Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

How Do I Add a Favicon To My Website?

Friday, January 1st, 2010

Once you have created a favicon you need to upload the filename.ico to your web server.

Then to add a favicon to your website you simply need to insert the following line of HTML code into the head section of your web page.

<link href=”/images/favicon.ico” rel=”shortcut icon” />

After you have done this, refresh your browser and if all is correct the favicon will appear. Some browsers update much quicker than others.

How to Increase Web Traffic

Monday, November 9th, 2009

If you want to get high quality website traffic then you need to use off page SEO (search engine optimization) techniques. To generate a continuous steam of web traffic to your website you need to create link building strategies.

To get a very large amount of website traffic you will need to have your website ranked on the first pages of search engine results pages (SERPs). To achieve this you need to have a high quality website that has unique content with keywords relating to your websites topic. It is imperative to have key phrases and well written content is useful and no copied. Having these things will encourage a continuous flow of traffic to your website. By having a website that generates interest, other websites will link to it and the chances are that those linking to your article will have a website of a similar topic. High quality back links such as these will push your website up SERPs.

If you have written a web page and it is no appearing on the first few pages on search engines for the keywords of your choice then the chance of getting large traffic numbers decreases dramatically. When a user searches for something on the Internet it is unlikely that they will check past the third page of results so you should make it your gaol to be in this section.

After creating a unique article with keywords and good SEO techniques you should strive to gain back links of a high quality. These back links to your website should not just be to your homepage; they should also be to deep internal pages. This can be achieved by writing genuine useful comments on blogs and forums with a link back to your site. You can submit your website to web directories that are free and paid ones if you wish. You may also want to take advantage of Google Adwords.

As the number of visitors increases and you first start to see traffic you need to do everything in your power to keep them coming back to your website. This will then provide constant traffic to your website and increase the popularity of your website. It is logical to only carry out free techniques to increase traffic at first until you have some revenue to invest in paid methods.

What is Organic Traffic?

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

Web traffic that comes to your website either via a web directory or search engine that is free and unpaid is commonly known as organic traffic. You can gain large amounts of organic traffic by listing your website on directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo or by submitting your website to search engines such as Google.

One of the best ways to increase traffic to your website is to register with major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. In most cases it is not enough just to register with these websites. By registering you are asking the search engine for your website to be included for crawling. This involves the search engine gathering data about your website. Search engine crawling programs are generally called bots, robots or spiders.

The crawl will begin with your websites homepage and then progress through your linked website structure. The crawl will following internal links around your website and gather data about the pages that it finds and then index this information in the search engines database. The search engine will index the web page URL and the web page title and some include more information such as a page description and parts of the pages content.

When a user searches for a phrase the search engine will match this phrase with indexed pages and show them as results. The order in which the results are displayed is usually dependant on the search engines algorithm. It is more common that organic search results are displayed higher are receive more clicks from users. This is why it is important to get your website ranked high on SERPs.

Web crawlers can take a long time to index pages due to the vast number that are on the web. With more and more websites being created everyday the spiders workload continues to grow hence the time it takes for your website to be indexed on a search engine. Using a service like Google Adwords you can decrease the waiting time it takes for your website to become indexed.

What is Link Popularity?

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

Link popularity is based upon the quantity of high quality back links from similar websites. If an incoming link to your website has relevant keywords in the anchor text on the external website, this may well help your web page gain a higher ranking. Link popularity is a very important part of search engine optimization which can really improve your websites ranking in SERPs.

Link building is an Off page SEO technique used to increase the number of websites linking to your web pages. The link popularity of a website is dependent on a few factors. These are listed below:

  • The number of websites that are linking to your website
  • The Link popularity and the PageRank of the external website linking to you
  • The page from which you are getting the link should not have too many outgoing links
  • The content and niche of the website link to you should be similar to yours
  • The link to your website should be one way which means there is no link back to the external website from your web page (no reciprocal link).
  • The external web page should have a higher rank than your website
  • The website linking to you should not be blacklisted
  • The IP addresses of the website linking to you
  • The anchor text in the link to you should contain one of your websites top keywords
  • The link coming to you should be a simple link with no scripting

There are other factors too that affect link popularity however the ones listed above should give you a basis on which to gain back links.

Designing a Modern Website

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

There are millions of websites on the Internet all competing for visitors all the time. To ensure that your website is successful in attracting the most visitors it is important to have a modern website. This article details points that can help you to ensure that your website is up to date.

Designing a Modern Website

The design of a website is obviously important when attracting visitors, however it is not the only thing that should be considered by the designer. The website content is just as relevant as the page design if not more so. Having unique content on your website helps you to achieve better search engine rankings and therefore more web traffic.

A modern website should have consistency throughout where the sites logo and general colour theme is continued on every page throughout the site. A tip is to spend time looking at professional websites that you like and evaluate what makes them appealing to you. You can then take these ideas on board and implement them into your own website. It is advisable to spend plenty of time designing your website and ensuring that it is of a high standard as to impress visitors.

A visitor that finds a website to be interesting and rewarding is likely to return to visit your website again. This is the biggest reward for producing a great quality website.

Website Homepage Design

It is very likely that the first page a visitor will see will be your home page. As the home page it should have short sentences and paragraphs explaining about the site and its content. A few images may be used to make the page more attractive however do not use to many or the download time of your website may increase. By updating your home page regularly with relevant contact search engines will begin to rank you which will increase traffic. The overall look of your website should be professional and enable visitors to read the content easily.

Web Page Linking and Navigation

It is very important that your website is easy to navigate for visitors and search engines. There will naturally be many internal and external links to other website pages so make it easy for your visitors to navigate to them. This means that while designing your website you should have in mind your site structure and ensure this shows through your menu.

If a visitor cannot find the content they want on your website it is highly probable that they will leave. A general rule is for a visitor to get to any content they want by three clicks. This is what is called the three click rule.

Attracting Visitors to your website

On your website you may find it useful to offer some freebies to site visitors. This can be anything from an eBook to a piece of software they can download and install. This is a great way of getting more traffic because the first person who downloads content from your website may inform their friends that they can get free “your freebie here” from your website.

Using Images in Web Pages

Images are a great tool when creating a professional modern website. They can be used to separate and space of large chunks of text or to explain something more clearly. You should only use relevant images on your website that help to promote its content. Very large images on a website can increase the time it takes to download to the users PC.

Multimedia has become more available on the web so you can make use of videos, images and sounds to enhance your web pages. Great high quality content is the number one factor that will drive traffic to your website. Use images and other facilities to promote the page content and make it easy for the user to understand.

There are few barriers to creating a professional modern website simply due to the number of helpful resources on the Internet that answer web developers questions. On a final note ensure that your website is clear and easy to use as not to confuse the user. A great website will always be recommended to friends so work on making your pages eye-catching and interesting.

Reliable and Cheap Multiple Domain Hosting

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

If you are a web master it is likely that you will own or manage more than one website. If you had to purchase a new hosting plan for every website that you owned you may end up spending more than you need to.

A great feature with cPanel is the ability to addon domains. This means that you can add multiple domains to one hosting account. The limit is set by your web hosting provider, in the case of iUKHost this feature is set to un-metered which means you can addon as many as you like. 

Some hosts limit the amount of domains by the CPU usage, for example if one of your websites is using all the servers resources this is unfair to other clients in a shared hosting environment.

All cPanel shared hosting packages with iUKHost come with un-metered addon domains, sub-domains and databases.

Google Adsense – Bigger is better

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

Larger ads usually yield better results from users.

Google Adsense – Dress for success

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

Try and get your Google Adsense adverts to blend with the theme of your website.