4MakingYourOwnWebsite Blog

I’ve set up this blog for those that are interested in starting their own website and online business.  I hope that you will find the information and comments here interesting and helpful.  Please come back again and again to find out what’s new in the world of web design, SEO, and other pertinent topics related to websites and online businesses. 

They say that when it comes to websites and attracting visitors, “Content is King”.  I believe this is true as visitors are usually looking for information when they’re surfing the web.  There’s a lot of content out there though, so the question is which content is king?

There’s a bunch of sites out there that have content that is strictly made up from articles gathered from the various article directories.  I’ve been wondering how these fare compared to sites with original content. 

So I tested a couple of my websites.  I started two websites with a couple of articles from the directories.  I then began adding content to these sites every couple of days.  On one website I continued to add just articles from the directories.  The content of these articles were pertinent to the site and well optimized for the keywords that I was targetting.

On the second site, I added my own original content.  Here again, pertinent and optimized for the targeted keywords.  I left the articles from the directories that I originally placed on the site.   But any new content was my own and very original.

So which site fared the best with the search engines?  Both were visited within two weeks of my submission to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.  Repeat visits were sporatic through the first month but became more frequent as the robots realized that I was continually adding content. 

The first site began to show less frequent visits during the second month and I couldn’t find it on search pages when I looked for it with my keywords.  But the second site began to have daily spider visits.  By the end of the second month, I could find this website when I used my keywords in MSN and Yahoo.  It had yet to come up on a Google search.

It’s still too early to tell, but I’m beginning to see that the search engines definitely like the original content versus the artificial (and duplicated) content coming from the article directories if you are trying to get pagerank. 

Not that it’s bad to use these articles.  They are good content.  But you have to write your own original content and get that into the mix of your website.  You can’t be lazy and depend totally on others work and hope that you’re going to get up in the search engines.  The best ranked websites seem to be those where all the content is original. 

I’ll keep you informed on how this test is doing in the months to come.  In the mean time, if you are looking for ways to make your own website and haven’t checked out me out yet, just head to http://www.4makingyourownwebsite.com .   

It seems these days that there are so many websites out there that are “fly-by-night” sites.  These websites tend to be there to spam the search engines and make some bucks over night.  Which they may do.  But then they’re gone. 

I am of the philosophy that a good website should be an enduring entity.  It should represent an online business that also endures over time.  My philosophy is to make a website with great content (of which most is eventually original) to attract visitors.  Then slowly (and that’s one of the keys to endurance on the web) build it as the business grows. 

There are so many internet gurus out there preaching what it takes to make money online.  One common theme to their teachings is search engine optimization (SEO).  The right domain names, meta tags, keywords, etc.  These ARE important, but in a way aren’t these means to spam the search engines into giving you faster indexing and higher rankings?

Some of the content that I find on websites following this line of teaching almost sound artificial when you read them.  I’ve come to the conclusion that the visitor should, and must, be the prime factor when designing a website and writing the content for it.  This line of thinking might get you into the search engine directories as fast as other methods, but over time I believe it pays off.

For most of us that are online with our businesses, big money doesn’t come over night.  So, it’s probably best to focus on your visitor’s experience on your website and build the business into a real, long term money maker.

A visitor focus will become more important in the future as web “surfers” get frustrated with the make money quick, fly-by-night businesses they keep running into when they’re searching for real information. 

Take advantage of using the visitor experience to guide your website design and content and you will be miles ahead of the competition in the future.

One key strategy to getting your website on the various search engines is to build their trust.  Your website will not get indexed and ranked if you don’t have the trust of the search engines.  And this is particularly true of Google.

Google and the other search engines have gone to great extremes to create alogrithms to catch “black hat” webmasters from spamming their results.  They have spent a lot of time to insure they are bringing relevant content to their search pages.

Not too long ago you could keyword weight your content and gain a significant jump in page rank.  But as many have found by having their websites loose rank and become de-listed, this is no longer true.  

Now days, the process of gaining good page rank from the search engines is to gain their trust and show that your website is authoritative and providing solid content about the subject of the website or page. 

I’ve found that you might as well not even try to trick the search engines.  It’s better to provide your content in a manner that your website visitor’s accept and trust.  You need to concern yourself with building a great content site for your visitors and not for the search engine. 

This may take you longer to go up in the rankings, but it will also mean that once you get there, you’re not going to see your website and pages taking the dive when Google and other search engines change their alogrithm. 

If you follow so many of the “gurus” and build your web pages to revolve around a keyword list then you probably are not making your website for the visitor experience.  Related keywords are just repetitions of your main keyword and the search engines have caught on to this “keyword stuffing” in the content of the page.

Besides, how many pages can you have on basically the same topic?  Keywords stuffed content doesn’t read smoothly and the visitor is turned off and clicks away from your website.  The search engines view this as manipulative and visitors realize that they are not getting the content they wanted. 

The rage these days is to gain as many incoming links from high page ranked sites as you can to increase your own page rank.  Google, etc., have caught on.  This is looking un-natural to them.  If all your incoming links come from high ranked pages and none from a variety of lower ranked pages, this sets up a red flag.

You want your website to not only look natural but also to behave naturally in the minds of the search engines.  I’ve found that my best ranked websites these days are the ones that I made strictly for my visitor’s experience.  Those that give the visitor what they came to my website for and that information is in a purely readable format. 

If you’re trying to maintain a lasting website.  One that endures all the alogrithm changes.  Quit worrying about your search engine ranking.  That will come in the long term if you concentrate your efforts on your visitors and why they came to your website in the first place.

If you gain the trust of your visitors, then you’re gaining the trust of the search engines.