Creating
your affiliate website.
How
to build a search engine friendly site in a few minutes.
For
this part I'm going to assume you have never built a website
before, and start from scratch. If you know how to build websites
you may want to skip this section.
There
are several major software application to help you build a
website simply and efficiantly. The most widely used and well
known are dreamweaver and frontpage. I personally have used
both, but prefer dreamweaver for more control over my projects.
If you use frontpage you also may have to get frontpage extensions
installed on your hosts webserver. You can build sites in
notepad or any text editor, but this isn't adviseable for
a complete novice with no html skills. For the sake of this
tutorial I'm going to use dreamweaver mx. If you are serious
about creating websites, you really should buy this software.
Its the industry standard and very easy to use, even for someone
with no previous knowledge. You can easily create templates
for fast page creation, and format your pages (text styles,
alignment etc) in the same easy way as using microsoft desktop
packages such as Word.
Setting
up your affiliate website:
Within
dreamweaver, on the righthand side is a pane named 'files'
click on the site tab, and within the menu underneath select
the 'site' menu and select 'create new site'
Type
your site name in the box (eg: affiliateschool)
In
host directory, type the location you want to store the site
locally on your computer (eg: c:\dreamweaversites\affiliateschool
)
Leave
images folder blank for now.
For
the http address put the domain (eg: www.affiliateschool.co.uk)
Then
click on remote info, and change access to 'FTP'
Change
FTP Host to your domain (eg: www.affiliateschool.co.uk)
For
host directory, enter the folder on your webserver where your
files are to be stored, generally this is /public_html/
Enter
the login name and password you setup with your webhost to
access your domain, and click test connection. Hopefully it
will say connected successfully and your ready to go! If not
repeat the above steps and ensure you are using the correct
login and password, and the host directory is correct (check
with your webhost)
Now
we are ready to build a basic search engine friendly affiliate
website.
I
personally have many affiliate websites, some are incredibly
basic whilst others are quite complicated using almost completely
CSS for design and layout. If this is your first foray into
the affiliate world I would suggest making it as basic as
possible. There was a time when there were advantages to be
had by using CSS to place sections of the webpage at the top
of the code and other things like this, but these seem to
have lost weight in Google, although I will go over this in
a later peice. What we want to do, is make the website easy
to navigate from a visitors point of view, and easy to read
from a search engines point of view. Search engines send small
programs called 'spiders' around the internet following links
and taking information from each website to calculate your
ranking and placement. We want to make the website as 'googlebot'
friendly as possible.
Before
we start, some things to consider are:
We
want to include your major keyword phrase close to the top
and bottom of the website. This generally helps. It should
be used in context throughout the page, but no more than about
4 or 5 % of all the text on the page. (this is referred to
as keyword density) If over used you could be given a penalty
by the search engines for 'spamming' (over SEO - Search Engine
Optimisation)
If
possible we want to include your keyword phrase in italics,
bold and heading tags, but only if this fits the page design.
Again, too much of this could cost you with a penalty, so
use them sparingly, perhaps only once in bold and once in
italics. As for headings (the tags used in the HTML code H1
H2 etc, used with the properties box at the bottom of the
page in dreamweaver under the 'format' drop down. I have had
as much success with or without Heading tags, and I don't
believe they carry as much weight as they used to. (it seems
google is trying to make it very hard to optimise your website)
so I would suggest just using a H1 tag as the title of your
page (which should include your keyphrase).
OK,
so lets get on to actually creating the template. Their are
many different ways and styles, I'll help you create a basic
one, then you can play with dreamweaver and build something
decent!
We
will make our basic template using tables. note - Its
generally not a good idea to have too many tables nested inside
each other, some spiders won't go past the first four or five..
Start
by ensuring your new site is showing at the 'site' panel on
the left.
Click
on 'file' and 'new' on the top menu to open a blank webpage.
click
somewhere on the blank page and then go to 'insert' and 'table'
from in the top menu. In the popup box, make the rows 2 and
the columns 1 and the border 1. For width put 80%
Now
you have your basic layout, highlight the table on the page
(~it should already be highlighted, if not click on the edge
of it) and in the properties box at the bottom, change 'align'
to 'centre' to make the table fit centrally in the page.
Click
in the top cell (where we will put your logo) and in the properties
box, click on the 'Bg' square (background colour) and change
the colour to something darker. You really want to create
a small logo or title graphic for your website to be in this
cell at the top of every page. Do this in a graphics package,
any will do - or microsoft word, perhaps find a nice font
and color, ensure the background colour is the same as your
cell background and save it to your website directory as a
GIF file.
In
the cell, click 'insert' and 'picture' from the top menu,
and select your new logo. This should now appear in the top
cell. (You may need to play around and try a few to make it
look half decent.) It should now be starting to take shape.
When your logo is there, click on it and in the properties
box, type your keyphrase into the 'alt' box. This is the writing
when someone hovers there mouse over the graphic, or someone
with a text only browser will see. It will also be beneficial
to help you get ranked, as the search engines use 'alt text'
as factors in their algorithm's.
Now
click in the lower cell in your table. Press return a couple
of times to add a bit of space to work. move the cursor to
the top part of the cell and insert a table with one row and
one column.This will be our navigation bar. In here we want
things like 'contact us' and 'link partners'. to add these
links, click in this cell and type them in, seperated by a
space and a character like '|' or '>' and align them to
the left if they aren't already. Feel free to change the background
colour and text colour to make the navigation bar fit in with
your colour scheme. Colours don't seem to have any effect
on ranking, the only thing to watch out for is having text
the same or nearly same colour as the background colour. SE's
can see this as spamming and hidden text and again could penalise
you. Now highlight the 'contact us' text by clicking and dragging
the mouse over it. Now in the properties box at the bottom
in the link field type:
mailto:webmaster@affiliateschool.co.uk
replacing
webmaster@affiliateschool.co.uk with your email address. When
someone clicks on this link it will open up a new email to
you for them to fill in and send.
Now
highlight the 'partners page' text and in the link field in
the properties box type:
/partners.htm
This
will now link to a page in your website called partners.htm
that we will create in a minute.
You
will notice that the link text becomes blue. This is the default
and we will leave it like this for now, although it is easy
to change with CSS and I'll explain this later.
Now
click in the lower cell in your table. In this cell, insert
another table with no border and one row and two columns.
Make the first column a width of 150 by highlighting it and
using the properties. This can be our menu bar and in here
we will link to the most important pages of our website.
Click
in the large main area of your table, this is an area we want
to be able to edit in every page, this can be the main content
area. click on the template tab in the upper menu, and click
on the 3rd icon from the left, when your mouse is over it,
it will say 'editable region'. Type in a name to register
this editable region eg: content.
Now
you can save this file as a template from the file menu.
Now
you can edit the template every time you want to change all
the pages in your website (adding links to the menu bar on
the left.) You may want to add another 1 row 1 column table
into the content area, centred with a width of about 90% to
keep any text away from the edges. In the menu area you can
add links to important pages using their keywords. For example,
for a tennis racket website you may want things like: adidas
tennis rackets, and 'wooden tennis rackets' linking to a page
you create about wooden tennis rackets.. (does anybody still
use them? ) but you get the idea. This is for the internal
linking structure.
The
linking structure. |
