I’ve been keeping close tabs on a few of my major sites lately and I stumbled across something very interesting about my sitemaps, it’s the most viewed page on my sites.

I decided to try a little experiment, I fed google and yahoo my sitemap url and you would not believe the outcome. In a very short time my indexed pages in both search engines had more than doubled!

Why do I want more indexed pages?

Think of it this way, the more pages you have indexed in search engines, the more doors there are leading into your site.

Submit your sitemaps, open your doors and wait for the traffic to walk right in.

With the latest craze of text links we have done a little bit of work and created a few really great sites with keyword text links available.

If you’re going to purchase links its best to buy links on sites of the same topic as your own site. We currently have a few available for you. Home Theater, Car Rentals, Pets and Music are a few of the content sites ready for links.

The greatest part about  these new sites is you can get your very own inbound keyword text link for $1.00 or $2.00!

Enjoy!

Can you believe we are at lesson three already?

By now you should have a HTML document with some nicely formated text.

In this lesson we will learn how to add images and links.

First lets talk about hypertext linking to another file. In order to make this work we need the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the file you would like to make a link to. We can’t link to something if we dont know where it is.

Now lets add a link to this site:

Example:

This is a great place to learn HTML

Code:

This is a great place to <a href=”http://www.stcfx.com“>learn HTML</a>

Now when someone clicks on the words learn HTML they will be taken to this site.

Ok now we will learn how to add a link within the same document. This is useful if you have a large document and would like to add links to different parts of it to help users get around.

Example:

This is my document, and this is my text. Now lets jump to another part of my document.

This is more text in my document.

This is where we end up.

Code: 

This is my document, and this is my text. Now lets <a hre=”#jump”>jump</a> to another part of my document.

This is more text in my document.

<a name=”jump”>This is where we end up.</a>

Still with me? Awesome!

Lets add some images. We need some information before we do this; URL of image, hieght and width of image.

Code:

<img src=http://mysite/location/of/my-image.gif height=”200″ width=”200″ alt=”This is my image”>

Looking Good!

Next lesson we will work on color and placement.

Inbound links  are a very important part of PageRank. Every inbound link you have coming to your site scores you points with Google*.

How can you increase your sites inbound link? Simple submit, submit and yes submit.

If you want to get a high pr you are going to have to work for it. You need to give directories, sites and search engines your site link.

You cannot just trade a few links and think that you have done enough, this process takes time.

You can make this go a little faster and a bit less painful by hiring someone to do a mass submission. This is when they take your site and submit the heck out of it for you.

Either way if you want to get in google’s PR good books, inbound links are a great place to start.

In lesson one we learned how to create and set up our basic html document.

Now in lesson two I will show you how to format your page text. Rather than plain old text like this, I will show you how to make your text a bit more attractive.

If you would like to keep your text exactly how you have typed it, you can use whats called a pre-formatted text tag. This will tell the browser to not change your text at all.

The pre-formatted text tags look like this:

<pre></pre>

Now we can also make our text appear bold by using the bold text tags.

<b></b>

If you’d like your text to show as italic text you would use the following:

<i></i>

Moving on now to header tags. These tags are of great use when writing blogs or articles.

As you can see header tags go from 1 being the largest to 6 being the smallest.

Header One

 <h1></h1>

Header Two

 <h2></h2>

Header Three

 <h3></h3>

Header Four

 <h4></h4>

Header Five

 <h5></h5>

Header Six

 <h6></h6>

Now lets look at the paragraph tags. You will use these tags when writing a paragraph of text. The paragraph tags look like this:

<p></p>

If you would like to skip a line in your document you will use what is called a line break. Now the line break tag uses only one tag not an open and close tag. When you want to skip a line in your document you will simply type the following:

<br>

If you would like to separate your documents contents with a line, you will use whats called a horizontal rule. This tag also uses only one tag.

<hr>

If you are still with me you are doing great!

Now from time to time you may like to use a list. There are a few options when it comes to lists.

First we have the ordered (numbered) list:

1. Item One
2. Item Two
3. Item Three

<ol>
 <li>Item One</li>
 <li>Item Two</li>
 <li>Item Three</li>
</ol>

Next we have the unordered list:

• Item One
• Item Two
• Item Three

<ul>
 <li>Item One</li>
 <li>Item Two</li>
 <li>Item Three</li>
</ul>

And thirdly we have whats called a definition list:

HTML

HTML stands for hyper text markup language.

TAGS 

Tags are used within html to tell the browser how to display the documents contents.

<dl>
<dt>HTML </dt>
<dd>HTML stands for hyper text markup language. </dd>
<dt>TAGS  </dt>
<dd>Tags are used within html to tell the browser how to display the documents contents.</dd>
</dl>

The very first thing you need to know about HTML is what HTML actually means.

H - Hyper
T - Text
M - Markup
L - Language

Now that  we know what we are dealing with, we can begin.

HTML is based on tags. We have open tags <x> and close tags </x>.

The very first tag in your HTML document is the HTML tag. This tells a browser what type of document it is and how to read it.

The HTML open and close tags look like this:

<html></html>

Next are the HEAD tags, they look like this:

<head></head>

Followed by the TITLE tags:

<title></title>

And the very important BODY tags:

<body></body>

Now we will put tags together to show and example of a basic html document:

<html>

<head>

<title>My Page Title</title>

</head>

<body>

My Page Contents Go Here

</body>

</html>

1. Up-time - This is one of the most important parts of your sites page ranking, if your site isn’t up then it isn’t on the web, if it isn’t on the web then you can’t get hits so invest some time into researching for a reliable host!
2. Simplicity - To gain a high search engine ranking simplicity is key, keep pages low on images and fast loading. As long as your site is appealing to the eye visitors won’t care if it has the latest fandango flash effects. All they want is the product!
3. The Domain Name - Your domain name should be easy to remember, spell and say! When someone types in STCFX on Google for example Google will more than likely show stcfx.com and other extensions before other domains. If your site is about cars then name it something like hot-cars.com!
4. Keep directory’s simple - When spidering sites search engines don’t want to be going more than three directories deep for content, they want things nearest to the root as possible, keep things organised but not too organised!
5. Directories and file names - They should contain keywords about their content, if your site is about retro cars, then name your document something like retro-cars.html
6. Small sites - Keep the size of your sites small, the smaller they are the better, makes search engines life a hell of a lot easier and for the poor people on 56k modems it brightens their day!
7. Static URL’s - Search engines like static URL’s such as http://www.stcfx.com/some-content.html than having to crawl dynamic links such as http://www.stcfx.com/find.php?some=content . Search engines will crawl dynamic links but you are likely to rank higher with static URL’s.
8. Hyphens - They are your friend, most search engines parse a hyphen as a space, and for example lots-of-content would appear to them as lots of content. But if you use an underscore it would appear as lotsofcontent which do you prefer!
9. Navigation - How do you expect visitors to visit the other pages on your site without a navigation bar! There needs to be one on every page with at least one link to the all important home page!
10. Sitemaps - Include sitemaps, it’s a search engines dream to have one page with links to all major parts of your sites! Include the link on at least the homepage and name it something like sitemap.html or site-map.html.
11. META Descriptions - Whoever said they were dead! Sure they don’t help much with your ranking but some search engines use the content to show under your sites title, so make sure to include a rich, descriptive sentence! Make it no more than 150 words.
12. Title Tag - This can be a very short overview or your site or just the title. It’s recommended you have no more than 7-10 words.
13. META Keywords - Now these are really dead, but using these will help you remember what keywords you were targeting when you come back to it, try to keep no more than 20 keywords and use spaces not commas!
14. Robot META Tags - Ok this isn’t essential but it helps keep search engines out of private things. Use this guide to help you Robots META Tag .
15. Heading Tags - These are the things such as <h1>, <h2> all the way to <h6>, you should use them in the right order and if they are too big use css to resize them. Also keep in mind that search engines prefer <h1> for example, then text and graphics and the next header.
16. Title Attribute - This should be used primarily on links, with a brief description of where the link will take you, such as “<a href=”page.html” title=”This page contains links to other pages.”>” This will improve accessibility/usability.
17. Alt Tag - Every image should have this tag; it should basically be a rich description of what the image depicts. This is also another accessibility/usability tool.
18. Content - Your site should definitely have more text than code! Content is key so keep the code down and the text up!
19. Anchor Text - This is the text used to link a page, this will increase SERP performance greatly if used!
20. Text Links - Search engines can’t read images so use text links wherever you can, image links are a no no. If you must use them make sure you use the alt text tag.
21. Content Galore - In my opinion the best way for better search engine ranking is content. Lots and lots of original content will greatly improve your sites ranking!
22. Constant Updates - Sites that are constantly updated will give search engines a reason to come back time and time again, so make it a constantly updating, developing site!
23. Build it first! - Don’t have a construction page, then slowly upload bit by bit of your site, build it and upload it is the best way to get in a search engines good books!
24. Use a robots.txt file - Only a few search engines at the moment use this, but many are starting to look for it. This basically tells the crawler what not and what to look in, more details can be found here robots.txt .
25. Validation - Stick to the rules for better rankings! Adhere to the W3C standards and you can’t go wrong, the code will work on all browsers and search engines will be more likely to take your code seriously.
26. Analyze Traffic - Make sure you know what traffic your getting and where from. Analyze log files, this will help you optimize your sites more!
27. NO Frames - Frames are bad! real bad!
28. Link Popularity - The more inbound relative links your website has the better its search engine ranking. Look for link exchanges!
29. NO Broken Links - Why link to something that’s not there, really what is the point!
30. NO Tricks - If it doesn’t help the user, don’t have it!

Welcome to STCFX

 We are currently setting up a few new additions so please hang tight.