Tuesday 28 April 2009

Creating my personal web site - finishing touches

Following on from my blog about creating my personal web site, there were still a few things left to do. Just to refresh all your memories, this is my personal web site.

Firstly, I needed to let people know about my web site. It would have been a shame to have gone to all the trouble of creating and deploying it, only for it to not have any visitors. So I emailed my family and friends, sent out an email at work, updated my Facebook status and sent out a tweet on Twitter. I have so far received quite positive feedback from the people who have navigated to my web site.

Secondly, I needed to let the major search engines know of its existence. To do this, I submitted the web page's URL (Uniform Resource Locator - otherwise known as its web address) to Google and Yahoo. This let's your web site get listed when appropriate search words are entered into the search engine. To do this, use the following links:

Google www.google.com/addurl.html
Yahoo submit.search.yahoo.com

This adds your web site to the list of web sites that the search engines will crawl. After initial URL submission, your web site should be crawled within 48 hours. Your web site will be crawled from thereafter. I have also added the URL for this blog to the search engines.

To see what traffic your web site is generating, where your visitors have come from, and what referrals your web site has, you can use any of the web site traffic tools that are available. I have registered my web site and blog with Sitemeter. This is one of the more popular site traffic tools, and is also free. There is a more advanced option for which you have to pay, but the free option is good enough for my purposes. Again, I have also added my blog to the tool so I monitor my blog traffic.

With my web site and blog setup, configured, registered with the search engines and the tools for me to monitor their traffic, all I need to do now is keep the content up to date!

3 comments:

  1. It's good to see you've submitted your website to the search engines. I think you could do with having a look at your meta tag keywords. Off the top of my head, I would use words like audax, cycling, vegetarian which describe your interests rather than dominic,burford,dominic burford,personal web site,dominic web site,dominic resume,dominic site. If I was doing an internet search, I wouldn't search on dom, but rather cycling for example. But you've come along way in a short time, so keep up the hard work :)

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  2. Good point. I wasn't really sure what meta data to use for a personal site, so I'll consider your points. Thaks for the positive feedback!

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  3. Your blog is just terrific and have read all your posts. Very interesting!! Good luck to you.

    How to make a website

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