DAY 1 - Preparation to optimise your website for better search results on search engines

I thought about it and decided to publish this guide in steps. The reasons for this are twofold: Firstly I don't have time to sit and work everything out and publish it in one shot. Secondly, it will be easier to follow it according to the steps or days. This way you can check back to this blog and check for days that were added or updated. Maybe some of you also don't have time to sit and read an entire site before starting your website optimisation. If you do it in steps, it might be easier to follow the progress you've made more closely and pay atention to each step. It also enables you to wpent as little as 10 or 15 minutes per day tweaking your site little by little until you are happy with the final product.

I'll be converting the blog to a fully fledged website as soon as I am done with the whole guide.

We'll start off by something very simple, yet very important.

You have to log your activities in which ever way works for you. You need to see where you started off and where you finished. You're looking for results. Get a hit counter and a statistics page for your website. Normally, if you signed up with a decent host, they inlcude these counters and stats in their services. If you are making use of some form of free webhosting and these services are not included, you can get it for free at Amazing Counters's website. They offer both free webcounters and web traffic and hit reports. Once you have a webcounter and web traffic report, set the counter to zero and add this activity to your log, for example:

DAY 1

Date: Sat 18 march
Total hit count: 1
Activity: Added hitcounter to website.

The log will become bigger and you'll add more features as we go along.

As you go along with this guide and keep logging your activities to optimise your site, you will over time see how traffic increases to your site. You will aslo be able to pint-point those factors that played a major role in increasing your web traffic dramatically.

I am doing exactly the same. As I write these steps, I apply everything to a website that I am currently trying to get high in the ranks (dvdshack.co.za). I have chosen Excel to log my activities and will for instance add the next information tonight:

Date: Sat 18 March 2006
Total hit count: 409
Activity: Added link to site on http://get-noticed.blogspot.com/

On the webstats from my host, I will be able to see how many people clicked through to the site I am monitoring, giving me an indication of how much success I have with one of the many aspects of optimisation.

Go try it out. More to follow soon...