Eight Steps to Building Your Website
The key to a successful web site is good content. You must
give your
visitors a reason to come to your site, as well as a reason for them to
return in the future. There’s no reason to spend a lot of money on a
fancy design if you don’t have valuable information for your visitors
to read. Let’s step through the process of building a Web Site that
will generate good traffic and more income for your business.
1. Purpose
- Before you get started, you need to know why you are going to spend
your time, effort, and money to build a Web Site. If you operate a
small business, or plan to start one:
Your Web
Site Should be the Center of Your Marketing Plan.
The bottom line of any marketing effort is to generate more
business for
your company, and the Internet is a great tool for increasing your
revenues.
There are four ways to create income using a Web Site
1. Market Your Product
2. Market Your Service
3. Market Your Information
4. Market someone else’s Product, Service, or Information
No matter what your business, you can create income from each of these
sources with an effective Web Site that provides visitors some valuable
content.
2. Theme - The best way to get
visitors to your web site is to establish credibility by having content
that is of interest to your visitors, and does well in the Search
Engines. If you are already in business and have written a marketing
plan, the content for your Web Site should be based on your Main
Marketing Message.
If you are just getting started, come up with a couple ideas that you
are passionate enough about to want to write about. Either way, its
time to do a little research.
3. Keywords - Using your Main Marketing Message, or
that great concept you’re ready to take
action on, develop a list of 10 to 12 keywords that represent the Theme
of your Web Site. When building your list of keywords, never limit
yourself to single words, as most people search for two or three word
phrases.
When deciding on keywords it is important to know two things
What are people searching for?
How much competition is there for your keywords (and hence your
business) on the Internet?
Once
you have this list, you can get a feel for how often people actually
search for those words by going to the Google web site where you can do
some keyword research with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This tool
shows you keyword search volume and advertiser competition.
It also also provides similar keywords and multi-word key phrases you
might want to consider.
When you are done, go to the Google
Search Page and find out how many pages are listed when you search for
each of your keywords. This will give you a feel for how much
competition you will have.
Those keywords with the highest ratio of Searches / Pages will provide
you with the best results with the search engines.
If you are ready to get real serious about Keyword analysis, we
recommend trying out WordTracker.
You can research a database of millions of actual queries of terms that
people search for.
You
enter some keywords, and they tell you how often people search for
them, and also tell you how many competing sites use those keywords. WordTracker
helps you find all keyword combinations that bear any relation to your
business or service - many of which you might never have considered.
You'll find out how popular these keywords really
are.
Then for each major search engine, they will show you the chances of
making the top 10. Even if you’re not ready to spend any money, take
the trial
to get a feel for the power of this tool. Once you see how useful this
tool is, we think you will find that its well worth the small cost.
4. Register
Domain Name - Now
that you have some keywords for your web site, its time to pick a
domain name. If you are already in business, its a good idea to
register your company name as a domain name (www.mycompanyname.com). We
use GoDaddy.com
to inexpensively manage all of our domain names.
Whether or not you are already in business, its even more important,
for
marketing purposes, for you to look for a domain name that contains
your top keywords. Use this domain name for your Web Site and forward
your company name domain to this Web Site domain. If you are going to
build your own Web Site, you can also buy your domain name from the
vendor you plan to have host your Web Site.
5. Choose Your Hosting Company
- There are many things to consider when choosing a web hosting
company. Rather than searching for the lowest price, we recommend you
look for the best value for your individual needs. We’ve listed a the
two hosting services that we currently use for ourselves and our
clients.
6. Create Content
- The most important thing you have to do is create the content for
your web site, especially the home page. You must tell your
visitors who you are and what’s in it for them.
7. Submit to the Search Engines - Start with the
free listings and then consider pay-per click advertising.
8. Promote Your Web Site - Now that you’ve got a Web
Site, its time to tell the world about it.
This sounds like a lot of work. Isn’t there a better way, you might ask? Yes there is, and we had to learn about it the hard way. We are just glad we found Site Build-It for our newer web sites. You will be guided step by step through the process of building a web site with quality content that attracts visitors and generates revenue for your business. Yes, yes there is. Go directly to Site Build-It now to read all of the details.
