Friday 11 December 2009

Website Growing

So I have been growing the amount of content on my website and it is now starting to become quite considerable, with this new content I have also been getting more traffic. Every time I put a new article up I am now getting more search engine traffic. My traffic is now around about 20-40 visitors a day and going up!

So I can without a doubt state that with more content comes more traffic. But its not just content you need its the amount of links coming into your site that determine how high you rank for certain keywords.  So anyway I will continue to add content until hopefully I hit the 50 visitors a day mark by Christmas!

Saturday 21 November 2009

Revamping the site

So today I have been working hard at revamping the site. I believe that the current sites design does not help my visitors to view the content I have put up and lessen their visiting enjoyment. So I have decided to go with the following template.



This in my opinion looks a lot nicer and more organized than that of my old website layout. This will hopefully lower the bounce rate and increase my page views. Also the way I have set it up I think it will allow me to rank higher for keywords than I normally would. But the effects will be seen when I launch this latest edition. Right now I am currently testing the site to see if all the links work correctly. Also I am putting up some content so that it isn't just an empty website. It will be a rolling launch tomorrow as I hope to get the new layout up and running by the morning. Then I will simply add content as the day progresses.

This is one of the effects of that spark that was lit the other day. Hopefully though it will be a positive step forward and bring me closer to my goal - Several hundred visitors per day - upon achieving this I will have a big party to which you are all invited!

Friday 20 November 2009

Traffic Increase

So the other day I noticed a sudden increase in traffic. I checked on analytics to see what had happened, and found out that one of my articles had been listed pretty high on yahoo. Something like 8th on yahoo out of 33 million. For one keyword! This is a break through as I have never seem what search engine traffic could really do. I thought it would take longer to get more traffic from search engines. So my new push for content is working! I am getting more page views and visitors per day now. Although to match this success on google I will have to consistently build good content so that it will get linked to more and I will rank higher for keywords.

I feel like I have just sparked the ignition to a fire that may burn quite wildly and efficiently soon!

Anyway I need to start playing the games more so that I will have more things to talk about on my website. More things to talk about means more content which means more keywords and more traffic!

Bye for now I will give you a screenshot of my traffic at the end of the month!

Monday 16 November 2009

More Content

Today has been a slow day for traffic. I only received 1 visitor. I did add some more content up so hopefully I will rank for some more keywords. My plan is to just constantly add more and more content and see if it gets me more and more traffic. I will continue to just keep adding content until I get to the stage where I have several hundred pages of reviews and articles and tutorials and what not.

So hopefully I will start seeing more and more traffic everyday. I will give you a screenshot of my traffic at the end of the month. Hopefully it will be getting to the stage where I can brag about it.

Anyway I need to get to bed. Lots of work to do tomorrow!

Monthly traffic stats

I am going to set myself a long term goal here. I am going to try and reach and average of 200 visitors per day in the next 3 and a half months. I will post monthly traffic stats and give you screenshots of my google analytics graphs. 

By February the 1st I hope to achieve this goal. 

If I get to that stage I will throw a party and you are all invited.

So anyway today I will be putting in screenshots and cheats and reviews. I don't want to do too much tonight but as long as I get a couple pages done I can rest happy. I read an interesting note yesterday: The small blog post you post now could end up getting you. I also looked at another blogs traffic, and he posted regularly and his traffic just kept going up. Hopefully it will be the same here.

Anyway New tutorials will be on my website tonight, Maybe even a new website template. I am not sure yet but I will do my best!

Bye for now!

Sunday 15 November 2009

Building content

So I have just been building more and more content today. Mainly on the shop, but I haven't uploaded those pages yet. Tomorrow, when I have finished the main tech page I will upload them and then start working on new games reviews and walkthroughs.

Today has been pretty tiring because I have been building a conservatory with my dad. Its hard back-breaking work but I am getting paid for it. 

Anyway my plan for the next 2 weeks is to get more and more content up on my website. 

  1. 5 new games up. Complete with cheats, unlockables, and reviews. And maybe a page of screenshots.
  2. 10 new items up in the shop.
  3. I will also add about 2-3 more tutorials on HTML and CSS programming. I am hoping to branch off a bit with the tutorials. I plan on getting around 20-30 small tutorials up and running by Christmas.
  4. Getting my traffic up to around 4-5 a day. At the moment my traffic is dire, but that is because I have almost no content. Compared to the sites I am hoping to start competing against I will have to build hundreds of pages of content. Hopefully during the Christmas holidays I will be able to churn out a few.
  5. Finally getting it so that I am earning a sound $0.01 a day from advertising. This should come hand in hand with getting my traffic up. The more money I earn from advertising the more money I can therefore spend on getting some writers to dish out a couple of articles for me.
Anyway I need to get back to work. I want at least 5-10 more items in the shop before the day is over.

Saturday 14 November 2009

Content = More Traffic

So guys I have been reading up a bit on getting more traffic to my website and there seems to be one solid way to do this. Provide unique content to my visitors. This not only increases my long tail keywords but it will increase the short keywords as well. Getting more long tail keywords means that I will be able to generate more traffic.

So anyway I am going to be putting up loads more pages of content onto my site in a bid to increase my traffic to like 20-30 a day. Right now I am building a solid foundation on which my house will be built. If I start generating lots of organic traffic then I will be higher ranked for the newer articles that I produce, which will give me more traffic and hopefully it will be a steep incline in the amount of visitors on my site every day.

Anyway I am planning to create a small-medium sized computer shop on my tech page. This means that I will not only have more traffic but I will also have the possibility of sales from amazon. 5% per sale may not seem like much but if I sell 1 £200 graphics card thats suddenly an easy £10 in my bank. So I really need to start building it up. Tomorrow I will hopefully add around 10-20 items in my shop. Each with its own unique page for more details. This means that I will have more adbrite impressions and make more money!

So anyway I need to get started.

My tasks for tomorrow:


  1. Get small list of products into my shop. 10-20 products minimum
  2. Work on another article or 2
  3. Put some more help guides e.g cheats, walkthroughs.
  4. Get some more games up on the go. I need to start filling in my A-Z of games list.
Hopefully all of this will allow me to generate that bit more traffic, but we will have to wait and see.

More updates soon!

Content = More Traffic

Tuesday 10 November 2009

New Articles To develope Keywords

New Keywords are vital for success with Organic Traffic, so my thoughts are that if I am going to generate articles of interest that re both relevant to my games and develope keywords which are not competed for but will bring some traffic to my website. So I started yesterday by creating an article on traditional Japanese Weapons which gives you the history of the weapons an such. I am hoping that this article will bring me a few more keywords which will in turn produce more organic traffic.

Although today is the day that one of the biggest games of the year is launched so I thought I would get some videos going on youtube to for the extra links and also write some articles on the game. This will hopefully bring in a few more visitors and will inevitably help with longer tail keywords as well as some of the smaller but more competed for short keywords.

More updates will be brought to you tonight but for now I need to get back to my studies.

Monday 9 November 2009

My website

So I thought I would tell you about the website I currently own. http://www.gamercity.co.uk is a website which has been up for a couple of months now and I thought I would start sharing information on how well it is doing.

I thought I would tell you about things like what I am doing to it, how much traffic I am receiving, etc...

So I am going to start off by saying that it is a very small website created and maintained only by myself. It has taken many hours to get it to the stage it is at now and I am always looking for new ways to improve it. However recently I have been neglecting the site and not adding any new content. With this blog I hope to generate new articles every few days.

My main goals for the website are for it to become big enough so that it becomes my full time job. This will take time and a lot of effort but hopefully it will be worth it. I am now at the stage where I just have to create the content to add to my site. All the foundations are down and I am really happy with the way the site is coming along.

Current stats

My traffic is pretty poor. Anywhere between 1-5 everyday. This will hopefully change soon, but this requires me to put a lot more content on the site. My thoughts are the more content I put onto the site the more keywords that will generate me a bit more traffic. More traffic means I can rank for higher keywords better and thus generate more traffic.

I used to use advertising for a couple of weeks but these produced artificial results which were not permanent and did not make it worth my while. So right now I am fully focusing on generating purely organic traffic.

So anyway I need to get back to content writing.

Sunday 8 November 2009

First Project

My first ever project! I have been asked by a company to create a small 3 page website on which they will display things like viewing times for games and should have a decent navigation bar so that visitors can go to either the contact us page, the listings page or the home page. Which is fairly easy, and I plan on going with a very simple layout.

I will have a nice banner at the top which will be quite light, to reflect the rest of the page. And a simple navigation bar similar to the others I have already programmed. I will have a white background using blues/greens for the headings and things like that.

Anyway I need to get started. This could be my first website of many freelanced jobs so I need to make it good.

This will also add a name to my portfolio so I can have a bit more backing when trying to go in for other jobs and what not.

Anyway more updates tomorrow!

Saturday 7 November 2009

Tutorial 6 : HTML Creating a Table.

This tutorial will focus on creating a table for your site layout. This is incredibly useful as once you get your head around tables and how they work then you can create pretty complicated websites. Tables can also be used to add structure to your data and make the page look more organized.

Firstly we want to use the <table> tags to open up our table.

<table>


</table>

Secondly we shall start by adding a row to our page.


<table>

<tr>


</tr>

</table>

And thirdly to create your table we now need to add the following lines:


<table>

<tr>

<td>

Hello

</td>

</tr>

</table>

So as you can see tr starts and ends a row and td starts and ends a column. To see the results properly I want you to modify the table tags a bit.

Type the following:

<table width="200px" height="100px" border="1">

This should set the table's width and height appropriately and now that we entered the code: border="1"
We can now see the table with outlines. I myself use this to help me plot out websites that I am creating as it gives a clear picture as to where your columns and rows are.

Tasks:

1) Try adding some more rows and columns so that you can display the following.

hello1
hello2
hello1-2
hello2-2


Thanks for completing another HTML tutorial. Please remember to press the follow button and keep track of any new tutorials.

More Websites

So I have been busy creating more website layouts and experimenting with new things. I am going to start javascript really soon as I want to be able to create drop down menus and other cool features, which will hopefully all add value to the sites I create. Anyway I need to get back to programming, I am designing a cool new webpage which is a lot more intricate than the last one I did, This should hopefully be available to you by tuesday night latest.

More tutorials will be coming soon!

Friday 6 November 2009

Free Website Template

I have finished another website. Just thought I would give you a quick update and a screenshot of my latest accomplishment.




This one utilizes tables for the layout which has proved a lot easier, I can also do things that would be impossible or incredibly hard using the other method. Tables provide a quick and effective way to layout all your webpages.

The Zip file is provided here

Enjoy!

Thursday 5 November 2009

Working on things

Hi guys I have currently been working on getting the table layout for my website up and running. This is taking me a while but I will do it eventually. Once I get the tables positioning up and running I can churn out a few website templates. I hope to get to the stage where these are market-able so that I can make some money back from all the time I have spent on it. Anyway time to hit the hay. I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow.

Wednesday 4 November 2009

Tutorial 5 : CSS Basics and background color

Welcome to Tutorial 5 : CSS Basics. In this tutorial I shall show you how to use CSS files to make website creation easier and quicker. For example; It is far easier to write one piece of code once than have to write it 50 times for 50 webpages in a website.

Firstly I want you to open up Microsoft Visual Web Developer which is a free easy to use and powerful tool which will help you a lot in website creation. It can be downloaded from the Microsoft website.

I want you to start a new website. Make sure its an empty website, and then add both a HTML file and a Style sheet. Name them whatever you want.

Next I want you to open up the HTML file, as you can see the basic HTML structure is laid out for you already. Next in the head section I want you to type the following line

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="StyleSheet.css" />

Make sure that you change StyleSheet.css to whatever you have named your style sheet.

Now we have a link to our style sheet from our HTML file.

Secondly I would like you to open up your Style sheet as we are now going to be writing some CSS!
If all goes to plan you should have something similar to this:

body{

}

This means that whatever you code into the brackets will directy effect whatever is in your &alt;body> tags which is your whole website.

Now I would like you to type in:

background-color:Red;

Now when you go back and preview your webpage it should have a Red background. As you can see this could be incredibly useful if you have hundreds of webpages all following the same design.

So congratulations you have completed Tutorial 5 : CSS Basics and background color.

Please stay tuned for more HTML and CSS tutorials and remember to follow my blog either view RSS or through blogger's follow function! Thanks!

Website Finished

I have finished my second website design. This one is a bit more bland than the first, but this one was all about coding in better functionality. For instance if you put in lots of text to your main column. Your sidebars adjust to the correct height. I will show you how to do it soon although for now I am still working on getting a couple more templates up so that you can have a look at the code and possibly use it for your own devices.

Anyway I will put another tutorial up tonight. And possibly another website. I have been having a few ideas as to what to add to my websites. Although I would like to find a suitable place that gives images for place holders. So that I can spice up my websites a bit.

I am also going to try a little javascript to spice up my navigation bars as well as add a bit more functionality to the sites I create.

Bye for now and please remember to click to follow me here on blogger!

Thanks.

Tutorial 4 : Creating Links

Tutorial 4 will concentrate on showing you how to link to either other pages on your site or a different website. Links are used in nearly every website as they are a functional and easy to use way of navigating the web. For instance when you search in google and press the search button, you are in fact clicking a link. This takes you to another webpage.

Links are very easy to implement to your website and they have, by default, a blue text color and are underlined once. This can be changed to fit in with your website if need be. For now though we will concentrate on how to create links.

To create a link all you need to do is type the following line:

<a href="#"> Hello </a>

This line produces the following:

Hello

This as you can see does not take you anywhere but if you replace the pound sign with a website URL of your choice you can make it so that the link takes you to that URL.

For instance linking to my site I would put the following:

<a href="http://emforce-webdev.blogspot.com">My Website</a>

Thats all from Tutorial 4 : Creating Links I hope you found it intuitive.

In the next tutorial I shall show you how to use CSS to help create your websites. Please stay tuned and if you found this tutorial useful please become a follower and learn along side others learning both HTML and CSS.

Thank you!

Tuesday 3 November 2009

Tables instead of Divs

Tables in webpage layouts are something I have been looking into for a couple of days now. They look to be far less complicated than using the CSS method of equal column height on your webpages. Having to create several Divs which encapsulate the main columns on websites was quite a tricky thing to do. Tables however allow me to create as many columns as I wish by just stating the width and what row the column has to be placed on. This is great. Although I will have to find a way to transfer this over to a CSS page which will be the basis for all my other pages. Hopefully now I can start dishing out quite a few more websites a week.

Anyway I have school today so I have to get ready. But I will hopefully post another tutorial up tonight. I might do it on CSS pages as it is, in my opinion a lot easier to create websites with.

Anyway bye for now!

Tutorial 3 : HTML Manipulating Text

So in this tutorial I will teach you how to change font size, color as well as how to use header tags. Such as <h1> through to <h6>

First of all lets start with font color. This is possibly the easiest to do and can sometimes make the biggest impact on any website. You want to choose colors that will contrast very vividly with the background of the text for instance a white background with black text is perfect a dark gray with black however will have your visitors struggling to extract any information from your webpage. We can change font color by using the following line:

<font color="red";>

Put this into your page and you will have red color. Colors can be set by using certain names, Red green blue values or hexadecimal values like #FF0000 place this in the quotation marks and you will have the same red. Many paint programs show hexadecimal values for colors, so if you see a color you would like to use in a paint program look around for the hexadecimal value.

Now we shall change the font size. We can do this by using the following line:

<font size="25px";>

This can be useful if you would like to have custom sized text. To change font size you could also put in large, small and other variations into the brackets to achieve different font size.

<h1> - <h6> tags are a great way to change the size of certain bits of text. h1 is the largest header size while h6 is at the opposite end of the spectrum. To use these tags we simply encapsulate them around the text we would like to make bigger. For instance:

<h1> Hello there! </h1> which produces the following results

Hello there!



Try different sizes of header tags to try and suit your needs.

Thank you for reading tutorial 3. Please follow me if you would like more html tutorials and articles, as well as any site template ready for download.

Thanks for now! Bye.

Website finished

So I took some time today to try and put some of the things I have learned together into one website. It took be about 2 hours and I am pretty pleased with the results. Heres a quick screenshot.



I went for a silver color scheme as I didn't want to waste time choosing what would go well with what. But I think I did a good. You can download this website from here

Anyway I need to start work on my next, even better website.

Anyway I need to get to work on my next website.

Please don't forget to become a follower here on blogger and keep up to date with any new tutorials and websites that I put up. Thanks.

Tutorial 2 : HTML Background Color

Lets add a bit of color to that boring old webpage we have right now. We can specify the background color by using the following:

<body style="background-color:teal;">

Save this and then refresh your browser which is viewing the page. The background of the page should now be the color teal.

But wait we can also do a lot more with the line of code above. For instance if we wanted to change the color of the text displayed we could just add:

<body style="background-color:teal; color:red">

As you can see all the text displayed on your webpage will now be red against a teal background.

You should play about with this a bit and see what colors you think go well together. This will also help you remember the line of code better as you will have had more practice with it.

congratulations you have completed Tutorial 2 : HTML Background Color

In the next tutorial we shall start to manipulate the text that you put into your webpage.


Monday 2 November 2009

Introduction

So guys I am a young web developer and am hoping to give you tutorials and tips on how to program your own website. I am learning everyday so the intention of this blog is to provide you with useful tips as well as Ideas and tools you can use to create your own websites.

I thought I would start by saying that I also program games as a hobby. I enjoy creating something from nothing and programming either with HTML or C# seem to be an easy way to create a limitless amount of different things :D

Stay tuned for tutorials on how to create your own website, These tutorials will be for people who want to learn HTML and CSS. Hope you enjoy!