People only find your website when it is visible to them. Building backlinks will help in this. Here are 3 ways to build your backlinks, and improve your Page Rank:

1) Article Directories

Articles directories may not a favorite form of traffic generation for most marketers. But it is a great way to start. It may take more time and work, and consistency. It needs manual work. However, why should you start with this?

Writing your own article is free. It can be used to promote yourself. Visitors feel that you are knowledgeable in your field. If you keep providing valuable information in the free way, this will lead your visitors to take action such making a purchase to your product or subscribe in your list.

You may need hundreds of articles to prove you are credible. What you need to remember is, you are doing article marketing to popularize your website. This will improve your Page Rank and bring the visitors to your website through search engines or article directories themselves.

Your actions can be: find at top 5 article directory and start submitting your articles on a weekly basis. And make a link back to your website from each article you submit.

2) Social Media

Social media is a popular technique in Internet marketing because it brings you to your visitors, rather than waiting your visitors to find you through search engines.

From the visitors’ perspective, social media adds the human element to their researches rather than computer generated information from search engine.

For marketers’s perspective, social media let you present your information directly to your visitors in a socializing environment. This make them feel a sense of personal sharing among friends and personal experiences.

3) Forum Marketing

Forum is a big chat room where people ask and answer to each others. This is a nice place to get free traffic. All you need to do is to find a question thread that is popular and reply to this thread. Just answer in short and precise manner, and at the end of the reply, you just add “for more information read my article” followed by a link to your article.

Do not try to promote or sell product in forum thread. Just promote your article that contains free and valuable information, and at the end of your article is the link to your website.

From the 3 ways above, just choose one way to follow first. After you master one, you can try and master another, this will surely help you to get more backlinks to your website as well as improve your Page Rank.

Here are 7 ideas to start writing your own articles:

1) Good Articles Follow Good Article Structure

If you just follow good article structure, you will be able to write good article. When you search the article websites, you will see most of articles follow a similar format. Take time to understand this format or skeleton of article. When you need to write an article, you just fill the skeleton with some contents, and you will get a good article.

2) Original Ideas Are Gone

There are thousands of thousand writers on the Internet, the new ideas that you think of, are already written by others. The only difference that you can make is to present it in a new way. You may use the right words and explain it well to a particular audience. What you need to do is to read several articles about a specific topic that you inspire about, and then write it down in a new way.

3) Write Like You Speak

When you write an article, you should use a conversational style in your writing, this will build a good relationship with your readers. Show your sense of humor whenever you can. It is your original voice in your articles.

4) Read Article Content Aloud

After you finish the first draft of your article, you should read it aloud, and you will find out words that make you pause or hesitate. After you eliminate those words, you will get an article of your own personal style.

5) Use Visualization

You can use your visualization for writing article. For example, if someone else in your industry, ask you for an advice, what would you tell him/her? So when you start writing your article, visualize that you are speaking to that person or friend. If you follow this way, you will get an article that will fill with intelligent and conversational tone.

6) Proofread Article Content

You can proofread it by yourself, or you can find someone else to proofread it for you. This will help you from having wrong spelling and grammar in your article.

7) Avoid Over-Analyze

If you over-analyze what to write in your article, you many find yourself spending hours in front of computer screen, but never get an article done. This is what we known as “analysis paralysis”. Just get out of your mind, and start writing your article. Remember that, you can always edit it later.

If you follow the above ideas, you will start writing your own articles in no time, and have good articles filled with your personal and conversational tone, that are right to your audience.

1) Make Article Title Interesting

Title is one important aspect of your article. Title will attract reader’s attention if it is interesting enough. A good title indicates that it has good content inside it. Furthermore, title of article will serve as a heading for your article in search engine result, or a heading for your RSS feed. For this reason, you should make your title as good as you can. The good article is unique and grabbing reader’s attention.

2) Make Article Content Matches Article Title

The content in your article should match your article title. Whatever your article title promises to offer, your content should be about it. Don’t disappoint your readers when they have a chance to take a look at your article. Let your readers get the information they want from your article.

3) Proofread Article Content

Read your article again and again to check for wrong spelling and grammar. Every word should be used in proper usage. Readers come to read your article because they want to get information. Wrong grammar or wrong spelling may puzzle them. So, you should proofread and edit your article carefully before you publish it.

4) Be Consistent In Article Content

When you write an article content, you need to focus on the same topic from the beginning till the end of the article. You should avoid leaving your reader hanging.

5) Create Original Article Content

You may read the articles of other writers to get ideas. But you should not duplicate it, or copy and paste exactly the same. You articles are about your honesty and good reputation. So, the rule is to always write the article that is unique yours. Be original by your own style.

6) Have Clear Content Structure

Your readers can understand your articles easily if you have clear content structure, that will not confuse your readers. You may consider using: colon, punctuation mark, number list, bullet list, etc. to make your article clearly organized.

By following the above guideline, you will write good articles as well as provide good information for your readers, and you will earn the trust from your readers. This will bring traffic to your websites and you can also monetize from your article writing effort.

Here is a list of common search engine optimization terms to help you understand how to optimize your website.

301 Redirect – This is a way to redirect the visitor from old page to a new one. For example, you change file name or move around of old page, so you need to use 301 redirect, to safely redirect people to new page, in case they use old link to see your old page.

Affiliate Marketing – This refers to a practice that advertisers will pay affiliate for driving traffic to their website. When that traffic converted into a sales or a lead, the affiliate will get the commission from advertisers or product owners.

AJAX – This is a short word for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is the way to design a webpage that is more end-user friendly and it can respond more quickly when the user requests the data, for example, Google Maps.

ALT Text or ALT Tag or ALT Attribute – This refers to a description for your image in your webpage. Humans can recognize image as we see, but search engine can read image only through ALT text of image. Make sure you put ALT tag to images whenever possible.

Anchor Text – This refers to the visible text for a hyperlink. For example: <a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/”>This is the anchor text</a>

B2B – This is a short word for Business To Business. It refers to the transaction of goods or services between businesses.

B2C – This is a short word for Business To Consumer. It refers to the transaction of goods or services directly to the end consumer.

Blog - This can be a part of website, or it can be a website of itself.

Blog is a place where you can publish contents. The contents can be opinions on industry/company, events, photos, videos, etc. Every time you post an article on your blog, it will become a webpage that the search engine sees it, and then there is an opportunity that people will find your website. The best thing to do is to have blog on your own domain name.

Bookmark – This refers to the link to a website or webpage, that you saved it in your web browser or computer for later reference.

Bot, Robot, or Spider – This refers to a computer program/script that will browse the Internet and collect information about websites.

Conversion Form – This refers to a form in which you collect information such as first name and email address from your site visitor. This form converts from traffic to lead which you can follow up later.

CPA – This is a short word for Cost Per Acquisition. It refers to the way that advertisers will pay to an affiliate for driving traffic to their website, and the visitor did a particular action, for example, made a purchase or signed up as as lead.

CSS – This is short word for Cascading Style Sheets. It a code that defines how different elements of your site will look like. For example, header, links, body text, list, etc.

CTA – This is a short word for Content Targeted Advertising. It refers to the placement of relevant PPC ads on content websites, not on search engines.

CTR – This is a short word for Click Through Rate. It refers to a ratio of clicks per impressions in a PPC campaign.

Dynamic Website – This refers to a website has no fixed contents. Its contents/pages will be shown based on user-selected activities or program-driven.

Directory – This refers to a directory of website. It is similar to our directory books for people and phone numbers.

When you submit your website to a directory, you will get an inbound link, and a chance for people see your link and come to your website. The most popular directories are Dmoz and Yahoo Directory.

Domain – This is a web address for your website. For example: www.yourwebsite.com.

When you register for your domain name, you should register for several years. Search engine rankings like websites with longer registration, because it shows your commitments to your website.

Doorway Page or Gateway Page – This refers a page that is designed and optimized to target one specific keyword, and then drive traffic to another page.

This page is written especially for search engine to rank high for specific keyword. Using doorway pages is a violation to most search engines’ Term of Service. Search engines may ban your website for this reason.

FFA – This is a short word for Free For All.

It refers to a website that post lists of unrelated links to another websites and everyone else. This is considered useless because search engines minimize its importance in ranking website.

HTML – This is a short word of HyperText Markup Language.

It refers to the code part of your website that search engines read. You should keep your HTML clean as you can, because search engines can read your website easily and often. You can do it by put your code related to layout in your CSS instead of in your HTML.

Inbound Link or Back Link – This refers to a link from one site into another. For example, a website with high Page Rank links to your website, this inbound link will improve your SEO.

Indexed Pages – This refers to the webpages of your website that are stored/listed by search engines.

For example, you have 5,000 indexed pages in Google, and when a visit does a search in Google (related to your website), they will see one or more pages of your website in Google Search Result.

Keyword – This refers to a word that a user/web visitor enters in search box of search engine. And you should optimize each page of your website, with a goal of getting visitors who do a search for specific keywords.

Keyword Density – This refers to how often a keyword or keyword phrase is used on a particular webpage.

Keyword Stuffing – This refers to the practice of adding excessive keywords to a webpage. This looks like spam, and there is no reason to do this.

Landing Page – This refers to a content-rich webpage aimed toward a particular topic, product or conversion goal.

Link Farm – This refers to a group of highly interlinked websites for the purposes of increasing link popularity. Using a link farm is a violation to most search engines’ Term of Service. Search engines may ban your website for this reason.

Long Tail Keyword – This refers to a rarely used keyword. This keyword may consists of 4 or 5 words putting together.

Most common keywords are very competitive today, and it is hard to rank high for them in the search result. As a result, small business owner should focus on targeting long tail keywords, because it is less competitive, and they have a chance to rank high for those long tail keywords.

LSI – This is a short word for Latent Semantic Indexing.

It refers to an algorithm used by Google to determine how words are related to each other in the context of a webpage.

Meta Data or Meta Tag – This refers to the data (at the top of your HTML) that tells search engines what your website is about.

Mirror – This refers to make a nearly identical duplicate website (or webpage).

It is used in an effort to target different keywords using this mirror page. Using a mirror page is a violation to most search engines’ Term of Service. Search engines may ban your website for this reason.

Nofollow Link – This refers to a link from one website to another, but it does not pass SEO credit or score to that website.

When you link to internal pages in your website, you should use follow link. But you can use nofollow link when you want to link to external page that you do not want to endorse about.

Organic Search – This refers to the search result that comes up naturally when you do a search in a search engine, based on its indexing within the search engine.

Page Title – This refers to a title that you give to your webpage.

This title will be seen at the top of your browser window. The rule of thumb is your page title should have related keywords in it. And the keywords at beginning of page title are highly weighted than keywords at the end.

Page Rank – This refers to a number from 0 to 10, which assigned by Google.

It indicate how good your overall SEO is. It is often known as Toolbar Page Rank.

PPC – This is a short word for Pay Per Click.

It is an advertising scheme, where an advertiser puts an ad (advertisement) in an advertising venue, and the advertiser will pay that venue each time a visitor clicks on his/her ad. For example, Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, etc.

Paid Link Building – This refers to the websites who are willing to link back to your website if you pay them a fee. You do this in order to boost your rankings in the search engines.

Reciprocal Link – This is a practice of placing link back to each other. For example, website A links to website B, and website B links back to website A.

robots.txt – This refers to a text file which tells the search engine’s spider to read the specific parts of a website as you set it in robots.txt file.

RSS Feed – RSS is short word for Really Simple Syndication.

It is that way that you get updates for new content from a web source, blogs, or news websites. When you set up an RSS feed on your blog or website, it will help your followers stay updated whenever you add new content.

Search Engine – This refers to a website whose function is to help users find webpages on any given searched topic, for example, Google.com, Yahoo.com, Bing.com, etc.

SERP – This is a short word for Search Engine Results Page/Positioning. It is the organic search results for a given query (excluding paid listings).

Social Media – This refers to online media that created by and shared among individuals.

For example of popular social media websites are Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. You should have the links to your website in social media, because those links now also appear in search engines.

Traffic – This refers to the visitors that come to visit your site.

Traffic Rank – This refers to the ranking of how much traffic your site gets compared to all other websites. You may check your traffic rank on Alexa.

URL – This is a short word for Uniform Resource Locator.

It refers to the web address of a page on your site. For example: www.yourwebsite.com/about

Advantages of Dedicated Web Hosting:

1) Dedicated Resources – When you use a dedicated server, you can store all your data such as website files, database, images, videos, etc.

2) Fast Data Transfer – As you use dedicated hosting, you have sufficient bandwidth you intend for your websites. You will not experience of not enough bandwidth like shared hosting or virtual private server.

3) Root/Administrator Access – You can install your own applications or scripts in dedicated server as you required for your business websites. And you need not shared features with other users, as in the case of shared hosting.

4) Control Panel – As you have control over the dedicated server, you can choose how you add functionality to your control panel.

5) Security – As you use dedicated server, you do not share it with other webmasters, it actually reduce security thread.

6) Priority Support – As you are the highest paying customer for them, you will get priority support for your dedicated server.

Disadvantages of Dedicated Web Hosting:

1) Higher Cost – To use a dedicated server, you need to invest many times more than when you use shared hosting or other hosting service.

2) Necessary Knowledge – As dedicated server is your own server, you need to be familiar with operating system and dedicated server terms and know what you are doing with your dedicated server. You also need to keep it up-to-date and secure, and ensure that it was not gained access or exploited by hacker or malicious attacks.

Conclusion

If your website get many visitors per day, and you want to guarantee a reliable and stable service for your visitors, dedicated server hosting is the best choice.

There are both advantages and disadvantages of shared hosting, let us see below:

Advantages of Shared Hosting

1) Shared Hosting is Low Cost

Shared hosting means we share server space (with other users who are also using it); as a result, the hosting provider can provide all web hosting users at cheaper price. Nowadays, we can get web hosting for less than $10 per month and get all of the features for running our online businesses.

2) Shared Hosting is User-Friendly

We don’t need to have knowledge about managing the server. The hosting provider will maintain the server and hardware in the data center for us. All we need is already available in the Control Panel that provided by the web hosting provider. Even the most technically challenged people can use that Control Panel to easily build their websites.

Disadvantages of Shared Hosting

1) Unexpected System Crushes

As we share one server space with other thousands of users (websites), it is susceptible to crush. Even we host with respectable hosting provider that uses high technology such as load balancing, we will still experience the system crush at some point. For example, sometimes, we open our website, and we see error page instead of our webpage. And a few minutes later, we see our webpage back, this happened when we experience the system crush in the server.

2) Webpages Loads Slowly

When we use shared hosting, we will experience performance issues. For example, we get an average traffic coming to our website, and one user who shares the same hosting server with us, has a sudden burst of traffic coming to his website. As a result, other websites will have a lagging problem. Our webpages may load very slowly or take forever to load.

3) Security Isn’t Guaranteed

As we share hosting with others, someone may misuse it and creates a chaos on the server. And there is a case that we might share hosting with someone who can compromise other websites in the same hosting server. And all websites may crush without us having any clue.

We can conclude that the shared hosting environment is vulnerable to many conditions. However, with a little research, we can find a reliable shared hosting provider with knowledge and technology to ensure that only few issues will happen.

1. Open Source Software

WordPress is free. We can use it for personal or commercial website without paying a penny for this script. On the Internet, there are also other blogging scripts that are similar to WordPress, but they come with difficult interface and we have to pay the yearly license fee (or other fee) to use them.

2. User-Friendly Installation and Using

We don’t need to be an expert of computer knowledge to use WordPress. Currently, most web hosting companies offer one-click installation of WordPress (from the hosting control panel). If we take a few minutes to view the tutorials, we can do it.

Installing WordPress is easy, and using it is also easy. It is easy like we use web email (i.e. Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail). For example, to create a new web page or a new post for our website:

• First, click on “Add New” under “Post” menu (like we click on “Compose” new email button)
• Then, put the title for the article (like we put Subject for our email)
• Next, write the body of the article (like we write our email message)
• Last, click on “Publish” button (like we click on “Sent” email button)

Furthermore, there are a lot of tutorials about how to use WordPress on the Internet. Just go to search engine, we can search for the beginner guides to WordPress.

3. Easy to Upgrade to Next Version

Now, WordPress comes with one-click upgrade feature from preview version to next version.

4. Comes With Many Supported Themes

It is easy to find the WordPress theme that is right for our website. It has a huge and free collection of WordPress themes for us to use. If we want ever better themes, we can also go for the premium WordPress themes, that are also low cost. If we are good at designing, we can custom our own themes.

5. Comes with Many Plugins

There are many open source plugins to extend the possibilities of WordPress. Just search for any plugins that we want, after we find it, we can install it with one-click installation.

6. Comes with Standard Web Compliance

This means every bit of WordPress code is in full compliance with the standard of W3C. It is important for compatibility of today’s browsers and compatibility of other tools.

7. Comes with Robust Spam Protection

Akismet is a great spam protection came ready with the installation of WordPress. It use integrated blacklist and open proxy checker to block comment spam on our blog. Beside this, WordPress also has many plugins of this functionality.

8. Comes with Full User Registration

If we want, we can allow people to register, and maintain their profiles and leave only authenticated comments. We can also close comment for non-registered users. We can also hide post from lower level users from viewing by adding a plugin of this functionality.

9. Search Engines and Blog Communication

WordPress comes with supported function of Trackback and Pingback standard. This will notified search engines and other top blogging service every time we publish a new post.

There are more reasons to use WordPress, especially, with the extended plugins of WordPress.

One more thing, WordPress is not only use for blog, but it can also use for other website purpose such as:

• Content Management Website
• Gallery or Video Collection Website
• Portfolio Website
• Rating Website
• Shopping Store
• etc.

There are two options: The first option is to set up a server machine and take it physically to the location of colocation provider. Then we install this machine in their rack. And they will provide us an IP address, bandwidth, power to our server. And we can access this server like we access from other web hosting providers. The second option is we rent a server machine from colocation provider.

Advantages of Colocation Hosting

1. We get more bandwidth.

2. We have better outrage protection and better security. Because the server is stored in better environment.

3. We own the server machine, if we feel that it is too slow or out of memory, we can upgrade it.

4. We own the server software. We can install any software we want in it.

5. The server is still running, even if we move office to new location.

6. Most colocation providers offer a maintenance service to our server at extra cost, if we need it.

Disadvantages of Colocation

1. It may be hard to find a colocation provider that is near our office or home. If it is near, we are easy to maintain and upgrade our server when we need to. And colocation provider is only easy to find in big city with large network hub.

2. It is more expensive than standard web hosting options. For example, when we need to upgrade, we need to buy hardware and software, and install them.

3. It may take hours between our office location to location of colocation provider whenever we want to physically access our server.

4. If we have to move office to new location out of colocation provider’s area, we need to move our server to new colocation provider or we just pay an extra cost for a server maintenance service.

5. The price will be fluctuated from month to month, based on monthly data transfer through the server.

Who Should Go for Colocation Hosting?

It can be difficult to answer this question. However, for individual or small business owner, they should go for standard hosting plans. For big corporations that need more resource, more bandwidth, and more control, they can go for colocation hosting.

Web hosting is where you put your web pages as well as your website on the Internet, so that everyone around the world can view it.

There are many types of web hosting:

1. Free Web Hosting
2. Standard Web Hosting
3. Shared Hosting
4. Dedicated Hosting
5. Virtual Private Server Hosting
6. Colocation Hosting

Free web hosting seems to be a good option because it is free. But there are many disadvantages of free hosting like: limit space, limit bandwidth, few features, running required ads on your site, etc. Free hosting should only use for testing purpose or for unimportant or personal pages.

Step 2 – Get a Domain Name

Not every site needs to buy a domain name. If you choose a free web hosting, it also comes with free sub-domain name, for example, www.yourname.blogspot.com or www.yourname.wordpress.com, etc.

With your own domain name, it is shorter, it is easy to remember by your visitors, and it also gives a branding for your website. And the cost of owning a domain name is around $10 per year. Here are some resources about domain name:

• How to Choose A Domain Name
• How to Register A Domain Name
• 5 Ways to Protect Your Domain Name

Step 3 – Plan the Structure of Your Website

After you got a domain name, the next step is to decide the structure of your website. Here are some things you need to consider:

1. What type of website do you want to build? Is it information website? Is it news website? Is it reference website? Is it product website?

2. How about the navigation architecture of your website? How people will navigate through your website?

3. What type of content you want to create for your website? How many contents do you want to build?

4. How many categories do you want for all your contents?

Step 4 – Build Your Web Pages with HTML Editor

There are two options for you to create your web pages.

The first option is you create web pages on your computer first using HTML editor tool and then upload or publish them to your hosting (later in step 5).

The second option is you create your web pages directly online by using CMS (Content Management System) tool or blogging tools such as Joomla, WordPress, BlogSpot, LiveJournal, etc., and instantly publish them. It is easy to use CMS, if you can use email, it is likely that you can build a web page using CMS tool.

To build your web pages professionally, it is required you to know some of these knowledge:

1. Basic Designing Skill – This will help you organize your website outlook well, if you build it by yourself. You can buy website theme from other people, or just hire other people to design it for you.

2. Basic HTML Knowledge – This will help you build your web page or edit the page the way you want it. It is better to learn at least basic HTML, because it is easy to learn and available to use when needed. However, it is not required to learn, you can just use the HTML editor or CMS tool and it will write HTML code for you.

3. Learning HTML Editor – This will help you create or edit web pages, without knowing about HTML. The editors such as MacroMedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft Outlook, will write HTML code for you, all you need to use this editor.

4. CSS Knowledge – This will help you to change your website site outlook easily.

If you are serious about designing website by yourself, you need to learn all of them. If you just want to use CMS tool, it is not required to learn them. All you need is just take a short time to learn how to use the tool.

Step 5 – Publish Your Web Pages to Your Hosting

Publishing means getting or having your created pages and putting them into your web hosting.

If you build your website (web pages) using HTML editor on your computer (in step 4), then, you need to upload those web pages to hosting (in step 1). (However, if you build your website (web pages) using CMS such as WordPress or Joomla, etc., you already published the web page immediately, each time you created it.)

To upload your web pages to your hosting, you need to upload it directly using your hosting account or using FTP client.

Step 6 – Promote Your Website to Your Visitors

There are many ways to promote your website.

The cheapest way is SEO (search engine optimization). All you need to do is to create web contents rightly, and then let it ranks well in search engines. This may take a bit of time, but it will provide good result in the long-run, if you work on it.

The other ways can be: email marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, advertising, putting website address in letter head, putting signature about your website address at the end of your email message, etc.

Step 7 – Keep Your Website Fresh

After you published your website, you need to maintain your website. You need to keep it work well and add more contents to it on regular basic. This will provide more contents for your visitors or to keep your customers updated.