How does the interweb work?

Discussion in 'Off Topic Area' started by Bozza Bostik, Mar 29, 2015.

  1. Bozza Bostik

    Bozza Bostik Antichrist on Button Moon

    As my work situation is so bad and doesn't seem likely to get better over the next year or more, I'm thinking of setting up my own business.

    It'll all be online and through the magikry of the interwebz. I'll need to set up a webpage and all that stuff.

    But how do you get your website to come up in searches? Is it just spells and black magic or is it a little less complicated than that.

    Also, if I want to target a specific area of the world, is there a way to do that?

    Write slowly please...this kind of stuff is a mystery to me!

    Thanks.
     
  2. Mitch

    Mitch Lord Mitch of MAP Admin

    To maximise website hits you have to dress like barbie, pour salad cream over your head then post pics on MAP. Surefire success; off you go!
     
  3. Bozza Bostik

    Bozza Bostik Antichrist on Button Moon

    Well, the site was going to be photos of me in a Japanese school girl outfit covered in Crisco...so not much different.

    Er...When you say salad cream....??
     
  4. Hannibal

    Hannibal Cry HAVOC and let slip the Dogs of War!!! Supporter

    Well that went south quickly........
     
  5. Hannibal

    Hannibal Cry HAVOC and let slip the Dogs of War!!! Supporter

    My limited understanding is that the site designer does that for you....mine is a DIY job and I get keywords and tags that link to anyone looking for jkd/martial arts/self defense in calgary.

    I am sure there are better advanved methods but for my needs this has been more than sufficient
     
  6. holyheadjch

    holyheadjch Valued Member

    Most web-designers don't know a jot about search engine optimisation and those that do will charge a premium.

    It honestly depends on what the website is for. If it's for something really specific, Google will probably rank you highly without any specific work, but if you want to be #1 for 'Life Insurance' or 'Weight loss', you need to be willing to drop thousands, if not tens of thousands on professional consultancy.
     
  7. csoby

    csoby Valued Member

    I agree, as a web developer I know next to nothing about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It is like black magic. I have had good luck using CMS' (Content Management Systems) with SEO, things like WordPress and Drupal. However, it seems that the rules change from time to time so you really have to be focused on that particular subject to stay up to date.

    For a while it used to be about tags in your page. Then it was about links to you page. Now it seems to be about content on your page. It changes and each engine seems to have slightly different rules. If you are really concerned about it, hire someone who really does SEO.
     
  8. Moosey

    Moosey invariably, a moose Supporter

    As a web developer who knows a bit about SEO, the general rule is to make your site as readable as possible for humans and the search engines will catch up.

    Some good tips (which should be obvious help for human readers too, but are, last time I checked, also prioritised by Google):

    1. Put the theme of your page at the top of each page in an H1 tag. If your page is about horses, don't title it "Neigh, My Four Legged Friend", call it "Horses and Equestrianism" - get the key terms in the title.

    2. Succinctly describe what your page is about near the start. Again, think carefully about the topic of your page and describe it using terms that people would likely search for.

    3. Don't overload your pages with large-sized elements. No giant JPEGS or massive uncompressed javascript files. The quicker the page completes its loading cycle, the better.

    4. Don't replace titles with images. Images can look nicer, but any content in an image won't be read and indexed by the search engine. Use alt-text with images containing useful phrases that describe the image and your main theme (e.g. "Horse jumping a gate" - you get the word "horse" in there).

    5. Structure your page layout so the most thematically useful content is at the top of the HTML document. The search engine crawler will read your page from top to bottom in the order it appears in "view source", so don't put all your navbars and sidebars at the top and your title tags and content at the bottom of the html. Arrange the layout so the important stuff is first, then arrange the visual layout with css.

    6. Use description and keyword meta-tags, but don't stuff them with irrelevant keywords. In the old days, people would stuff the keywords tag with "horses horse donkey sexy gambling free money jennifer lawrence"...etc and hope that those popular search terms would bring people to the site. Google will blacklist you if you do that now.

    7. Mutually link with other good sites. Google prioritises web sites that have a lot of links with other reputable sites.

    I'm sure there's a ton more, but those are the ones that come to mind right now.
     
  9. Prizewriter

    Prizewriter Moved on

    Great stuff Moosey.

    To the OP:

    SEO, as with most things with the web (and indeed computer science) is in a constant state of flux. A few years ago, keywords in meta tags were the most important thing. Now Google are more interested in long tail phrases.

    Some other things to consider:

    1) Quality of links to your site will really bump you up the search ranking. Social media is MASSIVE in this area. The more traffic that comes to your website from popular social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest), the more this will help with your ranking.

    2) SEO specialists can be pricey, but in my Masters degree we had a guest SEO lecturer. The results he produced for private companies were unreal. Having a good understanding of SEO will really help.

    3) In broader terms, with any digital media (websites, social media), you need an integrated approach. And it starts with your overall strategy. So before you get too bogged down in the technical side of things, you have to have a very clear idea of what you want to do online, and how you want to do it. Once you know that, you can build your digital presence around it.

    In martial arts parlance, if someone came on to MAP and said "what's the best MA for me"?, it would be hard to advise them unless they had a very clear idea of what they wanted (Goals), what resources they had (time, money) and how they would measure the success of a MA (is it meeting their goals)? Same goes for digital communications: What are your goals (to get customers to buy things, to provide services, what is your value proposition?), how much time/money do you have to spend on a digital presence, and how will you know if it's working?

    Hopefully you are well ahead with stuff I mentioned in point 3, but of all the websites/digital business presence I've seen not work, it's because people didn't think about what they were doing BEFORE they went online.

    Sorry for being preachy but it's worth remembering.
     

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