In Part 1 you learned some tips about basics of starting your site and finding a home for it, now comes time to properly name it and get it optimized for search engines so that your home on web is easy to locate.

Domain Name This is one of least expensive things about getting online as many hosting companies charge nothing or only a few dollars. But it’s also one of most important, as yours has to be descriptive and as memorable as possible. For a family web site, simply using your last name or a combination of first and last name is fine. Domain names can also include numbers. The minimum amount of time you can purchase a domain is for one year. But for an eCommerce site [meaning a site where you intend to sell products or services], an appropriate name is essential. http://www.namecheap.com only charges $8.88 per year.

Keywords = Power What will help drive people to your site faster than a cable connection? Keywords! These words and phrases indicate what your site is about and contain more authority than a novice can imagine. Proper keywords will feature terms and words used in text on your home page. Each subsequent page you create will also have its own set of keywords. If you are selling products or services online, Wordtracker.com is a fee-based service that enables you to look up latest information on what people are searching for online.

Overture.com has a fine feature where it will show you just how popular keywords that you’ve chosen really are. This is updated on a monthly basis, but you can also find week’s most popular keywords. http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

What is your site all about? What words best describe your site, your products/services, your hobbies, etc.? What words would a person use to find your web site? For example, if you are building a web site to show people in Los Angeles area fact that you have used cars for sale, term “preowned car” was searched 2628 times, followed by “certified preowned car” 209 times. “Used car” brings up more than 1 million searches, with “buy used car” at more than 534,000 searches in previous month. Other terms that show up are: “used car for sale,” “used car prices,” “used car financing,” “cheap used car,” “Los Angeles used car,” “used car online” and “sell used car.” On a highly ranked site these terms will be used along with others containing variations of used car and other terms related to a used car such as a dealership, blue book, classifieds, dealership, etc. Again, thinking like a potential customer or viewer is key to keywords.

Meta Tags Description When you accurately describe what is on each of your web pages, this will help anyone who discovers it in a search engine. You are doing your customer a big favor and they will thank you for it by visiting your site. For that used car site, here is what you might add for home page: “Low cost pre-owned vehicles that hold their value. Located Los Angeles, California.” This comes to only 12 words, or 82 characters including spaces. Some search engines accept up to 250 characters, others will allow far less. Keeping it within 100 characters or about 15-20 words is recommended.

Web Page Titles Titles aren’t just for books, movies and royalty. When designing your web site you’ll be able to name each page so that online visitors will locate your home page or other pages you’ve created. What you call your web site is as important as what you name your company. Be as descriptive as possible. You probably want your stamp collection web site to have term “stamp collecting” or “stamp collection” in title. Perhaps you have a page that has advice for stamp collectors, so you might want to label it “Stamp Collecting Advice” or “Postage Stamp Collecting.”

The lack of understanding page titles has shown up on my journeys online. I’ve seen web sites with “New Page” or “Page 2” appear along top of my browser as web designer clearly didn’t fathom benefits he or she had in naming pages.

That's great isn't it? Your very own website to promote business, and it also tracks your referrals and commission!

For example, popular program $1.67 A Day provides all subscribers with their own website, which looks like this:

http://akuma.167aday.com/

You Are Not Alone

The only problem is, every single person who signs up for $1.67 A Day gets same webpage, only thing different is that each person has their own name at bottom of page.

That means, even though you have your own webpage, it is not unique. There are thousands out there with same webpage as you.

Some of you might be saying that it's ok. That you can still promote your own webpage by emailing everybody (be careful that you don't spam!).

However, problem surfaces when you start considering search engines and directories, such as:

www.google.com www.yahoo.com www.msn.com www.askjeevevs.com Let's face it: vast majority of website visitors find website via search engines. Certain rare cases get visitors via word of mouth or brand name or via offline advertising. But numbers still indicate that search engines still provide most traffic.

And if you have thousands of other websites that look exactly same as yours, you're definitely not going to do very well in search engines. Most search engines look for how much value a webpage can provide to a search user. If your page is one of thousands that look same, it doesn't have much value.

As a side note, Google changed their search engine algorithm in November 2003, and a lot of commercial and affiliate websites appear to get hit hardest. It is now harder for these sites to rank well in Google.

Stand Out From The Crowd

a) Domains

So what you have to do, is be different from rest of affiliates. The first step is to get your own domain. Your domain is basically your internet address.

Consider following two URLs:

http://www.amazon.com/affiliates/cgi-bin/id?123456

and