How To Design Your Site For Massive Traffic

How-to get the most from website traffic

In order to tap into the power of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) elements, you first need to know what they are. In HTML, elements are bits of markup that tell a web browser to display or format parts of web pages. For example, <p> means paragraph, and <b> means bold – there are plenty more. These elements are used constantly when writing web pages. You should basically think of your HTML elements as the organizational and visual formatting of your HTML document.

By learning HTML, you can tap into the power of HTML elements and create a more interesting website as well as tipping off search engines as to what the most important information on your web page is. Many people starting out on the web just use ‘easy editors’ (also known as WYSIWYG for what you see is what you get) that show the page as it will appear, without ever looking at the code that the page is actually made from. This is fine if you intend to distribute and are only interested in the look of the page. Visually artistic people are often drawn to using WYSIWYG (pronounced wise-ee-wig) editors when creating their web pages because it allows them to see exactly what they are doing and frees them from the time consuming task of learning HTML.

If you want to sell one or two products, then you only need a static website with one or two pages. If you have a database with hundreds of products, however, then it would be very time-consuming to make each page manually – that’s when most people build a dynamic website.

Once you understand that all you’re doing is providing these simple structures, you realize the understated power of HTML. You see, once your HTML structure is in place with the appropriate markup, you can add CSS (Cascaded Style Sheets) for visual presentation, using a graphics design program. Good elements provide meaning and structure to your content, making it simple to add whatever design you want afterwards.

There are programs that will automatically produce static pages from a database, but it’s not usually the best move. Most designers to work with true dynamic technologies such as PHP, because of the amount of time it saves. Because search engine technology is increasing, the problems associated with dynamic URLs are decreasing day by day. It is still important to have constants, but you don’t necessarily have to have a huge list of static links throughout your site.

It can be much easier to put www.domain.com/article.php?num=1 than www.domain.com/articles/article1.html. A search engine can easily locate the prior so there is no real need for the latter. The only time that you will see trouble is if you have things like www.domain.com/article?num=1&userid=2424 where “userid” changes for each user. If this sort of thing happens you may run into trouble and should arrange so that the “userid” isn’t completely necessary (unless, of course, you want the page password protected).

Another tag that is very important is the <a> tag (or anchor tag). This tag is used to link to other web pages and it is invaluable to your web page because search engines like to see relevant links on your web site. Make sure that you only link to relevant sites, and while your at it, try to get a return link so that your page rank increases.

Other tags such as <b> (bold) tags and <i> (italics) tags will also help out. You can put these around your key words or less important subheadings. These won’t do quite as much for you, but they will definitely help to some extent and should be utilized when practical. The difference between your site and other sites of equal page rank and similar material will be how well you utilize HTML elements to exemplify your work. You can very easily modify your web site so that things stick out where they should. Solid knowledge of HTML is your best friend when you are performing SEO activities. Remember, “If you build it, they will come.”

You have to realize that search engines can’t use your search box, so the only way for them to access your dynamic information is if they follow a link to it some other way. The lesson to learn is that you need to give access to all your pages with plain, text links, somehow – you can’t just rely on searches to drive your whole site. What this means is that somewhere on your website you need to have a list of your products that has been organized by category – from here, you should be able to follow links to every page in your database. Once you’ve done this, the search engines can see your content.

Offering both search and category views improves your site’s navigation, as well as making it crawlable – your work will be useful to your visitors as well as the search engines, which is what SEO is all about.

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