WEBSITE BUILDING TIP
See the navbar at the bottom of this and every page here, linking to this site's main directories. With subdirectories you don't have to change the site directory page by page, just add or remove the link on the main directory page. EXAMPLE Main directories art, music, books. In the music directory is subdirectories classical and county & western. If I remove classical music or add rap music I only have to change the listed links in the music directory and I'm done! Subdirectory files all link back at top of page to sub and main directories. Subdirectory links back to directory. Directory is in Navbar. Navbar is at the bottom of every page.
How to make BANNERS
Make all the banners you want, free, any time day or night at crecon.com. They walk you through bannermaking. If your banner isn't right go back to the banner and try again until it's right. You can view other people's banners made in the last hour or so too. Save your banner to disk immediately when completed. Also upload it to your web site from disk, see above. Include your URL on your banner so people can copy it down to visit later. When you put your mouse over the banner it shows the name of the banner exchange and cgi and seldom the site's URL. Clicking on a banner runs the risk of crashing you. Banners also get shown while people are in the middle of something like reading their e-mail. Make your banner a simple unaminated gif of low filesize (crecon.com does this real well, especially the old bannermaker) so it loads properly. If people still crash when your banner appears it's not your fault!
FREE BANNER EXCHANGE PROGRAMS
Upload your banner to them as shown above. They show your banners on other people's pages. In exchange you show their banners on your website. You can prohibit banners you don't like such as "adult" sites if you want (avoid visitor complaints etc) Put their banners on all your pages posted. The more pages you show their banner on the more credits you get (your banner shown) Linkexchange and Linkbuddies are two of them. There's others listed in search engines. LINKEXCHANGE makes banners for you. You still need your own banner elsewhere but you can download yours from there (see Tutorial 1) and use it.
SEARCH ENGINES
You have to resubmit from time to time because they take your files off after awhile. Especially true with Yahoo. Check first see if you're still listed. Check every so often. Also good idea resubmit and get a later date. Some, for example Infoseek, let you search by date, starting with most recent. You got to list each file. They don't always automatically list the whole file. If your site has lots of files and changes them often you can list the homepage and the main directories. Click on where it says add your site. On Yahoo you have to find the category or subcategory you want to list in, e g shopping or pets or electronic music or whatever.
KEYWORDS
Must be relevant to the page's content or they won't accept it for listing. People decide by hand site by site page by page. Use keywords 6 or 8 times or so on the page. I use all the tags shown here on every page. I need them. I give each file its own meta tags.
META TAGS
These are pretty much all you need on personal websites. Example: (the < and > are left off so they'll show here and not be seen as actual tags)