I have seen and heard crazy things...ah! But how to build a website! In my endeavor and quest for success I have heard people ask weird questions and I have seen those professing to be internet gurus give astounding answers.
I know of a fellow who posted a question on yahoo answers. This particular question kept me staring at my monitor screen lost of words. This fellow had bought a domain name and registered it with one of the leading domain name registrar. His question was simple yet to those familiar with the art of online business, the question leaves a lot to be desired.
My friend was seeking advice on what to do with his domain name. He had no plans or ideas on what to do with it! Think of lack of planning and we don' t need to go further than this example.
To avoid being on the same predicament, here are 5 factors to consider as you ponder on your next move. Before you build a website, think about the following:
Type of web site.
Identify the type of web site you will be building. Are you going to build a website whose primary purpose is to sell hard good or e-goods? Would your site be composed of affiliate links or are you going to sell your own service or product? Is your web site going to be primarily informative in nature with google ad sense and other form of advertisement or is it going to be purely visual with little or no content.
Identifying the type of web site you are going to create will make the next step easy to identify.
Niche based.
Gone are the days when all a web master needed to do was to stuff their web site with links leading to all type of product and services. In the current internet world you can not succeed in building a web site designed in the form of a shopping mall with all kinds of goods and services.
The internet is increasingly and exponentially becoming a specialized super highway. Only those web sites that are able to distinguish them selves as authorities in a given area are poised to reap the benefits of online business.
Start out by identifying a profitable niche that you will enjoy writing about, identify an area that you already have experience on, have passion or will be comfortable learning about.
Only build a website in an area or niche that you believe in.
Research you market.
It's not just enough to develop and build a website based on your strength and weakness. Care should be taken to do a little bit more research about the potential and profitability of that given field.
There are great tools out there on the net that would enable you to come up with a profitable niche, those tools will also enhance your research by shading light as to the exact phrases that your potential visitors would under normal circumstances type into the search engines in their quest for information.
Domain name and hosting.
Care should be taken while choosing the domain name and hosting company for your online business. A search in any of the leading search engines for the phrase "how to choose a domain name" or "web hosting" would return tones of articles that have been written advising us on the do and don' t do as far as choosing a domain name or host provider is concerned.
Quality Content.
Have you ever typed the exact phrase of a given keyword while searching for information on any of the leading search engines only to end up frustrated with the displayed results after trying several times? Search engines and human traffic thirst for information, great quality information.
One sure ways to win the search engines wars and in the process please your targeted customers is to create quality content. A site owner who remains focused and persistent in doing just start will in the long run reap the benefit of having their pages rank up high if not at the top of the search query results.
And there are many more things to consider, but why not start with this 5 first!
Joseph Nyamache is an Author and Webmaster specializing on web hosting and site builders That work. His site is devoted on providing information, tips and ideas on how to build a web business by providing great content that search engines love and humans thirst for. Visit www.your-inforcom.com to get your Free Special Report Now!
Search Engine Optimization is a method used by webmasters to achieve a better ranking in the search engine's listings for a particular website and its content pages. These methods are aimed particularly at benefiting from organic or crawler search engines. Organic searches are natural searches that don't involve pay-per-click advertising. Crawler search engines follow the links on a page from one web page to another, taking note of all the connections.
Unfortunately, SEO (search engine optimization) methods are often misunderstood and misused (even abused) by many Internet marketers. As a result, various SEO methods have come to be classified as either "white hat" (meaning that they are proper and legitimate approaches within the eyes of the search engines) or "black hat" (meaning that they are either deceptive or unethical or frowned upon by the search engines).
There are two primary arenas for search engine optimization: on page SEO and off page SEO. On page SEO generally includes providing good content for visitors, and the proper use of page titles, meta tags, header tags, text bolding, alt tags, keyword emphasis, and outbound links. Off page SEO generally includes such tactics as anchor text, article directories, link exchanges, and back links from site submissions, forum comments, and blog comments.
Let's take a quick look at some of these terms:
Page Titles: these are the words that appear in the upper left-hand corner of your browsers, in the blue bar at the top, that identify the website page you're currently on.
Meta Tags: these are tags inserted in your HTML header code that describe the subject matter of your webpage. There are two common meta tags, one for your keywords and one for a short description of the page. While Google tends to ignore these tags, other search engines will often give them added attention and use them in their descriptions of your webpages.
Header Tags: these are used to emphasize the importance of specific text within your content. They are generally used to highlight your keywords much in the same fashion as a newspaper highlights an article with a bold headline.
Text Bolding: once or twice in your content, if you use bold texting around your keyword, it's believed the search engines will give extra attention to those words.
Alt Tags: these are short descriptive words that are associated with an image on your page. For instance, if you have a web page about water skiing and there's a picture of a little girl water skiing behind a boat, you'll want to tag that photograph with a descriptive statement such as "Water Skiing Girl" that emphasizes your keyword "water skiing."
Anchor Text: these are the words that are emphasized in linking back to your web page. For instance, you could link back to your water skiing page with anchor text that simply states the URL of the page (let's say, http://yoursite.com/waterskiing.html) or you can push your keyword for that page and use "water skiing" as your anchor text.
All of these are legitimate approaches to search engine optimization, standard white hat approaches. At the end of the day, by using search engine optimization to help those visitors who come to your web page to quickly understand and interpret your content, you not only serve them better, you also make it easier for the search engines to send them your way. Relevance is the key to assuring the traffic that comes to your page is the right traffic that for that page.
