I’m an advocate of learning by doing, so just open an editor (I like notepad++ for quick editing) and type:

Hello, this is my website!
E=mc^2

Great! Now save the file as ‘index.html’. Next, in your file explorer, double click the file and behold! Your very first website!

All right, that may not have been as impressive as you wanted, but really, that’s basically it! You have a page that you can look at in your browser and it even has some useful information! (I bet you were wondering why I had you write E=mc^2, weren’t you?)

By now, of course, you want more. You probably wonder why all your text displays on the same line in your browser. A browser ignores white space in html files. It uses special code in websites to handle content differently. To see an example, right click on this website and choose ‘View page source’ or something similar, depending on what browser you have. You’ll see a lot of code that has angled brackets which is HTML. Don’t panic, you’ll learn many of them, but even if you don’t want to: you don’t have to. Remember, you’ve already created your first website without them.

The bracketed words are called tags and they come in pairs. They are used to describe the content that’s between those tags. For example, somewhere on the top of the page source you’ll see <title>some title</title>. This describes the t… well… you figure out what it describes. To get back to our example, you can use the tag <br /> to put an enter after your first line. Tags that have no closing tag, are closed with a /, so you don’t have to type <br></br>. Your code becomes:

Hello, this is my website!<br />
E=mc^2

Save it again and open it in your browser. You’ll see the E=mc^2 on the next line now. Pretty cool, huh?

There are a great many tags you can learn, but frankly, you can make perfect websites without them. You don’t type these silly things when you’re writing a Word document, do you? This is because Word does this behind the scenes for you. (Word doesn’t use tags, but some other markup language.) So what you need is a different editor that lets you create a website using a dedicated editor, like you use Word write documents. I don’t use editors for my websites anymore, since I write most code by hand, but apparently a very good free HTML editor is HTML-Kit.

So now you know how webpages are created, you can create a website. You can user hyperlinks to link your pages together. Create another file in your editor with the following code in it:

E = energy,<br />
m = mass,<br />
c = the speed of light in a vacuum,<br />
The 2 indicates the squaring of the c.

Save this file as explanation.html. Open your index.html again and change it to:

Hello, this is my website!<br />
E=mc^2 (<a href="explanation.html">explanation</a>)

Open the index.html in your browser, and you’ll see a link that you can click on, after which you’re taken to your wonderful explanation page. Now you can make your website as big as you want.

After this, it’s just looking at other pages and find what else you can do with HTML and other languages used to describe and manipulate web content. Examples are javascript (used often for dynamic interaction with the user) and PHP (used for handling information on your page before you get to see it in your browser). If you’re of the level of this tutorial, I wouldn’t go into it just yet, but it might be useful to know that there’s so much more possible than what you’ve just seen.

So, this concludes my basic ‘how to create a website‘ tutorial. You have learned the basics of creating websites, some HTML and you’ve seen that you can learn a lot more by viewing the page source of any website you encounter. Remember that you can make it as difficult as you want, with tags, and images, and movies, etc. But in the end, people visit your site because of your content. If they don’t like your content, it doesn’t matter how good your HTML knowledge is, they will go away faster than you can say ‘hyperlink’.

I’m especially fond of Notepadd++. There are so many reasons, but I’ll bore you with just a few of them:

• It starts up in no-time, even if you have an older computer,
• A simple interface, which you can add and remove components from as needed,
• Syntax highlighting for more programming languages than you can program in, including: HTML, Javascript, CSS, Java, PHP, ASP, C#, Actionscript and many, many more,
• Code completion,
• It’s completely free!

While you can’t beat programs like Eclipse for large projects in Java or PHP for object oriented programming, there’s nothing like Notepad++ for quickly editing your files. It’s definitely my editor of choice.

1. Add content
Add content, add content, add content. Before you even register your domain, you should have enough ideas to build 100 pages on your site. Start brainstorming and see what you can come up with in 10 minutes. If that’s not enough to fill 50 pages, consider not building the site at all. Having lots of content is important.

2. Simple designs are better
The text content should outweigh the html content. Do not make heavy use of flash, java, javascript, etc. Don’t add text like ‘best viewed with’… Your website should be viewable with any browser. Keep it clean and professional.

3. Keep the pages small
Smaller is better. Keep it under 15k if you can. Your site should be fast loading, or people will leave. Speed is everything. Next to content, that is. Keeping it under 10k or 5k if you can. Difficult, but people love fast sites. Throw away all the trash on your pages.

4. Content length
Put a new page online every day of about 200 to 500 words. Go to the overture keyword suggester to find ideas of what to write about. Spell check your content. Search engines can do it, and so should you. If you have a blog, go for article-like posts as opposed to the personal diary kinds of posts.

5. Use keywords
Use your keywords in the following places: title, description tag, heading, url, once bold, once italic and once high on the page.

6. Link to other sites
Put 2 links to other, high ranking pages on your site. They should be relevant to the content of that page and use keywords as your link. Don’t add every link that people request from you. Check their relevance first.

7. Link to your own site
Put links from one page to other relevant pages on your own site. Again: use keywords as your link.

8. Submit your site
Submit your site to Google, AltaVista, Yahoo, Msn, Hotbot, etc. Then forget about that for 6 months. Also submit it to every single directory you can find. Do a check after 6 months and resubmit if you’re not listed.

9. Log and track
Most hosts provide these. Don’t use a lame graphic counter. Check where your visitors are coming from to find out what traffic methods work best for your site.

10. Write for people
People are not coming to your site for your content. They are coming for their content. Try to write as if you are writing to one specific person, such as a friend of yours who’s interested in the same topic. Don’t try to write for ‘all of your visitors’.

11. Stay ahead
If you know that something big will come out in a few months, build a page about it now. It gives search engines time to index that page so they can feed it to the growing anticipating crowd.

12. Add more content
This is so important: keep adding content. Do this for a year and your site will be a top ranking website within one year. You could’ve been there now, if you started last year. Start now, so you’ll be there next year. You’ll thank yourself (and me) later.

Tip 1. PPC Advertising

With Pay Per Click advertising you get paid a small amount of money whenever somebody clicks on an ad on your site. You’ll probably know this from Google Adsense, but Yahoo! also has a great PPC program or you can use Text Link Ads or… The possibilities are endless and they are all really easy to set up. You can also use ads in your RSS feeds.

Tip 2. Banner Ads

Display one ore more banners on your website. There are companies that pay you for displaying their banners and your visitors don’t even have to click on them for you to make money. Usually you’ll get a fixed amount each month. But please, don’t use full page flash ads. Those are the ones that slide over your site when people visit it. They have a high click on rate, but they are also the most annoying ads that exist.

Tip 3. Email Ads

If you have a mailing list, you can put ads in the mails you send out. Don’t mail just ads though, most people will unsubscribe immediately or hit the spam button on their e-mail clients.

Tip 4. Affiliate Programs

There are many affiliate programs. An example you see often is Amazon’s program. You join Amazon’s affiliate program and show some ads of one or a few relevant books on your site. When people click on the ads and buy a book, you’ll get a small percentage.

Tip 5. A Shop

If you have products to sell, start a webshop on your site. If you own a real life shop, you might not even need that anymore after a while. You don’t have to pay expensive rent anymore, you can sell everything from home and you don’t even have to go to your shop in order to sell anything. You can lower your price since your costs are lower. That’s why people love buying things online.
Starting an online shop may seem like a daunting task, where you have to do a lot of programming, security and worry about how people will pay. Don’t worry at all: a lot of free shopping cart software exists that are compatible with organisations such as PayPal. PayPal is just about the most famous and secure way of paying money online.

Tip 6. Sell Merchandise

If you have a unique site with original content, selling merchandise can be a great source of income. Many sites seem to be selling unique t-shirts, coffee mugs, pens, hats, etc. I imagine a site like cute overload sells dozens of t-shirts a day.

Tip 7. Sell Your Website

If you get the hang of creating websites and getting a fair amount of traffic, you might want to start selling websites. People pay big bucks for popular websites. This can be anything from dozens of dollars to millions and millions for very big sites. If you can make a website with a steady stream of visitors and make about $5 a day from, say, Google Adsense, you can easily sell that site for a few hundred dollars.

Tip 8. Sell Your Digital Products

Create more advance versions of the products you’ve made (lesson 3, tip 4) and sell them on your site. Again, you can create a variety of things: website templates, eBooks, tutorials, music, art, photos, software. If they have any value you can easily sell them. Still, think of what’s worth more to you: the traffic the free version brings or the money they can make you.

Tip 9. Sell Services

You can charge people in return for services you perform. This can be as easy as designing websites, answering questions in your area of expertise (private consulting), using an online application you’ve created and subscriptions to your eZine. Another form of selling your services is signing up for reviewme.com, where you can review websites upon request. The nice thing is that you’ll make more money per review if your site is more popular. Take a moment to think about what value you can provide to other people and if you can request money in return.

Tip 10. Membership

Create a part of your site filled with premium content which is only allowed to people who join as a paid member of your site. The free part of your site is used to show your knowledge about the subject and to attract visitors. The members benefit from all the unique things you have to offer, which can include the electronic products you’ve created in tip 7.

Last but not least: online marketing is a great way of making a lot of money. This may seem like a difficult thing, but people doing this once started without knowing how to do it, just like you. If you want to pursue a free form of living, working where you want, in a bar, in the train, in a park, you name it. It’s really possible. It’s not a dream. It’s also way beyond the scope of this free eCourse, but it is something real and achieveable. It might be smart to read up on how other people reached this goal and gain some confidence on that it can be done.

Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the position of a website on the result pages of search engines. There is so much to learn about this, but in this lesson you’ll read about the best tips.

Tip 1. Use the Best Keywords

Find the best keywords for your site, and make sure you use keywords that people are searching for. You can do this by using a keyword tracker. There are many applications you can use, but I suggest you start with a great one that’s also free at http://inventory.overture.com Just type some keywords you’re thinking of using for your site. The results might come up with some suggestions that’ll result in more searches and keywords you hadn’t thought of.

Tip 2. Title, Meta and Other Tags

Use the keywords you’ve found in tip 1 and use them in the title, meta, h1, h2 and h3 tags on your site. You can put some emphasis tags <em> and <strong> around a few important words on your pages. Not only does it tell search engines these words are important for your website, it also increases the searchability of your site for human visitors. In the end, they are the most important people you are writing for. Apart from having different content on each of your pages, it’s also important to optimize the title and meta tags for each page.

Tip 3. Use Your Keywords in Links

Having many backlinks is very important for your ranking and you’ve learned how to get those in Lesson 1: “Get Incoming Links“. It’s also very important to have your important keywords in those links. If you have a blog about baseball, but everybody links to your site using the words ‘bat’ or ‘ball’, search engines can think your site is about animals or bowling and rank it higher in the wrong searches. This tip is also something you should be mindful about when using internal links in your site.

Tip 4. Write Good XHTML

A search engine has to be able to read and understand your page in order to determine what your site is about. Flash can’t be read, Ajax driven sites are difficult to understand at best. Iframes aren’t good either. The best thing you can do is write proper XHTML. If you want to know how a search engine will see your site, remove all styles (which should be in a seperate css files) and turn off javascript. Table layouts aren’t too big of a hurdle for search engines, but it’s a horror for people using text only browsers (think of visually handicapped people) since the reader doesn’t know in what order to read all the cells of a table.

Tip 5. Validate Your Code

To check your website’s code use these three links:

1. XHTML validation
2. CSS Validation
3. Link checker to check for broken links.

See how the right keywords were used in those links (tip 3)? Those sites will be so happy about that.

Tip 6. Create a Site Map

If you have a lot of pages on your site, consider using a site map page. This is basically a page that lists all your pages alphabetically or categorized or both, with links. This means that visitors can get to any page in just two clicks. Search engines can also easily find all your pages using the site map. Again, don’t forget to use the right keywords in these links.

Tip 7. Update Content Frequently

Search engines come back to check your site regularly. They do this to always have the latest information on your site so they can show more relevant information to their users. Search engines, as well as people, seem to love sites that update their content often. This way they can tell an active website from an inactive one, giving it more importance in the former case.

Tip 8. Use Friendly URLs

Often, search engines will not index all your pages if your urls look like this: http://www.example.com/index.php?page=365 and page=366 etc. Using search engine friendly urls is better and can also give a search engine an idea of what the page is about. An example url is: http://www.example.com/index.php/search_engine_optimization.html. Most blogging software has the option to turn friendly urls on and off. Turn it on if your host supports it.

Tip 9. Write For Human Beings

While writing content with keywords in mind, remember that it’s the visitors that are going to use your site. Write good, compelling content for your visitors and keep them happy. Search engines just want to give good results to their users. Write for your visitors, and you’ll almost automatically write in a way that the search engines find important.

Tip 10. Have Patience

Google uses an aging delay for new sites. This basically means your website will not rank high for some time even if it’s very good and relevant. The only way to overcome this is to buy an established website. Other than that, it also takes time for other webmasters to discover your website and link to it. As your site grows and builds a reputation over time, your ranking in search engines will increase as well.

Put a tell a friend form on your site. This is basically a box where your visitors can enter the name and an email address of a friend that might be interested in your site. Don’t use this technique to collect e-mail addresses for your list. Those belong to people who did not decide to receive email from you. In fact, make it clear in the mail you send that this is a one time mail only.

Tip 2. Make a Custom 404 Page

An ever changing website will often have pages that disappear after a while, because you don’t need them anymore or because you moved them somewhere else. Visitors that come to those pages will see an ugly 404 error message. Besides the fact that this looks bad to your existing visitors, it will also make sure new visitors will not get to see your site. Create a custom 404 page that tells your visitors the requested page does not exist anymore and offer links to the main parts of your site instead. Chances are new visitors will click on it instead of on their back button.

Tip 3. Use a Memorable Domain Name

If people didn’t bother to bookmark your site last time, but in time they remember they saw good information on your site, a good domain name might be all that’s needed to get them back. There are no rules to what constitutes a good domain name, but generally: shorter is better. You can check whether names have already been registered at Internic. Many hosting providers also offer this service. If all names seem to be taken, it’s time to get creative (Google anyone?), but try to come up with a relevant name first.

Tip 4. Give Away Free Products

Creating free products can work extremely well. If you create a product with giveaway rights, other people will pick it up and put it on their sites as well. They will do this because they they want to keep giving their visitors new things to keep them coming back. You win by placing a link in your product that will direct them to your site.

Some ideas of things you can create are an eBook, a software program you’ve written, an eCourse or a short tutorial, a video tutorial, website templates or some music you’ve made. People love to get free stuff. Be creative. Sometimes it can be appropriate to request something simple in exchange for your products. For example, ask visitors to send your site to two friends before allowing them to download your eBook.

Tip 5. Do Offline Promotion

With all the online things going on, don’t forget about offline promotions you can do. This is especially important if you have a local website. There are a great many things you can do offline, but for now we’ll stick to the cheaper ones. Make your url stand out as much as possible. If it’s not clear from your domain name what your site is about, try to add some ‘about’ information as well. You can create business cards, hand them out to everybody. Go to events and seminairs and exchange cards. These places are also good for networking. Maybe you’ll meet somebody who has the means to give your site more exposure.

You could make stickers (don’t forget to put one on the bumper of your car), make flyers or do something controversial or very original. There’s a story about a man who created a lot of footprints with his url on it, going all across town leading up to his house. This made the news and got him a lot of exposure. He also had to remove the footsteps, so think things trough a little before you jump to action.

Create Fresh Content Often

People will only keep coming back if they find something new everytime they get there. Take a look at just about any site you visit often, why do you go back there? Now you know… And as long as you’re creating new content often, see if you can add an RSS feed. If you’ve never heard about RSS before: it is a document that basically contains some info about the latest new items on your site. Whenever you add something to your site, you also change this document. People can then add your feed to their favorite RSS reader. This can be a program you install on your computer or a website such as Netvibes or iGoogle. It’s beyond the scope of this eCourse to teach how to create your own RSS feed, but most popular blogging software has this feature build in.

A mailing list

Another way of getting people back to your site is to start a mailing list. You can start a newsletter that periodically tells your visitors what has happened in your area of expertise during the last week or month of whatever period you decide to mail them. You can give people the complete information, or just some information and a few teasers about what’s new on your website. Don’t forget to include links to your site. You can start a mailing list by creating an optin box on your site. Many hosting sites support mailing lists, and you can use them. However, sending bulk mail can be seen as spam by some ISP’s, especially when you send it often. The mails you send out can reach less than 50% of the people on your list. So sometimes it’s better to use a commercial autoresponder service. Your mailings will then be send from another company, using your credentials. Those companies work hard to make sure that your mail will be received by as many people as possible. They also take care of people subscribing and unsubscribing.

Easy Navigation

When people come to your site, but can’t find what they are looking for, they will leave. People surfing the web have a notoriously little patience. So make everything on your site easy to find. In fact, if it takes more than two clicks for a visitor to reach what she or he is looking for, it’s too many. If you have a really big site, it can be 3 clicks.

You can also consider putting a search box on your site. Create one yourself or use one of the search engines. This will save you a lot of work, but it might be harder to show the search results as if they are a part of your site.

Make it Easy to Bookmark

Not everybody likes to do this, but you can add some ‘Bookmark this site’ buttons to your pages. You can also add links that will add your site or blog post to social bookmarking sites.

The Number 1 Rule!

The number one rule of any successful website is to create valuable content. Remember that people will only come back when they liked what they found last time. This is more important than anything else. Other website owners will only take the trouble to link to you if you offer something worth seeing, reading or doing. Visitors will come back only for that reason. Only if you provide value, you can try to extract some value in return. This can be in the form of more visitors, more income from your site, building a good reputation or whatever your goal is for the site.

I can’t stress this enough: remember that content is king! Whether this is in the form of text (blog posts, reviews, news, articles, etc.), artwork, a service such as Google, Digg or Netvibes, or whatever form of content you can think of. If it’s something of value, people will like it and come back.

Get your link out everywhere!

Try a few of the following tips, and, if you’re really serious about your traffic, try all of them. It might take a little work, but if you work on it consistently, your traffic will grow and grow and grow… A pleasant side effect of getting more exposure is that other people will start linking to your site, too.

Tip 1. Leave Comments on Blogs

Most blogs give visitors the opportunity to respond to their posts, with an option to enter your website’s address in a field. Find the most popular blogs on topics that are relevant to your website and leave relevant remarks. The earlier you reply, the higher your comment will be in the comment list and the more exposure your website will get. Don’t put your url in the comment text, unless it’s really relevant to the post you’re responding to. Too many url’s in one comment will probably be deleted automatically by any spam software the blogger has installed.

Tip 2. Post in Forums

Find the most popular forums in your website’s topic by typing “my topic forum” in Google. Start posting good quality answers to questions people have. Put your url with a small tagline in your signature. Don’t put your url in the post itself: people will think you’re just there to promote your site. Genuine answers will get you high quality traffic. These visitors are people that are really interested in your topic, so treat them well.

Tip 3. Review Products and Services

Sites that sell products or services, such as Amazon, allow you to create a profile and submit reviews. Try to submit high quality reviews, because you will be viewed as more of an expert in the related field. It might also help place your reviews in a more visible place. For example at Amazon, the highest rated reviews are shown first and only after that they are ordered chronologically.

Tip 4. Submit Your Site to Social Bookmarking Sites

There are some very popular websites out there, that can give you tons of traffic. Submitting your url to digg.com and del.icio.us can give you a serious amount of traffic. The huge number of visitors from Digg can even cause your site to become slow or unreachable if your host can’t handle that much traffic. This has a nickname know as ‘The Digg effect’. Stumble upon can give you a steady stream of visitors that will never stop, as long as people will like your site. If you don’t have a Flickr and MySpace account, create one and get some exposure there.

Tip 5. Manually Submit Your Site to the Major Search Engines

You didn’t think I’d leave out this tip, did you? Be sure to submit manually, most search engines don’t like automated submission software. It takes a little while for your site to get indexed, so be patient.

Tip 6. Submit Your Site to Directories

Submit to as many web directories as possible. A few examples are: Google directory and Yahoo! directory. Submit your site to the right categories only. It will take some time for your site to appear on the list, most directories preview submissions manually. If you have a blog, be sure to submit to the dozens of blog directories.

Tip 7. Answer Questions at Yahoo!

Another way of showing your expertise and leaving a link to your site at the same time. Answer people’s questions on Yahoo! answers. For the most relevant visitors, pick the most relevant categories.

Tip 8. Do Link Exchanges

Find relevant sites and mail them or using their contact form if they have one. Many site owners will like a link from your site and will gladly link back to you. They seem to get more reluctant as their sites are more popular, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.

Tip 9. Start a Lens on Squidoo

Start a lens on Squidoo. Never heard of it? Find out what it is over here.

You can never have enough incoming links. Whenever you come to a site where people can leave a message, don’t hesitate to do it and leave your link. Don’t ever spam, but be relevant to the topics of the site. Build a positive image and people will keep coming to your site. You’re well on your way on getting free website traffic.

If you have any questions, tips or suggestions, please leave them in the comments on that page, not below this post.