On this page you will find a tutorial to help you with your website or web page search engine optimization ( SEO ) and positioning ( SEP ) efforts. Here you will learn enough to help you get good listings with most of the major engines and directories.

In the chapters below we give you an introduction to SE robots, spiders or crawlers as they are variously termed.

We will tell you how to design your website for better Search Engine ratings, how to optimize your meta tags and how to optimize your content.

Introduction

So, you have created your website, you have uploaded it to the server, it is looking great and you are ready to go!

Now all you need is vistors to see your site and they will buy your product or service? Maybe, maybe not, but how are you going to get visitors to your site to bring in any orders at all?

There are lots of ways to promote your website and on other pages we cover many of them, but the very best, most economical way is to get good rankings for your web page(s) keywords and phrases on the search engines.

It is not just a matter of submitting your URL’s to the search engines though. In order to get a semi reasonable rating or even listed at all, you need to ensure that the pages you are submitting are OPTIMIZED for the search engine robots and directory editors, who/which will come and check over your site once it has been submitted.

Search engine optimisation is not a simple matter and if you want to become an expert, you will need to go away and do a lot more study. However, what you will learn in this tutorial will help you to achieve reasonable results, even sometimes excellent ones.
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Background

Most of the SE’s use software called robots, spiders or crawlers which will visit your pages sometimes up to 6-8 weeks after you have submitted them for listing.

Actually most of these robots do not rely on submissions, they are constantly searching the ‘net for new and updated pages and, if you have links coming back to your pages from other websites they will eventually find your site. We recommend that you cover all bases though and make the submissions anyway.

These ‘robots’ all tend to have slightly different ways of working. Some look at the background ‘meta tags’ on your page, then compare what they find there with the copy or text on the actual page which your visitors see. Others, including the most important SE…Google, simply pull information off your page and list that in their index.

The Directories such as Yahoo! and Dmoz use human editors to review your website after submission, who do the same job as the robots, plus they check to see if your site is relevant to the Directory category you have submitted to.

The point we want to make here is that your website will be checked for relevancy against the keywords, search terms and/or directory category you submit your pages for. Or it will be listed according to what the ‘robot’ sees on the page.

In order to appear early in SE search results your pages must be optimized to ensure that they reflect the important keywords and phrases your potential customers will be using to search the WWW.
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Designing your website for better Search Engine ratings

Before we get down to detail on how to optimize individual pages, we should make a few comments about how to design your website to help the ‘robots’ do their job.

There are some pretty definate do’s and do not’s involved here. We must remember that these ‘robots are only software programs and that their abilities are limited. So here are a few design do not’s first.

DO NOT

• do not use frames, at least on the pages you are submitting, as many robots can not find their way around pages constructed with frames
• do not use only images, animations, movies or flash graphics on your main pages. Robots can not read them so if a robot finds them on the submitted page, with little or no text, it is likely to go away without listing your website
• do not use lots of java code at the top of your page, some robots will not scan the whole page and if the top of the page is full of java code it will not be able to compare the copy on the page with your ‘meta tags’.

DO

• create a website with lots of relevant information and content to your subject, the better your content the better your ratings if you also follow the other basic rules
• minimize the number of images on submitted pages but where you do use images be sure to utilise the alt tags to maximize use of your keywords
• if you need to use java, say to create a menu rollover or drop down menu, use an external .js file and call up the file with the <SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”yourjsfilename.js”></SCRIPT> command
• use text links to the main pages on your website on every page you create ( check out the text links at the top and bottom of this page ). Some of the robots will follow the text links and scan other pages on your website which you have not submitted. They will NOT follow links to images such as buttons
• use robot instructions in your meta tags to encourage the robots to crawl your whole site and to revisit and reindex regularly. They are not guaranteed to work with every robot, but they certainly wont damage your efforts. Here are a set that we recommend:-
  <META NAME=”Robots” content=”All”>
  <META NAME=”Revisit” content=”20 Days”>

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• If you have any images on the page such as logo’s etc, make sure you utilise the alt tag to use some of your important keywords.
• Make sure you have a heading to start the page using major keywords or phrases and set inside <h1></h1> tags ie. for this page:-
  <h1>Search Engine Optimization Tutorial!</h1>
• Make sure you have more than 250 words on your page and include your keywords so that you achieve between 3-8% keyword density( each keyword appears a minimum 8 times in 250 words ). In particular include as many of your keywords as possible in your page copy close to the top of the page, preferably in the first couple of paragraphs.
• The reason we recommend only including 3-4 keywords terms per page is that the page has to be not only legible to your readers, but meaningful too. With 3-8% keyword density in 250-300 words of text, 3-4 keywords is all you will be able to include on one page. Remember this same copy must also grab your visitors attention and keep them on your website.
• The SE robots will visit every page they can find on the website, but they will generally visit your home page first and follow the links to other pages they find on the home page. however THEY DO NOT FOLLOW LINKS EMBEDDED IN IMAGES or JAVA CODE. So, if your nav menu uses buttons or Java Code rollovers be sure to add another set of TEXT BASED LINKS, which the robots can find and follow, to all your optimized pages on all your optimised pages……in other words interlink all your optimised pages with each other.

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For your website appear in the top ten on any search engine results you will have to stick pretty closely to the principles outlined above and, if your keywords are in a particularly competitive field you will need to go even further with your SEO tactics.

This is why we say to you it is essential to first of all define as small a niche market for your products as possible, to make your SEO job a little easier.

You may think that if you pay for submission or even use the PPC SE’s like GoTo, FindWhat etc that you do not need to optimize your pages. Wrong!

Even with PPC where you bid for top spot, if the listing below you has a title or description which is more relevant to the searcher than yours, guess who will get clicked first?

Pay for submission or even pay for inclusion SE’s give no more than that, if you want to appear on top of their search results, you will need to OPTIMISE your pages.

Next, to further improve your chances of appearing in top ten results on many of the bigger and better SE’s and Directories, you will need to back up your good page optimisation with great links poularity. Click here to go to our Links Popularity Tutorial.

There you go, if you have followed our advice you will be ready to submit your pages. Click here for advice on the best ways to do this.

For more in depth information on SE optimisation check out Danny Sullivan’s site SearchEngineWatch.com

If you have not fully OPTIMISED your web pages, you should read this BEFORE submitting to ANY search engines.

It is a fact that a small number of Search Engines ( SEs ) and Directories, approximately 10 -12, produce more than 90% of the SE generated visits that most websites get.

To our way of thinking, this makes these 10-12 SE’s extremely important, too important to use a software package or online submission service. We highly recommend that you submit by hand to these important traffic generators, to ensure that the job is done as well as it possibly can be.

If you want to cover all bases you could use auto submission software for the many minor SE’s out there try the FREE online service at WorldSubmitter.com

In some instances, such as at Alta Vista, you have no option but to submit by hand now anyway. They have found ways to block auto submission software because too many users were abusing the system.

Also, the submission process for the important directories, Yahoo!, DMOZ and LookSmart has always been a manual one, purely due to the complicated process of selecting the right category in the directory.

These days, when we consider submitting our site to SEs and Directories, there are three types of submission.

In this tutorial we will cover the following subjects

• Changing your eMail address
• WebMail – your browser based eMail
• Downloading your eMail to your PC
• Setting up multiple eMail accounts
• Autoresponders

Changing Your eMail Address
Now that you have your own domain name, once it is ‘up’ on the www you can start using it as your email address ie you@yourdomainname.com.

This serves two purposes, it helps you to promote your URL and it makes you independant from your ISP. If they are charging you too much, or not giving good service and you want to change, you need no longer worry about having to change your email address.

No more having to change all your stationary and advise all your contacts and clients because you change your ISP.

In addition on our server ( and most others ) you have what is termed a catchall account, which means that you can use any address @yourdomainname.com, there is no limit to the number of names you can use ie john@, mary@, marketing@, sales@, info@ etc.

You can also use combinations of words also as long as they are joined by an underscore ie subscribe_me@yourdomain.com.

As you can imagine this opens up many possibilities for tracking marketing campaigns etc.

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WebMail – your browser based eMail
( this feature may not be available if you are not hosting your website with us )

All eMail sent to yourdomainname.com is held on the eMail server and you can access it online via your browser at http://yourdomainname.com:2082/neomail/neomail.pl

When accessing your WebMail you will be asked for a username and password. This will be the same as the original username and password given to you when we set up your account, unless you have changed the password.

WebMail does not read html messages, but can be used to access and manage your incoming mail and send eMail messages from a remote computer.

Don’t forget to edit the signature neomail puts on your outgoing eMail!

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Downloading your eMail to your PC
There are two ways to get email from your PoP server to your PC, setting up your eMail software to download from the server and setting up forwarding commands via your control panel.

We recommend the first option because it is less work and the more reliable method, once you know how to set up your eMail software. However we will show you how to set up both methods here.

Downloading
Most eMail programs like Outlook, Eudora etc will allow you to set up new accounts, identities or personalities. Have a look thru your email menus to find this option then go ahead and create a new one.

Retain the original one you are currently using to download from your ISP’s eMail server, as you will still be getting mail sent to that address for a long time.

Call your new personality/account/identity whatever you wish and continue. You will then be asked at some stage during the set up process, depending on which software you are using, for the following information:-

PoP or POP3 or incoming mail server name = mail.yourdomainname.com ( replace ‘yourdomainname’ with your actual domain name )

STMP or outgoing mail server name = this is your isp’s server name and it will be whatever your current personality/account/identity is now

Login name ( username ) and Password = This will be the same as the original username and password given to you when we set up your hosting account, unless you have changed the password.

Return address = the address you wish to use @yourdomainname.com

You will also need to tell your software to check mail at regular intervals and to delete from the server after a number of days ( you decide how long ). Please make sure you do set a time for deletion though, as you will eventually run out of disc space if you do not.

Forwarding
When you set up eMail forwarding you are essentially instructing the Mail server to forward any mail which comes addressed to a particular address @yourdomainname.com, to another address, in your case it would almost certainly be your current ISP eMail address.

If you want to forward all mail, you will have to set up forwarders for every address you use ie john@, mary@, marketing@, sales@, info@ etc.

To do this, log on to your cPanel3 control panel at
http://yourdomainname.com:2082, click on the Forwarders link, then on the next window put the address (without the @yourdomainname.com) in the first box and the full address to be forwarded to in the second box, click the Add Forwarder button and repeat the process for all addresses to be forwarded.

Please remember to log in to your webmail account on a regular basis to delete old mail ( and empty the trash ) or you will eventually run out of disc space.

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Setting up multiple eMail accounts
( this feature will apply to our hosting clients only )

If you wish you can set up an unlimited number of separate eMail accounts for idividuals in your organisation, family, friends etc, which utilize separate passwords and which can only be accessed by that person.

To set up new accounts, log on to your cPanel3 control panel at
http://yourdomainname.com:2082, click on the Add / Remove accounts link, then follow the instructions.

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Basic HTML Tutorial – Download this tutorial and learn how to create and edit your own website.

More Advanced HTML Tutorial – Download this tutorial to learn even more about HTML

Learn how to configure, adjust and use CGI scripts, download this free eBook

Now that you have your own domain name, once it is ‘up’ on the www you can start using it as your email address ie you@yourdomainname.com.

This serves two purposes, it helps you to promote your URL and it makes you independent from your ISP. If they are charging you too much, or not giving good service and you want to change, you need no longer worry about having to change your email address.

For more information on how to set up your email see our email tutorial above.

Good luck with your website