Appearance of website and SEO

[EveESN]

Hi

Appearance

During Preview, my website had a lot of space to the right hand side of the page.  This space didn't show when I was creating the site.  Will it be there when it appears on Google?  If so, it makes my site look odd, and I will have to go back and fix that.

Has anyone else got this problem? Is WYSIWYG applicable to all views except Preview?

SEO

I've read some posts on here that refer to the HTML code in the </head> of the site.  Do I have to do something with this or can I just launch without it?

I'm concerned because I launched a different website a couple of years ago which never appears anywhere unless I specifically seek it out.  But can't afford for my new website to fail.

Any help and advice would be most appreciated.

thanks

[Sogo7]

As to your first question about appearence...

Remember not everybody has the same size screen as you or uses the same web browser for that matter and both these factors should be taken into consideration. Whilst there is not a lot you can do about Cross Browser Compatibility hopefully the WYSIWYG software should be able to cope with it.. in theory at least.

The design trick for the layout  is to create a 'wrapper' table rougly 900 to 1024 pixels wide and center this inside one huge table with a 100% width so that it fills the screen. Then everything for the website goes inside that wrapper, when the 'live' version appears on the web it will sit evenly in the middle of screen. just like this forum does

SEO and the great misconceptions

Repeat after me..

SEO IS NOT A MAGIC BULLET,

SEO IS NOT A MAGIC BULLET,

SEO IS NOT A MAGIC BULLET

There are no tricks, secret codes, rituals or incantations that will cause your site to perform well in the search rankings, even if you throw serious money into it's promotion success is still doubtful. At it's uncertian best SEO is about maybe moving an existing site one or two positions up the rankings not miracle leaps.

I should also point out that Google now personalises many search results so any two people running the same search query could well get different results.

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE CONTENT!

Adding 'Meta' tag descriptions in the head section of a page of course never hurts  as all search engines read them, however they don't actually pay them much attention. Instead they prefer to read the text content of the page itself and figure out what the Topic is and what the keywords are for themselves.

Google has repeatedly stated that what it likes to find is UNIQUE, INTERESTING and RELEVENT content. Having this will make the site perform better in search results, if you merely copy somebody elses words in whole or part then the site gets buried.

NB: search engines have no eyes, so any text that appears as an image is  invisible to them.

Promoting a website

The most effective method for increasing traffic are backlinks, links from another website to yours. Those created by another webmaster are best (find a simliar or related venture and just ask to do a swap), forum post links score slightly less SEO brownie points but again are useful for raising awareness of a websites existance, along with social networking and if applicable good old fashioned flyers under windscreen wipers.

[EveESN]

Hi

Thanks for your response - I have revisited my website.  Can't do the pixels thing because I don't have a clue, but I've tried to utilise the space, so that if somebody gets a narrow view they will get the main stuff, but if someone gets a wider view they will see other things - add ons really, not essential.

This probably isn't the best solution, but I will come back to it when I have read up a bit more.

cheers

Eve

[tidaltides]

I agree with it. The better content you have in your website, the better search ranking you will earn. Although, you should still learn both onpage and offpage optimization which is very essential in learning how SEO works.