If you are just starting out in your new business and you

decide that a website could be a valuable addition to this

business how do you go about getting one up and running? You

have two basic options really. Do it yourself or employ an

individual or company to do it for you. Which option you take

depends upon your own confidence in acquiring the skills

necessary and the amount of funds you can divert to hiring in a

company. If you have sufficient funds then hire in a company as

this will enable you to devout all your time to developing your

core business. If you don’t then you will have to do it

yourself. So how do you go about it?

You will require no or little knowledge of HTML as you can

purchase a whole package from a web hosting company which

should include some form of website developing software and

your domain name plus the hosting of your website. Give some

thought to your domain name. It should be easy for people to

type in and remember. Not too long, succinct and preferably no

hyphens. So you have chosen your domain name and your hosting

service now you must develop your site. Again give some thought

to this. How many pages you are likely to produce, how many

links you will need. What sort of information is going on each

page. If you are completely new to this then I would suggest

that using your site editor software you produce a first draft

and publish it. You can always modify everything later as you

go along. This will give you your first website which you can

then submit to the search engines albeit not exactly what you

want or one that is going to attract visitors.

Now you need to do quite a lot of research on the internet as

to how to make your site visitor friendly and search engine

friendly. Here you will discover the importance of good

content, changing content, appropriate keywords, backward

links, article writing and good copy on the website. Taking

this information on board will enable you to restructure and

rewrite your site over a period of time, probably many times.

However all the time this learning process is going on your

site is actually published on the Web so is likely to start

being trawled by search engines and getting indexed even if it

doesn’t sky rocket through the rankings. The most important

thing to do from the outset is to write good content that will

be of interest to your visitors. If it holds the attention of

your visitors and gets them to contact you then it will likely

be of equal interest to the search engines. Do not produce a

site that is written with the search engines in mind. It is

your visitors who are important and by following a few simple

rules that are published all over the Web your site can become

very attractive to visitors and to search engines also. Keep

the site textually based, there is no point in having very

flashy graphics as these are not noticed by the search engines

and often annoy visitors who want to get at the information

they are after as quickly as possible and not have to wait for

some animated introduction to finish before they can enter the

actual site.

Having put into practice all the advice that is out there you

should have put together a pleasing and appealing website that

visitors and search engines like. Each day or week you add more

content and develop more links and you will gradually climb up

the rankings. The last piece of advice I would give is start

writing and submitting articles. One or two a week would be

excellent over a year or two. Once your articles start being

published you will see an immediate leap in the number of links

back to your site and a subsequent rise in the rankings if your

content is also good. Aim to produce over time several hundred

articles if possible. The more you write the more links back to

your site you will develop and the more visitors you will get as

well as boost your rankings in the search engines.