It seems that everybody has a website these days, sharing their views and advertising their businesses. For some the idea of making a site like this though can be a daunting prospect, and hard to get started with.
With this in mind we’ve put together some advice on how to get started, and the fairly simple process of building your own site:
The Web Host
The first thing you need is to find the host for your website. Examples of these are Go Daddy, Hostgator, and many other companies that can easily be found online. The idea is to find the best to suite your needs, and to do so at a cost that you can afford. If you are starting out, you’ll probably look for a Shared Hosting service, which is cheaper, but will be constrained in terms of bandwidth and functionality.
Domain Name
All websites need to have a domain name, and this will be how people find your site. Many web hosts will offer the ability to buy domain names and connect them to your site automatically, so this is the best method to use. Make sure you pick a name that is both attractive to the people you are trying to catch the attention of, and that it is easy to remember.
Building a Site
The more technical minded site builder can create their own HTML pages and upload them to the site. For most of us though, it is best to use a CMS (Contact Management System) to make the job easier. WordPress is a good example of this, and they even offer a free but restrictive free hosting service so it is best to install their software onto your site, and then only be restricted by the host itself.
Other CMS services are available such as Joomla are also available and can offer a more versatile system. Beginners though are likely to use something like WordPress for its flexible nature, and the ease of building attractive websites.
The Importance of SEO
When a site is ready to be populated with content, it is also important for search engines like Google to be able to find it. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is important because it helps form content that is search engine friendly and brings in traffic in a more organic way. It is also important to make plans to share things socially on services such as Twitter, so people can discover the content themselves.
While this is a fairly basic look at what it takes to build a website, hopefully it gives you a good idea of what else to look up, and topics to look deeper at. Websites are easy to set up these days, and to populate quickly. Engage enough readers, and you may find your site becomes a huge success.
In order to make your website Search Engine friendly; you’ll need to include a lot of keywords at the very least to help the program categorise your site. If you are designing a football team’s fan page, for example, you’ll want to include the team’s name, the word football and various other common words/terms referring to the sport to make it easy for the Search Engines to identify the website’s purpose.
Without SEO, a website will struggle to attract attention from Web Searches as it will no doubt end up on one of the last pages of results. A website that relies on the user inputting the URL itself is a website that will fail – you must be within the first two results pages a Web Search generates or you will see next to no traffic whatsoever.
Aside from keywords; good SEO practice is to include plenty of backlinks on your website which offer a route, via your webspace, to another site that returns the favour to you. A lot of backlinks will attract the attention of the Search Engines as they aim to categorise the entirety of the World Wide Web.
However, it is important to keep the links relevant to your website’s central topic if they are to contribute to the quality of the SEO. A football website can link to a rugby site as they are both team sports but a link to a sewing website will not be of any use as far as SEO is concerned – keep a clear focus throughout the SEO process.