What should I know to upload my website and make it work correctly with search engines.

Question

At the moment I have some basic understanding of HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery, PHP. What if I made a website or a page and I want to upload? My practical skills are restricted by only making some stuff in the playground. As I got to know there are also a lot of things I should do to make the website work correctly, for example, keywords for search engines in the head of HTML, robots.txt(what is it and how should I make it?), sitemap(I don't know how to do it either). In other words, there are a lot of things to know. Where should I learn all this stuff? Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Hi Mikhail,

For your first question regarding making a website and uploading it. You need hosting for this. You would typically buy a domain name and a hosting package to host the site from. You can get this at a low cost and i normally use 123-reg with a shared hosting package. You can connect to your host via FTP to upload your files or use the online file manager the hosting platform provides to you. By default your first page will be called index.html, or .php etc depending on what language you use. When someone visits your domain it will load this index page as the first page. 123-reg has some basic tutorials to get you started.

Regarding building the site ready for SEO and Google, there are many factors involved in this and often depends on how the site is initially built. We will focus on Google but most search engines operate the same way. Google used to use keywords to help rank the site but not anymore since they updated the algorithm used to crawl sites.

Googles spiders will scan your site looking for useful content. If you have the same content spread across many pages google will frown upon this so its important to make sure you think clearly about what pages you need and the content for each. Google also looks a lot at the structure of you code. If its messy and buggy google will give you a lower rank based on the fact the spiders find it difficult to pick good content. This is why you should us modern HTML5 markup sure as <nav> <section> <main> <header> <footer> etc. Google now knows anything with the <nav> tag will be your navigation and so on. Also make sure to correctly structure contact using <h1>,<h2>,<h3>,<h4> and <p> tags. Again this will help google identify the page layout, eg. this is the title, and this is the first paragraph and so on.

Keywords within the head section are still useful, but don't over do it. Make sure you set a good clear page title as google likes this too.

There is much more i could suggest but this should be a good start.
Hope this helps you out.