I just wanted to share an email from a visitor to my website from the UK.
The user basically just wanted to know what to do after his website was built.
My thoughts were as follows:
The most important step in building your website is the planning. A lot of people have great ideas and they just run out and start building. While that gets you on to the web quickly, it makes it hard to rank at Google and therefore you have lousy traffic. If we want lots of visitors and good ranking we need to plan accordingly so that our website is optimized. This means building your website around keywords that your visitors will use to find you on Google.
A brief look at the overall process:
1.Deciding on your niche and keyword research. (Extremely important) You will use your keywords to design your web pages.
2. Choosing a domain, also very important, try to include your main keyword in your domain
3. Choosing a reliable hosting service.
4. Choosing a site builder of software that you are comfortable with.
5. Building and optimizing your website. Building traffic. (Building traffic is a topic in itself, you need to be active in forums, post articles, join article directories etc…)
Now obviously there is much too much to cover in an email, but here are a few items….
In terms of keyword research and choosing your niche….it is great to already have a topic but you must make sure that it is a topic that visitors want. Very important.
So you need to find out what people are looking for when they search your topic. If there isn’t a lot of people searching for your topic on the web then…you can create a great site but you won’t have any visitors. So you must be careful.
To research your topic you can use Google adwords Keyword tool. Here is the link. It is totally free.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
The best research tool that I have found is Market Samurai. Not only does it do the research but it also analyzes your competition and how many links they have.(very important). There is a free trial period. Here is the link. http://www.marketsamurai.com/c/Marketdata
In terms of purchasing your domain, they are all kind of the same. However I would choose a domain at the same place that I am going to host my website. It is just more convenient. No other reason really.
In terms of a site builder or website host I have tried several things. My preference is SBI as a site builder. I used SBI to build www.you-make-a-website.com
Take a quick video tour of SBI, http://videotour.sitesell.com/Enterprise4.html
It has features for beginners as well as those with advanced skills. In addition the SBI price includes your domain, it includes website hosting, website submission to search engines, it has a keyword research tool for free, it has everything that you need to get started. If you need help, I can help you with that also. As mentioned before I use it now on one of my sites.
I have also built a websites without a site builder. This is the option to choose if you want to do it without any help at all. I use Kompozer (http://www.kompozer.net/) as my Web page software/HTML editor. It is free. For a hosting service for my second website I used and now recommend Hostgator. Here is the link.
http://secure.hostgator.com/~affiliat/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=steeloblk
I list the other hosting services on my website (check out the best hosting web page). I think Hostgator is the best though.
There is more stuff but I have given you the basics. In addition to the above information, my website has tons of other things you should read up on. Don’t be in a rush, this beginning stage is very important if you want to rank well.
Warren
Note: this was just a brief reply to an email. Should anyone have any additional questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to me using my contact page email.
