SEO Dragon

If you are the very beginner in the site making, this article will help you to make first steps starting your own website. I am going to show all stages in detail: from choosing a proper domain name to promoting your resource. Also, in the current guide you will find many useful hints helping you not to step on rakes.

Step 1. Choosing a domain name

This step is very important for the success of the whole website. And mostly, because it is hard to change it in future and not to lose much effort you spent promoting your website. If you are creating representation of your company or brand in the web, include company’s/brand’s name in your domain. If your site is about some topics, include name of the most related one to the name of future domain.

Examples.

www.nike.com – Nike (company/brand)

www.farcry2.com – Far Cry 2 (game)

www.hostgator.com – HostGator web hosting (company/brand)

www.seodragon.biz – site, related to SEO (search engine optimization)

Hint. Major search engines value, when domain name contains keywords from search query. Hence, they will list your site higher in results page by highly relevant keywords.

Unfortunately, a domain name you have chosen could have been already taken. To check, if certain domain name is available use WHOIS service:

http://www.internic.net/whois.html

If it’s not taken yet, you will see a “NOT FOUND”, “No matches found…” or something alike.

Hint. Be sure to check for available domain names on trusted resources only! (you can trust to the Internic WHOIS). It’s not much widespread nowadays, but unfair websites or cheap webhosters could steal your domain name by registering it first and then selling back to you.

Step 2. Registering the domain name

First of all I would like to show the difference between domain management and hosting your website. Managing a domain and hosting a website are two independent activities, which could be made by two different service providers. However both of them are often done by a webhoster, which cooperates with domain management company (registrar). You can rely on single company, but as well you can diversify domain management and hosting of your website. In this case you will be able to change your registrar or your webhosting quite easily.

Hint. I would recommend you always to diversify domain management and webhosting, until you absolutely sure that you are working with reliable service.

Talking of reliable registrar, I would recommend GoDaddy service.

Step 3. Hosting your website

After you have chosen a nice nameboard for your site, it’s time to find a home for it. Talking of home I mean webhosting provider. Although you can change a webhoster relatively easy, a proper initial choice will give you an excellent opportunity to concentrate on more important things, while your site is going to be online and reachable. First let’s make a little excursion into webhosting business.

In general, there are two kinds of webhosting companies. Big ones have their own servers, datacenters and all related infrastructure. They support two options: shared hosting and dedicated server. Shared hosting means, that there is a server which hosts many websites and you only have a share of its resources. In this case server’s resources (memory and CPU time) your website can use are limited to certain values. Shared hosting is an excellent choice for websites with moderate daily attendance (up to 5000-10000 unique visitors a day). Another option is a dedicated server. Such an option is more preferable for websites with high attendance. In this case you will be able to use all the resources of the server without any limitations, as well as installing additional software, etc. Intermediate solution is VPS (virtual private server), when you have your own virtual server, but share resources of physical server with others. Still it has certain advantages of dedicated server. For example you can freely install additional software on your VPS.

Small webhosting companies most often rent a dedicated server or buy reseller hosting packages and divide its resources between their clients. As a result their clients get shared hosting, but its capacity is more limited as compared to shared hosting from “big companies”.

Hint. Small webhosters often offer free domains or help registering domains. Never trust your domain to them in order to avoid troubles when switching to other hosting company in future.

I would recommend HostGator to be picked as a hosting company for two reasons: it’s really great webhoster and you can host for the first month at no charge (check the conclusion of the article to find how).

Step 4. Linking domain and hosting

After you purchase hosting package, hosting provider would give you two nameservers. You should set them for your domain in domain’s management panel. Then it can take time for your site to be actually available using URL in the browser (from several hours to one week).

Step 5. Choosing a platform for your website

Nowadays there are two ways to develop a site: develop a static website or use CMS (content management system). Static website mostly consists of HTML pages, but the important thing is that you have to upload modified files in order to change contents of your site. When website is driven by CMS, you just open your browser and edit site’s contents on the spot. Using a CMS gives certain advantages: you may modify/add contents to your site quite fast, easily update site’s design without changing every page manually, and use various plugins to add extra functionality to your site, for example image gallery. However there are certain disadvantages: it takes time to configure CMS so your site looks and works like you want and CMS consumes additional resources.

For small websites or ones not to be often updated static option is acceptable. But be ready, that even small changes affecting whole site (for example adding a counter) will take much time and require doing quite boring work changing every page manually.

If you are going to develop big site with daily updates, static option would be the bad solution. Spending a day studying CMS will be paid off a hundredfold. I would recommend DruPal as a good free CMS.

Step 6. Design

For the first time you may use default or free design templates from the web. But to give your site individuality you may think of custom design. From my experience, site’s design is not the primary factor, but in combination with good contents it could increase your sales or attract additional attention from visitors.

I would recommend not hurrying with custom design, rather concentrating your efforts on creating qualitative content. When your site’s contents will become formed, it will be easier to choose proper design solution.

If you decide to order design from specialist (web designer), don’t forget to mention following aspects:

• examples of the sites looking good in your opinion (relative to the subject of your site);
• preferable colors of the design;
• your expectations from the site (to sell products, to entertain, to emphasize particular qualities of your company).

Hint. The more you control the development of your site’s design, the more chances you have to receive what you want. But don’t overdo with control or you take the risk of getting too standard design solution.

Step 7. Fill up your site with contents

If you aren’t going to start up a new video/image service, then let’s talk about such thing as text contents. Most of the sites in the Internet mostly consist of text. Text information is the reason why visitors come to the site and you shouldn’t underestimate its importance. Google paradigm in the past was “Content is King”, but I ensure, that it is still true nowadays.

From personal experience: sites with competently written text, but with simple design and based on 1998 web technologies could sell very well. On the other hand, websites with poor contents, but shiny design barely sell anything.

Now I would like to introduce some practical hints:

• All text on the main page must be placed above the fold and introduce your site to visitors. Just brief overview: who you are / what you sell / what your site is about.
• Place most important information above the fold.
• Don’t overload page with the text. If you don’t want to break your article into pieces, at least provide handy navigational tools.
• Except for navigational pages, every page should contain minimal contents (at least 1000 characters).

Step 8. Promote your website

To choose informative domain name and reliable hosting, make nice design and fill website with interesting content is only the first two steps. Still there are no visitors on the site. One can dedicate three possible ways for visitor to get to your site:

• natural traffic from search engines: user searches for some stuff in the search engine and goes to your site from results page;
• referrers: user follows a link on another site or clicks on the ad;
• direct traffic: user just types in URL to his browser or uses offline bookmarks.

Below there are listed some widely used online advertisement techniques.

Contextual advertisement

You might have seen ads when have used the search engines. Their principle of operation is simple: you choose phrases your customers are likely to be searching by and set up a price for a click. For example, if one sells cars he can pick up the phrase “buy a car”. When someone does search by the exact phrase (or similar one) your ad is showing. If user clicks on it, he or she is passes on to your site and you are being charged for that click. Also you can choose an option, when your ads are shown on partner sites. The principle is similar: if partner site’s content contains (or relates) the chosen phrase (site about cars in the example) then your ad is shown. Advantages of context ads are:

• your get targeted traffic;
• context ads are very flexible: you may focus to the specific group of people. For example, only to those living in United States;
• one may set up context ads very fast and start getting potential customers at once.

There are also some disadvantages:

• ads are ads: there is a belief, that people trust to ads less than to links from search engines results page.
• if you have targeted ads poorly, you will not only get indifferent visitors, but also waste your budget.
• in a highly competitive niche clicks may cost a fortune.

At present, the absolute leader of context ads market is Google AdSense.

SEO (search engine optimization)

The topic of SEO is beyond current review, but you can find some basic information below.

Search engine optimization “promotes your website to search engines”, so it shows up higher in search results. Then mechanism is as described: someone queries a phrase related to your site, they see your site in results and visits it. The traffic you get from search engines is called natural traffic. For highly competitive niches it’s harder to promote a website and, hence, it could be more expensive.

SEO techniques have much in common with contextual advertisement. For example, if you sell red cars in Wisconsin only, then showing ad by keyword “car” is waste of money. The same situation with promotion: it’s very hard to get to the first ten results (TOP10) by the query “car”, but it’s much simpler to get your site shown up in TOP10 by the query “buy red car Wisconsin”.

SEO budgets are often more moderate, that ones for contextual advertisement, but search engine optimization in comparison with contextual advertisement has certain disadvantages. For example, you can’t focus on the specific group of people, only on the specific queries. But it’s not so important, because you pay for the promotion only regardless of how many visitors were actually driven to your site.

Affiliate programs

Affiliate programs or CPA (cost per action) advertising models are widespread in the Internet. The mechanism is quite simple. Webmasters advertise your site by any legal means and you pay them for actual results: client made a purchase, filled up a form, etc. The popular middleman for affiliate programs in the Internet is Commission Junction. Also take a look at Google Affiliate Network.

Conclusion

To run a website you are going to accomplish three tasks:

1)      Choose reliable webhoster;

2)      Create an original design and fill up your site with contents;

3)      Promote your resource.

To successfully accomplish first task, I would recommend you HostGator – reliable hosting provider you can count on. If you signup using this affiliate link I will help you establishing the hosting, linking it with the domain and loading your first page to it. To get help email me at mail@seodragon.biz and write a domain name you entered during registration. Also feel free to email me if you would like to get a coupon code to test HostGator for free.