Creating an Islamic Website

My primary website, Islamic Learning Materials, is my pride and joy. I originally started the website to showcase my Muslim children’s books and some of my Islamic History lectures. A lot has changed with the website since I first started it, and it has gone through many ups and downs. Mostly downs.

But now Islamic Learning Materials (ILM) is thriving and doing pretty well. I use it as an outlet to spread some Islamic knowledge and do some dawah. I get a steady stream of visitors, mostly new visitors from organic traffic. However, I also get several repeat visitors who I try to keep in touch with on a regular basis.

When I first started ILM, I didn’t know anything about websites. I thought it would be pretty simple to create an Islamic website. Just write some articles, throw up some audio and graphics, and watch the traffic just roll in.

Needless to say, things didn’t quite work out that way. It took me almost two years to begin to really understand some of the basic points of building websites, and I still have a lot to learn. However, building an Islamic website is a particularly different endeavor than building almost any other website. At the same time, there are many things about an Islamic website that fit in with building any other website.

Here are the basics of building any website, Islamic or otherwise.

• Choosing good keywords.
• Using sound SEO principles.
• Creating good content.

First, let’s look at keywords.

Whatever website you decide to create, you have to choose good keywords. Unless you’re going to spend a fortune in marketing and advertising, good keywords are essential to getting your website noticed by anyone.

My main keyword for ILM is “muslim beliefs.” If you type in “muslim beliefs” in Google, you’ll see my website is in the top ten, Inshallah.  The trick to choosing a good keyword is to choose one that doesn’t have that much competition yet is frequently searched. It can be very difficult to find that delicate balance. Sometimes you can choose a competitve keyword if you feel you can optimize it better than the people that are already in the top ten.

Speaking of optimization, we now move on to SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. SEO for an Islamic website is the same as any website. There are a few basic rules that you have to follow. For those of you not familiar with SEO, it is basically a set of techniques used to get your website ranked high, or “optimized”, in the search engines (Google, Yahoo Search, MSN, etc.).

There are lots of arcane and elaborate tricks out there but if you stick with the basics you should be fine.

• Use your keyword in your page title. (That’s at the top of the screen where you see “Islamic Learning Materials Weblog.”
• Use your keywords in the Heading. If you don’t know what the heading of your page is, then do a little research into HTML and look up H1, H2, H3..etc.
• Use your keywords several, but not too many, times throughout your article. Somewhere between 3%-20% of your articles words should be your main keyword.
• Use your keyword in the URL if possible. But don’t worry about it if you can’t. So for the keyword “Islamic Beliefs”, I created the URL www.islamiclearningmaterials.com/islamic-beliefs.html.

These simple SEO tips should get you decent ranking if you chose your keywords well.

Finally, you must create good content. That’s right…you must write, decent, clear, interesting, and engaging articles. This is for the humans that visit your site, as well as the search engine programs (colloquially called spiders) that crawl your website and index your pages.

Creating good content is necessary for all websites, Islamic and otherwise. Articles should be around 700-1000 words long. The article should be a unique article, not junk copied from someone else. The search engines will penalize duplicate content. And the articles should be relevant to your site. Don’t start talking football when your site is about Islamic Architecture. It’s not going to work.

Another point to keep in mind about your content is to make it appealing to human eyes. Human eye tire from reading computer screens. To ease this fatigue, use bullet points, bold letters, short paragraphs, and sub-headings. For a good example of writing for human eyes, read this article I wrote about Lailatul Qadar, or the Night of Power.

Alright, now those are the basics of creating any website, whether it’s about Islam or anything else. In the next post, Inshallah, I’ll talk about some things unique to Islamic websites.