Web page building for beginners 1
 by: Ted Dupuie

Making a web page is a simple job that can be done in minutes by anyone with no previous experience, so I will refrain from going in that direction as much as possible. The first thing an inexperienced webmaster should learn is search engine optimization, before ever making a page. The reason for this is simply because if they learn it after the page is made, it will cause them too much extra work that could have been avoided.

Keywords are the basis of all optimization, and all pages should be named for at least one keyword the webmaster expects people to use when trying to find their page. If your last name is Dupuie and you want relatives to find your family reunion website, then Dupuie will definitely be a part of the page name. If each page is about a different relative then their first name can serve the twofold purpose of helping in the search engine optimization (SEO) and making it easier to find the page on your hard-drive at home, if you are using a page builder such as Microsoft Front Page. Finding a particular page can be difficult when searching for a particular page to change a picture or just fixing a link.

So let’s stick with a website used as a family reunion announcement and catchall, to keep the examples easy to understand. Depending on the server being used for the website (you do not have to understand that statement yet) you may be able to name a web page dupuie-ted-cousin-1982-picture.html but you may only be able to use the name dupuie-ted.html because some servers do not allow as many long names as others. Mostly this is with free web servers that already have long extensions. I personally like the use of free web hosting, but many of them have pop-ups or banners that deter from a decent business site. I still use them because SEO is dependent on links that come back to your site from other sites.

The title of your pages should reflect whatever you want the keywords to find in another person’s search for your site. If your pages are each named dupuie-family-reunion-michigan and each was also numbered, then I would expect you to be hoping for people to be searching for a family reunion that is in Michigan and is for the Dupuie family. Note that there is a hyphen between each word so the robots can read each word individually instead of them seeing dupuieted or dupuie_ted and thinking it is one word that does not exist. Also note that everything is written in small caps. This is essential, as much as the home page must be named index.html even though any other page can be called whatever you like.

Links back to your site are counted by search engine robots and they are very important to where your pages end up in the database that they use. Some sites will never be put in the database, so can never be found by a searcher. I own www.saquoyah.com as well as www.homewriters.com and www.free-diet.biz and writing this article is not only good for the reader, but also for the writer as it gives one more link back to the sites.

Some family sites have thousands of pages with each page linking back to the index page, and they will be your competitor if their last name is also Dupuie. This could leave your site back to 685 on Google or Yahoo or even out of the first 1000 or so that they put up on a search. It is also important to note that when you link out to other sites, you lose favor with the robots. What you want is many incoming links, and very little outgoing links.

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