can add upto 10 Meta Keywords for site and Meta Description will be page title for each page. With Mr Site Pro you can add any number of Keywords, and Description for each page. (pro has also many more SEO features like Sitemap, directory listing and anayalzer tools)


Please let us know if you require any further assistance
 Best
 Mr Site Team
 info@mrsite.co.uk


I imagine you have a menu option where it says enter page title etc.  The same for the images – the ALT attribute is the text that shows up when you put the mouse over the pictures, I assume you can add description to an image when you insert it.
 
If you cannot find where to put in the information with mr. Site, save a backup of the *.html file you want to modify, and open it in NOTEPAD (not word, then you will add all sorts of codes to the file and it won’t be a pure text file anymore).  All your web pages are simple text files that can easily be modified in any text editor. 

Again, good luck.  Don’t beat yourself up, SEO is huge.  Try to find a few good keywords (like handmade glass beads) first.  Then take it from there, step by step.   

Julie

[Lush!]

Ilona, in Mr Site you need to select "Extras" then "Admin", then you'll see the "Add META Tags" page at E. 

You can choose up to 10 keywords; I've chosen Lampwork, Beads, Lush, Glass, Malvern, Handmade, Sets, Focals, Effetre and Frit.

I need to really read Julie's reply now though, cos I know nowt about all this stuff.   

[julieHB]

Hi,

You can choose up to 10 keywords; I've chosen Lampwork, Beads, Lush, Glass, Malvern, Handmade, Sets, Focals, Effetre and Frit.

Just remeber, a meta keyword doesn't have to consist of one word only, it can be a key phrase like "handmade glass beads".   

Julie

[Lush!]

No way! 

See, I told you I don't know what I'm doing!

So is it best to have a mixture of single words and short phrases, or just milk it and turn them all into long phrases?

And what about repetition - good or bad to choose the best phrase, say "handmade glass lampwork beads" for every metatag?

[Ilona]

Fantastic

This info is what I had been after, and I knew that their would be some amazing people that could help on this forum.

I had a look yesterday at the keywords, and I am going to have a go at the website after my beading session.

Thanks again Julie & Bluebottle

[nemeton]

wow, what a lot of useful info - I am hopeless at this sort of thing, luckily I have a nice friend who put up a website for me  But even with tags and everything in place it took a very long time for Google to find me (I am a cheapskate lol so didn't pay for any adwords or anything like that!). After about 18 months of relentlessly swapping links, posting on forums, getting images on other artists' websites and publishing projects in magazines, I do now come up on Google searches and I get people contacting me via the website, about once a month or so, and occasional commissions or sales. My website is more of a gallery than a shop so I wasn't expecting to make a lot of sales through it; this was a conscious decision to make it just somewhere for people to see the sorts of things I do and find out about my beading - now that people are becoming more interested I have a shop on Etsy (and hopefully soon the website will link to it) and that seems to be working. I did get very fed up at the beginning as we'd put all that work into the website and it was to all intents and purposes invisible - but links are the key. Oh and there are some free listings services that get a lot of traffic, will hunt out the details if and when I remember, might be worth getting your site on a few of those.
Stick at it and good luck! 

[julieHB]

So is it best to have a mixture of single words and short phrases, or just milk it and turn them all into long phrases?

And what about repetition - good or bad to choose the best phrase, say "handmade glass lampwork beads" for every metatag?
 

Hi

I do not know the inner workings of Google (then I would be a very rich woman  ), but this is what I have read:

Choose a few (2-3) essential keywords for each page, and then optimise that page for those keywords.  If you choose loads of keywords the importance of each decreases.  It also makes it difficult to optimise the page without the text becoming artificial and odd sounding.  Don't repeat keywords in the keyword meta tag, but they need to be used in various places throughout the page, as explained earlier.  Instead of writing "handmade glass lampwork beads" I would split that into two "handmade glass beads" and "lampwork beads". 

One way to find good keywords is to look at who’s site always come up on the first result page in Google, and see which keywords they are using.

A page that sells finished jewellery needs different keywords than a page that sells beads only.  If I understood the email from mr.site correctly you can only add 10 keywords for the whole site.  If I were you I would open the individual pages in the HTML editor and edit the keywords for each page.
 
One thing worth mentioning is that the search engines love relevant information.  Therefore you may want to spend some time and add more text to your homepage (and other pages).  Showing a tutorial or having a FAQ page is also a way of improving your Google index.

And don’t forget to verify your site and make a sitemap and submit it to google and yahoo.  A sitemap is simply a file listing all the pages on your site.  You can make it in Google Webmaster.

Just tell me to be quiet if you’ve had enough now….     

Julie

[Ilona]

Julie,

Please carry on

I have added the 10 meta tags on my site now and later will have a look at the HTML on my website too.

I might get stuck with this, but if I do I will let you know.



Ilona

[Ilona]

Well I am stuck!

I followed all the info, and google gave me a link to put on my home page in HTML code, but I can't do it!
I use Mr Site and when you go onto the HTML page the codes are hidden, and it asks you to place the codes below the head code but above the body. Because you can't see these codes you don't know where to put them.
The other way was to make a HTML file with the code they give you and upload that into your home page so the code is seen in your browser, again I'm stuck!

Anyway I think I will give up on this and just sort my website out and try to get people to notice it another way.

[julieHB]

Hi Ilona, don't give up!!

If the HTML codes are hidden in mr. Site's html editor I'd say that is quite naughty of them!!

Do you still have the code you got from Google?  This is what you do:

open your index.html file in NOTEPAD.  Insert the google code where instructed, it should look something like this (Google verification code in red):


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta name="description" content="Handmade jewellery in silver and glass. Fused glass and precious metal clay. Chain maille silver chains." />
<meta name="keywords" content="handmade jewellery, fused glass jewellery, glass pendants, chain maille, metal clay jewellery, silver chains, silver jewellery " />
<meta name="author" content="Julie Haveland Beer" />
<meta name="copyright" content="Julie Haveland Beer" />
<meta name="robots" content="all" />
<meta name="rating" content="safe for kids" />
<title>Handmade jewellery in silver and glass</title>
<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<meta name="verify-v1" content="ET3vCRLVb/ahQ1Rl20WkWBnkxRzZkI7pD8IkHhUR0lE=" />
</head>
<body>
This is where all the visible content is put..............
</body>
</html>

Save the index.html file and upload it as normal.  Now go back to Google and click the verify button.  Done!


The other optional method is to create an EMPTY html file (basically a text file created in NOTEPAD) and save it with the name as given by Google.  This file you upload to the same place as you upload your index.html file.

Good luck!  (I am PMing you  )

Julie