"Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet" - Part 8
By Tasos Vasilopoulos
Posted Saturday, December 11, 2004
Introduction
This article makes part of a series of 20 articles. The subject of this series is the creation and promotion of a website as a cost-effective method to establish a profitable home based business on the Internet. In my previous article, “Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet – Part 7 - Design the layout of your web pages”, I have pointed out what to take in consideration when designing the layout of your webpages. In this article I will teach you how to create your home page properly.
Developing your skills on computer handling and Internet usage
To create your personal website and publish it on the Internet you need to have basic knowledge of computers and Internet. This knowledge is divided into several parts, listed below:
1. Basic knowledge of your computer
1.1. What is the “hard disk” of your computer
1.2. What is a “folder”? How can you create, rename, copy, move or delete a folder? How can you examine the contents of a folder? How can you send a folder by email through the Internet to another person? How can you zip a folder?
1.3. What is a “file”? How you can rename, copy, move, or delete a file. How you can open a file? How can you edit a file? How can you send a file by email through the Internet to another person? How can you zip a file? What are the basic types of files? How can we distinguish them?
1.4. What is an “antivirus” program? Why do you have to use one?
1.5. What is a “backup copy” of your data that are stored in our computer? How can you make one?
1.6. What is a “word-processing” program?
1.7. What is an “image editing” program?
2. Basic knowledge of the Internet
2.1. What is an “email client” program? What is an email account? How can I create one? How can you receive emails in your computer? How can you send emails, answer emails, forward emails, store emails, move emails, remove emails?
2.2. What is a “domain name”
2.3. What is a “URL”
2.4. What is a “browser”? What is a URL? What is an IP address? How can you visit a web page? How can you copy a web page from the Internet to your hard disk? How can you copy a picture from a web page on the Internet to your hard disk? How can you keep track of web pages that you want to visit again?
2.5. What is “HTML”? How can you create a web page? What is a “HTML editor”?
2.6. What is a “website”? How can you create a website?
What do you need to get your website published on the Internet?
What is “FTP”?
How can you transfer pages from your computer to the Internet and vice versa?
Detailed answers to all these questions reside in Appendices A and B of my ebook at (http://www.netincome.gr/nm-ebook/ebook.htm). Or you can search for these terms on the Internet.
Time to create – Create your home page
The content – The menu - The optimization procedure
1. The content
You have 20 seconds to attract the attention of your visitor. So you need:
- A home page small in the size, so that it will download fast in your visitor’s computer - A title that will present the theme of your website with the proper words
- A subtitle that will invite him to read more.
These elements must describe exactly what he is looking for.
The first impression counts most in order to keep the visitor and create the right atmosphere. Now comes the second phase. You have to stimulate his interest. What is in your website for him? How can the “product” that you offer be of benefit to him? Here you must present your offer in two paragraphs. This is what I am offering to you and this will be your return, in case you decide to acquire my “product”. And then you will pass to the third phase. You must create the desire to your visitor to acquire your “product” in order to receive the returns you have mentioned. Finally, you must lead him to act. You have to put in front of his face your offer and invite him to make the call. Attract, interest, desire, act – The AIDA formula, you may have heard about in the Internet Marketing and not only. If one out of ten of your visitors decide to join your affiliate program and become your co-worker, then you must be satisfied of your web page. See an example in my home page at (http://www.free-work-at-home-job.com)
There are some words that have a special effect to the readers. I suggest you use them in your phrases. Study them at the end of this section, right below.
2. The menu
The navigation bar must contain links to the most important pages in your website. Must exist in every page. Must be placed in the same position in every page. Must be the same in every page. Initially your menu will contain the link to the home page, the link to the page that describes the link exchange procedure and links to the pages that contain the links. In time, as you will be more familiar to the creation of web pages, you may decide to improve your website by adding pages with useful content for your visitors, like tools, resources and reports. In fact you will have to do that. It is not an option. We will analyze this step in the creation of your website soon.
3. The web page optimization procedure
After inserting the content and the menu and formatting the layout of your web pages comes the task of optimization. Every page must be optimized for a certain keyword, which must be the main theme of the website or a similar one. The rules of optimization to be presented and analyzed in this section must be effectuated in the home page in any case. This is obligatory. The first element to be optimized is the metatags in the “header” section of each web page. There are three metatags that affect the relevance of a web page to its theme: - The “title” metatag
- The “description” metatag
- The “keywords” metatag
We have talked about the content of these three metatags previously in article “Part 2 – Search Engines Explained”. I will repeat here the requirements about them:
- The title must have 15 or fewer words. It must contain the keyword of the web page two times. - The description must have 25 or fewer words. It must contain the keyword at least one time. - The keywords must have 1000 characters at the most. It must not contain any keyword more than 6 times. Remember that the title and the description is what someone sees from your website in the listing of a search engine, when he/she conducts a search. So, they must mean something and they must contain strong words. Also they must have to do with the content of your website.
The second element to be optimized is the keyword density of the web page.
High search engine ranking requires your pages to maintain optimum keyword density. Keyword density is the ratio of a keyword to the total words on a page. Keyword density is a critical aspect of search engine optimization. To rank highly, your keyword density must not be too high or too low. A density of 1% to 7% is generally considered good.
The keyword must appear in the title and in the subtitle.
The keyword must appear in every sentence of the first two paragraphs. The keyword must appear in the links that reside in the content of the web page and in the menu. I suggest that you visit (http://www.keyworddensity.com/) to get more information and check your pages regarding their keyword density. The third element to be optimized is the word proximity of keyword’s words. Word proximity is the distance between the words of the keyword. For example, if you keyword is “earn money online”, then obviously it is better having as the “title” metatag of the page the phrase: “Earn Money Online – Take advantage of this opportunity and earn money online!”, than having the phrase: “Earn Money Online - Discover the best way to earn money while working online!”. In the second occasion the keyword does not appear two times in the title, since the words “earn”, “money” and “online” are not all together in the second appearance, as they are in the first occasion. Try to improve the word proximity of the keyword in the metatags and in the text as much as you can, but do not make the page unreadable from a human for this reason.
As Tasos always say: ”You give something to take something”. The better the word proximity in the page, the worst the readability of it, or vice versa. The fourth element to be optimized is the “alt” metatag of the images in the page. Each image in an html page has a metatag called “alt”, from the word “alternative”. This tag serves as an alternative way to say to the reader what this image is about, in case his browser does not support images (it may be a text browser, like the first browsers, 8-10 years ago). Or the visitor may decide to deactivate this option in his browser (every browser gives you the option to not download the images of a web page in order to decrease download times). Well, Search Engines take in consideration this “alt” tag, which resides in the properties of an image and can be accessed in every WYSIWYG html editor by right clicking on the image. The “alt” tag must be the keyword of the web page in every image of this page.
The fifth element to take in consideration is the location of the appearances of the keyword in the web page. The higher it appears in the web page, the better. This is the same with the rule: “try to include the keyword in every sentence in the title, subtitle and the first two paragraphs of the text”.
The sixth rule in the optimization of a web page is to format the keyword. It is better to make it just bold than have it written in other font, larger letters or italics. Search Engines takes in special consideration the words that are bolded, because the readers can see them easily, so the Search Engines assume that these phrases have to do with the main theme of the page. In this rule I must include another optimization tip that can help you get a better relevance without spoiling your page. You must format your title and subtitle as H1 (it comes from the word Heading 1). When the html language appeared some years ago, the letters in an html page could have six fixed dimensions. You could select the dimension of the letters from six standard sizes, H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, with the H1 being the bigger and H6 the smaller size. As you may have understood the first pages had their titles in size H1, their subtitles in size H2, smaller titles as H3 and the text as H4 or H5 or H6. Search Engines take in special consideration text formatted as H1. The problem is that this size is very big and will spoil the appearance of your web page. But it must be done. The solution is to format your title and subtitle as H1 text, then select them again and reformat them using any font and size of letter you want. The html editor, apart from this second information, will also keep the information of the H1 formatting, but it won’t visualize it. This way, you will have a smaller and elegant title for your visitors and the H1 title for the Search Engines! In case your html editor won’t do it, then you will have to enter in the source of your page and do it manually.
Here the rules of a good web page optimization end.
There is another issue that we must discuss before leaving this section. It is the internal linking in your website. By the term “internal linking” or “interlinking” I am referring to the links in the pages of your website that link to the other pages of your website. Every page in your website must link at least to the home page. When your website will start growing as you will be adding pages with content for your visitors, there will be occasions where you may change the menu that appear in a certain web page. In every case you must have a link to your home page in the menu or in another section of the page.
And the most important piece of experience for the end of this section:
NEVER TRY TO FOOL SEARCH ENGINES – NEVER TRY TO FOOL SEARCH ENGINES
Many webmasters try to find ways to meliorate the importance and the relevance of their websites using ambiguous methods, like hidden text, small text, page cloaking and other techniques. Search Engines are becoming smarter and smarter. There are people behind their ranking algorithms. They want to give their visitors the best content. For this reason, the programmers who construct and maintain the programs that calculate the importance and the relevance of each web page, include in them procedures to locate and punish the pages that try to fool them and gain better positions in their listings, not by offering good content and useful links, but by trying to make them believe that they do it.
So, prefer to take the long road that will safely lead you to your target. Create a nice website, promote it and in time start building content for your visitors. Search Engines will appreciate your work and will reward you with the right position in their listings for your keyword.
Next article in the series “Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet”: Part 9 - Create the pages that will contain the links
About the Author
Tasos Vasilopoulos is a successful Network Marketer on the Internet as Group Leader of SFI Marketing Group. His main method to promote his home business on the Internet is websites properly optimized to obtain a good rank in the listings of the major Search Engines. Get his ebook with an in depth analysis of all the steps of his method and find more resources on proper domain registration, effective website design and search engines optimization in his website at (http://www.netincome.gr) You are free to use this article as long as you do not make any changes in its content, you keep all the links in it active and you include the information above about the author as it is.
