1. When first starting out, don't be tempted to concentrate on impressive layout or exotic HTML and Java features, they will only use up your precious time as well as ruining your search engine ranking. Carefully avoid elevating image over substance. Instead, offer some kind of useful service to internet users. As they say, CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT.

Don't copy other sites; find something that ISN'T on internet already, then become the worldwide supplier for that thing. If your site just shows what a clever Java programmer you are, no one will care. Or if you spend your energy on "image" and trying to impress people, then you'll trigger the sensitive BS detectors of the audience, and they'll distrust you (if not avoid you entirely!) But if your site is useful, everyone will bookmark it.

I looked around the internet and found that there were no webpages at all for Amateur Science or Tesla coil building. (this was 1994) I complained about this for awhile, but then I realized something. There must be hundreds of other people out there looking for the same sorts of webpage I wanted to find. If I was writing webpages instead of complaining, other people would even now be hitting my pages while searching, and I could develop an audience.

Therefore, I decided to nominate myself as the central internet clearing- house for Amateur Science and for Tesla coils. I was subscribed at the time to the USA-TESLA discussion group, and also regularly read sci.physics newsgroup. I started saving the really interesting messages and putting them on my pages for the rest of the world to find.

2. While surfing, stay aware of your own desires, and write them down. Get inside the heads of other people: assume that there are lots of others just like you on internet, and if you are wishing that there was a good website for XXXXXX, then you've probably just discovered an idea for a popular website.

For example, while on newsgroups I was pissed about the constant flamewars between all the gigantic, fragile egos. I wished there were some interesting discussion groups where flaming was prohibited. And I wished that people on alt.sci.physics.new-theories actually did experiments, rather than arguing endlessly about untested theories. My internet- provider offers an email list service, so it was possible for me to START a discussion list. I became the provider for discussion groups for Weird Science (FREENRG-L), science museum staff (WEBHEAD-L), and others.

I also slowly typed in all sorts of useful files for other people to find. I'm a frustrated writer. In the non-web world I had never managed to get an article so cleaned up that I would want to offer it to a magazine. On internet things were different. I could type the first draft of many articles onto my website, then go back later and clean them up. I could even put MAILTO buttons on the articles, get comments from passersby, then fix what other people pointed out! This got to be a habit, and sucked me into writing huge amounts of stuff. This draws people to my site. Therefore, my next secret to generating content and attracting high hit-count is:

3. Make your website be your filing cabinet. If you have little projects underway, put them on your website while working on them. Reject the paper-publishing traditions of polishing an article to perfection before publication. DO NOT ELEVATE IMAGE OVER CONTENT. (Perhaps even keep yourself honest by cultivating a deep revulsion for "image.") Instead, let all your flaws hang out, and type things directly into your site in rough draft form (label them UNDER CONS TRUCTION if you really must).

Expunge the fear of embarassment from your life, and instead practice making foolish mistakes in front of thousands of strangers. Stop using your PC to store files, instead use your website as your main storage. Let people poke through your filing cabinet. It will contain far more than a perfectly polished website does.

You'll always be adding more stuff, which will make your audience come back again and again to see what's new. It will also give you "external ambition," because you'll start getting mail from people who say things like "when are you going to finish your article about smoke rings." ;)

Once you have some content, there are other things you can do to "spread a net" and catch more hits. There are conventional tricks like submitting your page to various search engines. But once you are "out there" you should constantly test how searches are finding you.

4. NEVER EVER move one single html file or change an URL. Don't you hate it when you click on a link and it says "404 file not found"? Well, I've been here since 1994, and all the links to my site still work!

Hitcount grows slowly as others link to you, and as search engine spiders gradually catalog your whole site. Traffic grows exponentially. It doubles, then doubles, then doubles again. The process takes a long time. Don't wipe out all your traffic by doing something stupid. I've seen people move their entire site to a new provider, delete all the pages on their old website, yet only leave a forwarding link on their former top page. VERY stupid. STUNNINGLY stupid. Yet even big companies do this! Are they trying to hide, so web users cannot find them? As far as search engines are concerned, their site has disappeared without a trace. All their google links will say "404 not found," and google will punish them for this major mistake. To google, the new site will be ranked like a newbie's first blog, and it will take months for all the different spiders to index their new site's URL. And even worse, during those months, human web surfers will think that the company has met it's demise, and after a few experiences with 404 errors they will stop clicking on any links that the search engine turns up, even if those links later are repaired.

Another problem: Google finds your sub pages, not your top page. Your site is like a large net, with each page intercepting clicks from many google users. Your top page is only one tiny strand in the net. Most of your visitors will enter via a lower page. Also, other web authors like to link to your "subpages", not to your top page. And so... if you've just bought a domain name and you ABSOLUTELY MUST move your site, you'd better replace every single html file on your old site with a small link to the new location of that page, and then maintain that skeletal site for a year or three. If you don't, then people with links to the "good stuff" inside your site will see those links go bad, and they will delete them. You could lose the majority of your site's users. You'll only be left with the non-serious people who link to the "splash page" at the top of your old site. Very often I'll browse somebody's "amateur science" links and will find that all the links on the page are bad. All except the ones that point to MY pages. :)

PS, if your site is maintained by another person and you catch them changing the URLs without maintaining the old URLs for many years ...then they're completely incompetent and you should ditch them ASAP. Every changed url is a lost search-engine link, and there's never any justification for changing an URL. Even *thinking* about changing an URL should be grounds for firing a web designer on the spot.

Wait a second.

Forget everything that I just said. Keep moving your site a few times per year, and only leave a forwarding address at the top page of your old site. After all, as long as you cause all your links to become "404 not found", then everyone will delete the links to your site, and they'll only be left with links... to MINE! Heh heh heh.

5. View your site using a 56K modem and with graphics turned off, then redesign it so it's still useful.

Never forget: Google is a blind internet user; Google deletes the blind-hostile websites. So, never use java/flash links or non-HTML text content, use "alt" tags on images, and add "summary" to tables, and provide text links that duplicate all your fancy click-map navigation, etc. I say more about this on my WEBPAGE MISTAKES page. Stay compatible with minimal browsers like Opera, don't become a "Flash bigot." You're trying to get MORE users.

6. Maintain a "link farm" of other pages similar to your own. Whenever you find another page to add, email the owner of that page to tell them about it. Don't add cool websites to your browser's "favorites" menu, instead add them to your webpage.

This one above is critical for creating a huge web-presence. First, if the other page-owners know you've linked them, they might add your site to their own links. If they haven't seen your pages before, at least you've attracted a new user. Secondly, after a number of sites all link to each other, they form a "community", and when one page catches a new user, that user can easily find all the other pages too. Third, if any pages in the "community" become high in the search engine rankings, your ranking will also increase. Even better: when no such community exists, and you're the only one who maintains a links collection to similar sites, then even if nobody else links to you, this still will attract lots of people because you've become a "portal" site for that topic area. Don't forget: if you find your "favorites menu" useful, then others will like it too, so put it on the web. Web users would rather browse a list of human-classified links than to run web searches, so your site will become popular with everyone interested in your subject. Think! Would you rather have a librarian on call who can deliver any book you ask for, or would you rather wander in a library? Most prefer wandering the library, because neither you nor your super-searcher- librarian knows which keywords will find the best stuff!

7. Ruthlessly avoid using javascript menus, frames, flash navigation, PDFs, or any other site files other than dead-simple HTML 1.0.

Pure HTML links will make your page extremely friendly to vision-disabled internet users. But far more important: fancy menu techniques are unreadable by Google and any other search-engine spiders. Search-engines are basically the same as the vision disabled. Google is a blind internet user. They can only "see" html, and many cannot even handle Frames well. So, if your site navigation links are all part of a Flash program, then all the sub-pages in your site will never appear on any Google search results! (Remember rule number one above: resist the temptation to use fancy stuff. The fancy stuff will hurt you. Fancy stuff is an embarrassing newbie mistake. )

8. Always add a link to the top of all of your pages which links back to your main site.

If someone uses a search-engine and finds a deep subpage on your site, they'll have no clue that the rest of your site exists. You have to provide links! Also, other site-owners may link to subpages on your site. If one of your files gets lots of traffic from some other site, that file must have clear links to your main site. If it does not, then those users may think they're still on the linking site. They may entirely miss the fact that they are reading just one part of your much larger site. Last, include the page URL somewhere on the page (usually at the very bottom.) That will force each of your pages to appear when people search on partly- remembered URLs. And if someone prints out your text, it forces the URL to be printed on that paper.

9. Maintain a "WHAT'S NEW" page.

This will let your repeat-users immediately find the stuff they haven't seen before. Without a "what's new" page, your site may seem exactly the same to everyone who visits, even though you're adding huge amounts to some far corner of your site.

10. Every time you add a separate webpage, submit it to Google's ADD URL page. Other good places are Altavista's add-URL page. Another is the Mozilla Open Directory Project, dmoz.org and Yahoo. These sites share their data with other link archives, so once you get into one of them, your links end up in many others.

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OTHER HINTS:

11. Use absolute links.

E.g., on your own pages, don't link to "sci.html", link to "http://www. yoursite.com/ ~user/sci.html". Why? Because people like to steal copies of good webpages, and if all the links on their plagairized copy of actually point back to your original site, then the stolen copies of your pages will send people back to your REAL pages and not to other parts of the copy. I've been doing webpages since 1994, and I've seen LOTS of copied fragments of my pages in other places. But I always smile, because all of the links to my orignal pages remain in the copy, so these copies just route traffic back to me, and serve as advertisements for my original site!

12. KEEP CONTENT KING! And keep ease-of-use near the top of the list. Look at rule #1 again. Do *everything* in html. Don't talk yourself into having to use "impressive" or "modern" techniques. Don't let a pursuit of "image" slowly destroy your site.

I constantly notice good sites that have slowly gone to hell because someone is being paid to make them look polished, as if they were an expensive magazine... and the designerly features interfere terribly with navigation. Those page owners have it backwards: image is nothing, ease of navigation is everything, and the need for useful content outranks both. Those page owners also have little respect for their audience; thinking that nobody notices attempts to manipulate them with shallow facades. In your organization, can the author of an article say "this aesthetic feature slows people down slightly, get rid of it" and the art department jumps to make changes? If not, then the wrong people are in charge, and the way is open for creeping corruption of facade over function.

13. Provide a guestbook. Let people read it. This isn't just for your ego. It provides another interesting file for your audience to read, and you didn't have to write it yourself.

14. Mutate your guestbook! Look at my "report unusual phenomena" page, and "science fair archives". These are simple guestbooks, but altered so that passersby can type in interesting things, and others can read them. Even if there were no other things on my site, just these pages alone would be worth an occasional visit. It's like a no-cost mini-newsgroup.

15. Become a heavy user of your own website. Try constantly to see your site as an outsider; try to get into the heads of strangers. Note how you cruise the WWW yourself, then modify your site so it is easy for YOU to cruise.

For example, most people (including me) rarely use the scroll-bar. Therefore, if they don't see good stuff on the screen instantly, then they will go elsewhere. If the good stuff on your website is not right up at the top of the screen, most people will never see it. See my own top page. I put the big four subsections right in your face, using huge font size. Yes, most of my other pages are these great huge things which absolutely require lots of scrolling. However, nearly all of them have a "shortcuts" list which acts like a top page, letting people jump down to all the sections, and this "shortcuts" list is right in your face, right at the top of the page. I suck you in first, and only THEN force you to get off of your butt and use the darned scroll bar.

Another example: stop maintaining a "favorites" menu on your browser, and instead always put interesting URLs on your website. Make your website become your only "favorite links" menu. Others will find this useful... and also you'll learn to see your mistakes because you'll constantly be looking at your own site and comparing it to others. Keep tweeking a page site to make it easier for you and your friends. And once you've learned the tricks, keep updating all the other pages in your site.

16. Start early. If you had started a few weeks ago, you might be getting lots of hits by now. If you had started last year, your site might now be a major player on the web. WWW is still growing fast, don't put it off, jump in quick. Don't polish your site before publishing. The time it takes to perfect your site could be better used for hooking in more users and getting an early start on the geometrical growth of hitcount. If you create a site a month early, several years down the road that month could mean an increase of hundreds of thousands of hits per year. If you are a big company that moves slow, a year of delay can move you from the top-ten websites and place you with the hundreds of late-comer wannabes.

More:

Search engines

Common mistakes to avoid

DOES THIS STUFF WORK? Well, here are some google keywords which, when last I checked, give me top rank or almost-top in the search results:

• Amateur Science
• Tesla coil
• microwave oven
• Cool Science
• Flamer
• Antigrav
• VandeGraaff
• Static Electricity

Pretty cool, eh?

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Shatter your mental plug and you're on your way to an amazing life. However, if you do remove your psychological defenses, you force yourself onto a path that leads to both genius or insanity. Do you REALLY want to see yourself as you really are? No fuzzy lens at all? Some people would rather not go there. And that's one reason why insanity is so close to genius. Removing your defense mechanisms is far more serious than taking a powerful drug that gives you honest vision. The effects of drugs eventually wear off!