Keep IT Simple

I have been making websites since the late 1990s. Most of the websites I developed then were free of charge not only because I was doing websites for charities and non-profit non-government organizations but also because my website making skills were still at infancy.

During that time, all I cared about was that the websites were published and it I just simply gave the reigns to the organization for them to let their contacts visit their websites.

Not until a few months ago that I came to ask myself: ”Why publish a website that does not get found?”

I started scouring the internet and learned about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are actually many processes to improve the website for search engine optimization. SEO usually refers to the natural or organic way to for a website to get found as opposed to Black Hat techniques or spamdexing.

One of the ways for a website to get optimized is by improving a website’s coding and content placement. This can be done by using the latest web technologies like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It may seem impossible to a novice netizen by even layout and design for menus can be optimized for search engines.

Another good (an in not malicious) way to optimize a website is by putting there new contents regularly. From a common sense analysis, the more informative the website, the more people will visit it. And when many people visits on the website, spiders and crawlers from search engines can easily index contents from the website which results in top places on the searches. But content handling can be a tricky business. There are many web developers who resort to keyword stuffing. This means that in an article for example, even if there is no more need to repeatedly put some words, webmasters would still do it so thinking that the more keywords encountered by search engine crawlers, the higher the possibility of getting indexed. But today’s search engines have become more intelligent and they can tell if an article is keyword stuffed.

From my own experience on my struggle to get my websites found, one of the good techniques is using reciprocal linking. I have webmaster friends around the world and I asked them to put a link from their website to mine and I would do the same for them. There are also many reciprocal link exchange directories on the internet where I can submit my sites to be linked with other sites. Reciprocal linking has become a major part of the SEO process.

Another thing I do for getting my website found is by building a huge friends base in my networking website and telling them to visit the websites I maintained. This is a good strategy because I do not spam strangers.

Of course the best way to optimize in my experience is by sending all my friends emails in my address books every time I make updates on my website. They are all my friends so I am sure they wouldn’t mind if I asked them to visit the my website every time I make updates.