This article is designed for those who are just building their first web site, particularly if they are interested in building a web site that could make them an online income. (Note: If you are still looking for a way to build an effective website…then you really should ‘click’ and read through this source initially: ‘How to build a website that can become a real online business!’)If you are like we were a short while back, then you will probably find yourself being tempted by cheap hosting offers, intrigued by
numerous (and largely dubious) Internet ‘Get Rich Quick’ schemes, and maybe bemused by concept of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and what it means for your web site building ambitions.
Every year millions more websites are being launched. Currently (May 2005) there are around 65 million active sites up and running (source: NetCraft), which account for many thousands of millions of pages! Many of these sites are published by novice web site builders, like you. Some will be doing it for fun, for a pastime, others will have recognized (as we have) that Internet can easily become a way of starting a small business that can earn you anything from a bit of ‘pocket money’ to many thousands of dollars a month…depending on how seriously you take it…
If you have decided to take web site building seriously, then, to be fair SEO is something you cannot avoid. Particularly if you are intent upon building websites that actually get visited! If you are naive enough you could even be persuaded to part with $1000’s a month to let someone do it for you! (OK so maybe YOU couldn’t be persuaded…why? Because you’re reading this…if you were paying SEO companies $1000’s a month you probably wouldn’t have had insight to ‘surf around’ and find this article! :-)
But maybe you have quite recently built your site, and ‘published’ it through a typical low cost domain registration/hosting company and are finding that you are getting few or no visitors? (Maybe you don’t even know how many visitors come to your site?) Then it is likely that getting to grips with some simple ‘optimisation’ techniques could help your site to be found by more than just handful of family and friends you have given your URL address to!
Now, you could take advantage of an incredibly economical total package of web site building, hosting and optimising services from a company like SiteSell (the company we use) because along with domain name of your choice, all advice and coaching you’ll need is included in low subscription fee (as is a fully supported, easy to use web site building and optimization technology)…BUT…
If you are determined to do it for yourself, no matter how many hours it’s going to take and how much frustration it causes then in this article, first of a series, we’d like to suggest that you start by taking a good look at your domain name (or what you are planning/hoping to register as a domain name) and ask yourself… “How good is domain name I have chosen?”
The first thing that Search Engines (SE’s) get to know about your site is your domain name. They use programmed web crawlers, or ‘spiders’, to check out domains appearing on ‘Net for their relevance as answers to millions of queries they are receiving…So, more relevant they judge your site to be, more likely it will be prioritised by SE’s, which means that your site appears earlier in search results, which naturally means there is more chance surfers will ‘find’ and look at your web site. This is critical to growth of your online business.
