Top 10 Steps To 10,000 Visitors Daily In A Year - Tips 7 and 6
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7. Architecture - Server - Unix or Windows? Unix is the favorite for many large websites, but Windows is just as popular and capable of delivering to Fortune 500 websites. Be sure to set up your website in a sensible manner, with folders named for your keyword terms. These folders should include relevant files and file names that relate to your chosen keyword term. Do not place your product information on yellow widgets in the folder for blue widgets. Get references from other websites on the server or other firms that have used the hosting company for dedicated server environments before committing yourself and possibly needing to move later.
Your site's navigation and ease of use are off the page factors that will also help you win or lose in the Internet-based business world. Your website needs clear and concise calls to action, to draw the visitor further into your site. A site with 100 visitors a day that all stay on the home page will be out of business before it has a chance to start.
Make sure to use a robots text file on your server to allow bots to crawl the pages of your website and keep them out of spider traps such as cgi-bins. If your website is dynamically generated use an Apache Rewrite; if using Unix or Isapi rewrite if hosting from Windows servers in order to modify your website's URL to be spider friendly. If you cannot place a robots text file on your server, make sure to include a robots conclusion in your head tags.
6. Site Design and Usability -- This is probably the single largest inhibitor to most sites ranking well on the search engines. Beautiful looking Web pages constructed from a couple hundred little images, or that nice Flash-based website, are very pleasing to the eye -- however, nether will do very well in most competitive categories in the search engines. The site with all the images will take forever to load, and the flash sites can't be crawled by the search spiders very well. Google loves speed! Their spiders measure how long it takes to return results for your search query, and it is usually done in fractions of a second. Your website must also load this quickly for your users.
Separate the content of your site from its presentation using cascading style sheets (CSS) and HTML where possible. These pages load super quick and are clean in their coding. By implementing these steps into your site design and architecture you move the content of your pages close to the top of your Web page, where the search engine spider bots do most of their reading. When considering what users like, simple wins over bells and whistles. Keep a simplistic approach to the design. Make sure to use lots of white space and definitive calls to action for your users.