Hi,

 

I hope you can help a newbie in webmastering, as I have just made a web site and need some help please.

 

I finished my site and have uploaded it to my web server (using coreftp lite in sftp mode), and it is on the internet (pardon my not wanting to share yet, but I think it needs some alterations before I would want to show it to experienced people like you).

 

Anyway, after uploading my web site and asking google to crawl it, I have realised it needs to get onto google with search terms that are likely to get it to near the first page. I have researched it a bit and originally thought I need to add meta tags to each page, but have been told that this is not required for google ??? I am confused about that, as I thought you input that which you think your client base would type, and then if typed into google, it would look at those meta tags and match them up. I realise it is more complicated than my limited knowledge understands, but I still thought this was pretty much what meta tags are for.

 

Secondly, I think I need a site map for google, and have looked at google webmaster tools where they suggested a few third party tools for this, but do not know which is best to use. I made the web site using wysiwyg web builder version 8, and this has a facility to make a site map automatically. Does it make much diffrence which one I use ?

 

I should explain at this point that I do not know how to write html, hence the use of a wysiwyg type software.

 

Thirdly, I have enabled hotlink protection at the server for my images (as I am on a shared server with a bandwidth limit), and I would like to know if this would preclude google showing those images in the search results, images page ?

 

Should I rename all my images to be recognisable names that describe the image (at the moments they are just numbers), again, for google to index them better, or does this not matter.

 

My last question is about managing the web site; when I want to make changes, do I just alter the original on my computer then upload the entire web site again, and does that then overwrite the existing web site in the server (obviously presuming that the web site page file names are all the same), just as it would do in windows if you made another file of the same name where it would ask if you want to overwrite it ?

 

I am nervous about how to tackle the above alteration when I know what to do, which is why I am asking about site management.

 

I tried to ask these questions on the forum for the software as I thought they would know the answers to some of these questions, however, they did not help much, hence my asking here.

 

If you could offer any advice at all it would be very much appreciated.

 

Thank you in advance.

Well, as for adding meta description you have heard right about it. It is not necessary to add meta description if the content and topic names are relevant with significant amount of keywords in it. However if you wish to add meta description, you may do so. And you should consider adding right description and tags to images because images also contribute to SEO of website. And as for sitemap, you can use any script or tool to generate it. Hope this helps you.

Meta tags: meta title and description are shown in the search results, so do use those two. Meta keywords isn't used any more, because people used to stuff the tag with irrelevant keywords in order to get more traffic. These days search engines do a contextual analysis of each page, taking in the content, what pages link to it from what domains and with what anchor text and hundreds of other factors. That's the most I can tell you - if I knew exactly what factors Google uses and what weighting it gives each one, I could sell the knowledge for millions.

 

As far as maintainign and uploading goes: keep a local copy of your site to work on. When you've made your changes, you only need to upload the files you've edited rather than the whole site.

As above, meta tags are needed but not keywords meta tag.

It still confuses why I'll pick up after another developer and find they've crammed 100+ keywords into a keyword meta tag. Same goes for cramming the footer full of links, they jut don't work and it's not how search engines gather data.

The best thing to do is have relevant content with clean HTML and well structured header tags, section tags etc etc

Ok so first off you can use this to create your sitemap - http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ just upload the file it creates to the root of your hosting.

 

Do rename your images to relevant names and use alt tags also relevant to your images.

 

Like the guys above said meta keywords don't matter but I add them anyway as it takes 5 secs.

 

With the meta description I personally believe Google does use them, thats just me, when you google something it bolds the words in the desc so it does notice them. I also believe Google takes CTR into account as well so the more relevant your meta desc is to your keywords the high the CTR, once again thats just me.

 

hope this kind of helped.