You will need to decide what your site will offer the visitor. What is the basic concept of your site? What kind of information is it providing? How are you going to present it? What functions will be included in your site?
When you have chosen the theme for your site, you need to do resea rch. See what others are doing on their sites which are on a similar subject. Look at how they write and at how the site looks. Do you like it? Get ideas of what you would like to do yourself.
But be sure to keep your ideas simple. Splash, Flash and fancy intro pages to sites are often more annoying then inviting. You will also need to do a bit of a reality check, and see if the sites you like get a lot of visitors, and if the site is updated often.
There is nothing that is more of a turn off then to see a message on the bottom of the page saying ‘Last updated 01.01.1999’. Also if the pages are having a lot of links that are not working, is a bad sign. Be sure to find a few good p ages that can be an example for your own site.
Below is mentioned a few simple methods to check a sites popularity.
Alexa ranking:
A way you can check the popularity of a site is to use the Alexa.com information. Go www.alexa.com and click on the button which says ‘Traffic Rankings’, write in the domain name of the site you are checking out in the search box. Then click on ‘Get Traffic Details’ .
You will see a page displaying an image of the front page of the site and a number beside it. The value and correctness of the alexa ranking number is disputed amongst webmasters, but it still gives you a good indication of how much a site is visited.
The lower the number is; the more traffic. My site has an alexa rating of between 250.000 and 300.000, and gets between 150 – 200 unique visitors a day. That is pretty OK for a hobby site. Everything within the 100. 000 is very good.
Backlinks:
Another way of checking if a site is popular is to check how many other sites that are linking to it. Go to Google, Yahoo and MSN and write this in to the search field :
link:http://www.example-domain.com/
The result that comes up when you perform this search is the number of pages that is linking back to that domain. These numbers are different on all three search engines.
MSN usually comes up with the largest number, Google comes up with the lowest number, and Yahoo somewhere in between. Try with a few sites and you will get the hang of it. The essence would be: The more backlinks; the more popular.
PageRank:
This method is to check how much a site is valued in terms of Google page rank. Google determines the value of a site according to many different criteria. The details of this are too much to explain now in the start, there will be further explanation in the ‘SEO’ part of this article.
The value of Google’s PR system is disputed and discussed amongst webmasters and there are many opinions about it, but in general we can say this: The more PageRank; the better. If the site you are looking at has no PageRank at all it might be completely new and not be in Google’s index because of that. It can also possibly be because the site has banned and dropped out of Google’s index is by using techniques that violate their terms.
Do not worries too much about this for now; stick with the simple techniques described here and in the material that it is recommended here, and you will be just fine.
You will need hosting services to actually partake in SEO, so check out the hosting reviews for a better understanding of the companies that offer such services.
