How to Create a Website

If you are completely new to website building, i.e. you know nothing about HTML, FTP and the like, this page will show you not only how to create a website - there are plenty of such resources on the Net, but how to create a successful website getting a lot of traffic from search engines, in the most time-and-money efficient way possible.

The whole process is divided into four sections:

1. Planning
2. Building
3. Promotion
4. Making Money

Planning

If you're going to create a website not only for fun, take the time to think it through thoroughly. The real opportunities on this Internet lie in the niches. The only successful strategy for newcomers is to select a narrow niche and to fill it with useful content. Think about topics that attract a lot of seraches. Wordtracker is a nice tool to get ideas about popularity of keywords.

Pick the keywords and plan pages of your site. Also select the main keyword for your home page. Each page should be optimized for one keyword. However, if you have managed to find some keywords with very low competitiveness, you can optimize a page for two or more keywords.

For example, if Google finds only 20-30 sites providing information about a particular keyword, there is a good chance that your page will be found if you include that keyword only once or twice into it. Otherwise, if you have 50000 competitors, you'll need to optimize all areas of the page for this keyword to get a high ranking.

Building

They are online website builders which anyone can use to build professional looking websites and have them hosted instantly. No software to buy, no code to learn, all you need is to be a little Internet savvy and know how to click your mouse. Those online builders are perfect to test your ideas.

You need to get a domain name if you're serious about making your business successful. Having your own domain instead of an extension of someone else's, gives your site better credibility, recognition, and visibility with the search engines and directories.

Choosing a domain name is very important step in the entire process of building a website, and due to the recent "gold rush" for domain names, it can also be one of the most difficult. It may seem that nearly all "good" names have been registered. This doesn't mean, however, that there's nothing left, you just have to be a bit more creative.

Here are some tips for choosing a domain name...

Keep the length between 5-20 characters if possible (the length can be up to 63 characters).
Try to base it on one of your main keywords for higher relevancy. The engines will rank your site higher for your keyword if it's included in your domain name. You may use dashes if it helps readability. Generally, don't use dashes if your name has only two words in it.

The generic Top Level Domain .com is by far the most marketable, and thus the most valuable domain.
You'll have to find hosting provide - this is additional $6-$20 per month fee.

Promotion

Just putting a site on the Web doesn't guarantee anyone will visit it. It's time to submit it to the major search engines and directories which provide an important source of regular visitors to any website.

You also need to work on building link popularity of your site. This factor has grown in importance in the last years. For example, Google is hesitant to list a site that doesn't have at least one link from other domain indicating that the site is worth listing in its index. In addition, if your link popularity isn't high enough, you'll never achieve top rankings on many keywords.

The simple solution is reciprocal link exchange. This is the most popular way of increasing link popularity: two webmasters simply agree to add a link to each other's site to their sites. A couple of well-researched link exchanges will generate the link popularity required for a Google listing.

Set up your own Links page on your site that will hold the link swaps you're going to arrange. Create the Title and Description for your site or copy them from your home page. Since the Title will appears as the link to your site, ensure that it contains your main keyword.

Go to Google and find a site that is ranked high for your main keyword. Most likely it has a Links page with dozens, even hundreds, of reciprocal links. Copy these links along with their descriptions to your Links page. Then, send a polite email to webmasters of these sites, introduce your site, tell them that you have already added a link to their sites from yours, and then ask them whether they would be kind enough to add a link to your site (include your Title and Description).

The response rate to these emails is low, especially if your site is new and doesn't get a lot of traffic. After a couple of weeks, remove the links to those sites which haven't responded and try to locate more sites with which to exchange links.

Making Money

Maybe you've heard people say that you can get rich on the Internet. But it's not a get rich overnight business. Internet success takes time, effort and knowledge. There's no easy get rich quick method, so you need to spend the time for building income stream from your website.

Affiliate programs

They pay you a percentage of the sales you generate for them. You don't have to spend time and energy creating your own product. No dealing with customer service, fulfilling orders, and the like. And some of them pay 50% commission.

Join only a few affiliate programs whose products or services match the audience you attract to your site and concentrate on providing useful, information-rich content that will generate traffic and sales.

Google AdSense

This is a popular, fast and easy way for small and medium sites to display relevant, text-based, un-obtrusive Google AdWords ads and receive a share of the pay-per-click payment. Because the ads are related to what your users are looking for on your site, the results can be much better than you'd earn from many affiliate programs.

AdSense is easy to join, it doesn't cost you anything, all you have to do is paste a few lines of code into your pages, and Google does the work of finding the best ads for them from 100,000 AdWords advertisers. You can check the relevance of the ads by looking at the text ads near the top-right of this page.

For now, AdSense is the best way to generate revenue from informational sites even if there are no obvious related affiliate programs. But you don't need to disregard affiliate programs. You can combine both ways and double your income.