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Tips for creating a successful Web site

Quite a few Web site authors wonder why they have few visitors and rank badly in search engines. Here are some tips and links on what to do in order to run a successful Web site, both in terms of visitor numbers and visitor satisfaction. Not all of this applies to everybody—after all, there are large differences between the target audiences of different sites.

This is not a step-by-step tutorial for beginners. You will have to know your HTML already. I make suggestions that emphasize the following site properties:

• unique content,
• mostly text,
• clean design,
• easy to navigate for users,
• easy to index for search engines.

Addresses and webspace

• Get a domain of your own. Don't have your site buried in some subdirectory of Tripod or home.t-online.de.
• Get a second-level domain (e.g. mydomain.com), not mydomain.domain.com.
• Don't use other people's trademarks in domain names. You don't want to be sued and forced to give the domain away. Even a similar name may be enough for the competitor to successfully sue you (it would be like naming a new soft drink Koka-Kola).
• Pick something short which is also easy to remember. Not all people keep extensive bookmark lists.
• If you use a free webspace provider, make sure your pages don't get cluttered with advertisements. Better pay for something that is ad-free.

Path and directory names

• Keep your HTML files near the root directory http://www.domain.com/ of your domain. Instead of http://www.mydomain.com/links/sports/basketball/lakers.html, use http://www.domain.com/links-sports-basketball-lakers.html. Search engines sometimes “punish” links that are buried deep in a directory tree.
• Don't change names of files and directories once they're established. Not everybody will make big efforts to find a page once it has moved.
• Instead of returning a simple 404 error code, forward all false page requests to a special error page that contains a search engine that simplifies finding what people are looking for. If you can, use software that makes suggestions for pages that sound similar to the one they were unsuccessfully trying to load.
• Give your files and directories names that contain full keywords which are relevant with regard to that page. Instead of laklnks.html, use lakers-links.html. The dash - ensures that lakers and links are seen as two different words. Don't use the underscore _ instead of the dash.
• Don't use special characters, letters with accents or spaces in the names. Restrict yourself to the 26 lower case letters a to z and the ten digits 0 to 9, the dash - and one dot . to seperate file extensions.

Links

• Create lots of links between the pages of your site. If your site covers one topic, there will be a lot of opportunities to link from the current page to another one, which may give more background on a particular issue. Identify and use those opportunities, sometimes a Web site developer knows his site too well and forgets the visitor's total lack of knowledge with regard to the site's content. On the other, don't exagerate. Don't use every word matching a page on the site to link there. Too many links on a page are hard to read and confuse the visitor with regard to what's important.
• When linking, use relevant keywords between the anchor tags: <a href="lakers.html">History of the Los Angeles Lakers</a> instead of only <a href="lakers.html">History</a>. It may be clear for the human reader whose history this is from the context, but search engines need keywords. Never use links of the type Click here to learn more (“click here…” being the link text).
• Ask people with pages related to yours to add a link to your site. Tell them what text you would prefer to be shown as a link. Offer to add a link to their site in return. Be polite in your request and keep it short. Use a descriptive subject line like link exchange suggestion.
• Don't suggest in the anchor text that you are linking to a “deep page” while actually linking to a table of contents which also contains the deep page, requiring an additional click by the user to get to the page he supposedly was choosing already when clicking on the first link. This is supposed to keep visitors on the site by forcing them to check out the table of contents. It also leads to more ad impressions. While unexperienced visitors may think that it's their fault to have to click twice, the others will be annoyed by this obvious trick. Instead, try to spend more time linking to and promoting the overview (table of contents).

Content

• Face it, if your page doesn't offer anything interesting, it will not succeed. If you want visitors, offer something that goes beyond a bookmark list and your email address. If that is too much work, you probably don't want to have a site.
• Avoid duplicate pages. If you have equal or similar pages on different domains, search engines may throw you out of their database. So make sure your pages differ.
• Write about things that you know well. The more work you put into your pages, the more useful they will be for others. If you try to cover a large topic in a mediocre way, people will probably not bookmark and return. Rely on being good in a niche, these days search engines can drive traffic to you no matter how obscure the topic is.
• Do not publish pictures of people without their permission. They may not want to see themselves published on the Web. In some jurisdictions it's even forbidden, unless one is a “person of public interest”.
• Use only content (pictures, text, videos, …) made by yourself or with explicit permission, everything else probably infringes someone's copyright.
• German web authors: Make sure that you have some sort of Impressum. Learn more about the Impressumspflicht.
• Image file formats—use JPEG for photos only, GIF or PNG for graphics. A favicon lets you add a logo to the address bar of some browsers, it must be in Microsoft ICO icon format. Don't use animated GIFs. Don't use other formats like BMP or TIFF. Don't use new, exotic formats because they offer a few percent better compression. People don't like to install plugins, some people use systems where they cannot install new plugins and there are always some systems (operating systems plus Web browsers) for which the plugin is not available.
• Use a spell-checker, and have someone check your texts for correct grammar. Some people are really turned off by those kinds of errors.
• There are guides on non-fiction writing. If you feel your texts lack certain qualities when it comes to style, you might want to consult those guides. It may pay off to hire someone to do the writing.

Navigation

• People won't come to the pages of your site by the front door /index.html most of the time. They will come from search engine query results, so make it easy to navigate to one of your main pages—people will then stay longer on your site. They expect some sort of menu at the top of the page. Make it easy to navigate!
• Don't use frames.
• Include contact information on a page of its own. Link to that page at the bottom of every page. Also offer an e-mail form on that page. People who are very inexperienced find that easier to use than a mail address (just a text field and a send button). Besides, on some systems a mail client may not be installed.
• Add a site map. Search engine spiders like it, people who are lost on your site will benefit from it. In addition, you can provide a special site map for Google in order to help them crawl your site more thoroughly.
• If your site has a rather hierarchical structure, use menus that let people pick any “higher” level in that hierarchy. Example:

  Main > Programming languages > Java > Compilers

  Each of the terms is supposed to be a link to the corresponding page.
• Include <link> elements in the <head> part of your HTML pages. More and more browsers can make use of it for navigation purposes. GUI browsers with support for it will provide some toolbar that allows for all sites using <link> to be browsed the same way. Learn more about the link element.

Basic technical rules

• Make sure that all your links work. There are online services and tools to accomplish this tedious task.
• Run your pages through a HTML (and if used: CSS) validator like the W3 validator.
• Restrict each page of your site to a certain size. People usually do not wait too long for a page. Note that the size includes all images and other objects (e.g. Java applets) that make up a page.
• Make sure that you use primarily small image files. If you have to have large pictures, add a small thumbnail version of it that links to the high-resolution picture. Add a note that says how many KB the large picture is.
• In order to save bandwidth usage, reuse images. They are loaded only once by a user's browser.
• Use proper HTTP response codes. When a site has moved or gone for good, there are specialized codes. Some people use 404 for every possible error.
• Don't optimize for some browser or resolution, and don't tell people to download another browser. They usually use their browser for a reason, they may have to use it (at work, in a library), or may have no idea what is meant by Download and install Internet Explorer 6. Visit the AnyBrowser campaign's site for more information.
• Make your pages degrade gracefully. A stylish user-friendly design doesn't have to look equally good on a 19" TFT with 1280 × 1024 pixels and 24 bit color depth and a tiny black and white cell phone display. But the basic information should also be accessible on the cell phone.

Layout

• This is not a course on web design, but you may want to follow some basic rules.
• Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for layout issues. Don't use visual markup like <font>, <b> or <center>. With CSS you can make layout changes at one place (the style sheet file) which will have an effect on the complete site. No need for textual search and replace and no redundant, bandwidth-consuming layout information in each HTML file.
• Try to stick to certain standards when it comes to arranging the elements of a page. Place a menu on top or the left side, a search text field also on top or the left side, a footer with contact information, sitemap etc. at the bottom. A three column layout is typical if a lot of information is to be presented at the same time.
• Don't set an absolute font size. There is the em unit, 1 em refers to normal size, as defined by the user agent.
• Don't mix too many fonts or colors, combine foreground and background colors with a certain contrast.
• Don't use music (.mid) or sampled sound (.wav, .mp3) on your pages unless that is a crucial part. Make people click to start the music, don't have it start automatically, it must be clear how to turn it off again.
• Do not use pop-up windows. Some people turn them off because pop-up windows often contain unwanted ads. Just make whatever you wanted to put in a pop-up window a normal <a href="...">...</a> link.
• Don't use blinking text or animated text (marquee) on your pages.
• Don't consume too much bandwidth with ads, large pictures, unnecessary Java applets or similar things.
• Always fill out the alt attributes of image elements (img) for people with image loading turned off, people with text browsers or people with slow connections who will not wait until everything is loaded. Specify width and height attributes so that the browser will know how large an image will become before it has loaded that image.
• Do not use images to replace text. It takes much more bandwidth, does not improve anything (it never looks much better), blind people can't read it and is not searchable anymore.
• Only links should be underlined, otherwise people will click on raw underlined text and become frustrated with it.
• Make sure that links somehow differ from other text. Best by underlining, or by color. Just make sure people can recognize links.
• Don't create pages that are too large. Split your content over several pages. If you do that, provide an abstract (short summary) and direct links to the parts on the first page.
• Structure your texts. Make use of headings, paragraphs, bullet lists and tables.
• Don't rely (too much) on Flash, JavaScript, Java or specific browsers, you only restrict your audience.
• Make sure that your site can also be read with very low and very high resolutions. PDA users (with low resolutions) should be able to get a page's meaning without having to scroll in all directions all the time. On the other hand, users with large monitors and high resolutions should be able to make use of that space, so do not artificially limit the page's dimensions.

Search engines

• For each page, find the most important keywords that describe that page. Use those keywords in the elements title and h1, in the description and keywords meta tags, and in the text itself, especially at the beginning of the page.
• Submit your site to the major search engines (links go directly to submission pages): Google, MSN, Yahoo! (registration required for Yahoo!).
• Write a one-sentence summary for each page and put it into the description meta element of the <head> section, e.g. like that: <meta name="description" content="A guide to Italian restaurants in New York City."> Some search engines present these one-liners in result pages, and you want people to get a good first impression.
• If you got thrown out of a search engine's index because you used “black-hat optimization techniques”, get your site in order (no more cloaking, specialized pages for crawlers and so on) and resubmit the site. Check out the Google reinclusion request HOWTO if Google kicked you out.
• Give the search engines time. Only submit the top page, the rest will be crawled automatically. As an alternative, submit your site map page that contains links to all pages (unless your site is really large).
• Also submit to the right categories of web directories like ODP and Yahoo.
• Do not spam search engines. They may notice it and you'll get banned.
• If you can afford it, spend money on paid inclusion in search engines and catalogs. Google Ad-Words can make a difference. This will work fast (for a price), but follow the other advice for long-term success.
• Don't go for quantity. You don't need to be included in 600 search engines, because the two or three biggest ones account for more than 95% of the traffic anyway. It's mostly Google. Most others simply don't matter (anymore / yet, this may change, but that's how it is now).
• If you have somewhat successful sites already, add a link to the new site you want to push.
• Learn more about website promotion.

Log files

• Get the log files (often named: access_log) of your site. These files contain valuable information: what pages were visited, from where did visitors come, what browsers are they using, etc. Log analysis tools help you to get that information from the logs.
• On the other hand, don't read too much into log files. Some products promise to tell you exactly how long people stayed on your site and other properties that simply cannot be retrieved with log files alone.
• What brower types were used to visit your page? Make sure your pages look as they are supposed to with these browsers. Your pages should be viewable with any browser, but those prefered by your visitors are even more important.
• Check the referer addresses. What pages are your visitors coming from? Make sure that the link to your page contains correct keywords (by writing to the author of that page).
• If they came from search engines, what keywords did they use?
• You can use all of that information to modify your pages in a way that they are even more attractive for your visitors and their queries. Make sure that the keywords used by most people are used in prominent places such as h1 and title elements. Remember: The terms that potential visitors would choose to describe your site are more important than the terms you yourself would come up with—even though your description may be more accurate.