How can it help you. First, set-up a Twitter account, its free. Next post some tid bits about what is going on with your business. Start inviting friends to follow your “tweets.” What this will provide is a simple non-intrusive way to update people on your business. For instance if you emailed your mailing list 10 times per day, they would soon flag you as a SPAMMER and ignore your emails. But you can post all you want on Twitter and since only those who are interested will follow your “tweets” it is a non-intrusive way to keep them up to date with your business. As you gain followers, you will have an easy way to get the word out about new products and services and also create a dialog about your business.

Its also worth finding local newspapers, blogs and other news services and sending them the release directly prior to submitting it to the public. All writers love to break stories so if your story is newsworthy and you offer them a preview of the news, you are more likely to get covered. In some cases it maybe worthwhile to offer exclusivity to a particular news source that is highly related to your news meaning that they will get the chance to write about your story before anyone else so that they can “break” the story.

Many blogs are looking for content. Simply emailing them your release may get you a quick story or re-print. Add up a lot of blogs that link to you and that maybe worth more than one story in a single large news source.

PR is a snowball. Writers all follow each other so if one news source writes about you, others will follow. Make your story newsworthy and get the word out.

First you will want an HTML editor. You can actually create HTML pages in a basic text editor but that is for advanced users. You’ll have much better luck using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. One of the most popular is Dreamweaver from Adobe. This is a sophisticated tool but very powerful. It will take some learning curve to get going but if you are serious about building your own site this is probably a tool worth investigating. You can also create a web page with a Word processor such as Microsoft Word. This is a way to get started quickly but not ideal as the HTML it produces will be difficult to maintain. Microsoft used to offer a product called FrontPage which was quite easy to use but they have discontinued it and launched a new product called ExpressionWeb that might be worth a look although I’ve not used it. Another worth looking at is CoffeeCup which is a little less expensive but quite powerful.

FTP client - you will likely want an FTP client such as CuteFTP, CaptainFTP or Traffic for the Mac. This will make it much easier to move the files you create to your web server. Some of the more advanced web development tools and html editors have this built in but if you are not using one of those an FTP client will make it much easier to move files. Most web hosting providers let you upload web pages through their own web interface but this gets cumbersome if you have a lot of pages to manage but is an easy way to get started.

That’s all you really need to get going for a basic web site. As you get more advanced and want to offer your users a more interactive experience there are many roads to travel but getting your own site up and running should not require much in the way of sophisticated software and in fact you can most likely get going with what you have today on your PC.

A blog is a great way to keep your target audience informed about your product or services and a great way to create traffic from search engines. Most blog software is well optimized for Google and other search engines so that your posts will get indexed and hopefully draw free search traffic to your site. A blog can be a powerful tool to build an audience and drive traffic to your site and as many have learned, a blog can be a large business on its own.

Some basic guidelines for blogging:

-Blog consistently. Most readers will not come back if your blog posts are sporadic. Pick a schedule and stick to it.

-Write your posts in a friendly tone and keep them relatively short. This is not a rule but I find most popular blogs are brief, easy to read and written in a friendly voice rather than an academic voice.

-When you link to a site or discuss a product or service, reach out to the site owner and get them to link to you. A great way to build search engine ranking and drive inbound traffic.

-Tag and categorize your posts using keywords that will drive search traffic

-Make sure your blog posts are automatically submitted to technorati and other blog searches. Most blogging software does this automatically but make sure its enabled for your blog.

Typically the most cumbersome part is the initial set-up. Your web hosting provider will most likely provide you with an FTP account or the capability to create FTP accounts from their web site. Follow the instructions on your web hosting provider’s site to get the FTP server address and your username and password to connect to the FTP server. Then use an FTP client such as CuteFTP, Captain FTP, Traffic or any number of others to connect to your web host’s FTP server. Once you do that, it is pretty straightforward to copy files from your PC over to your web server.

1) Most likely someone has already done it or is doing something similar. Start by researching other related sites. Make a list of what you like and what you don’t like. What are your favorite web sites and what do you like about them? Think of the web sites you use every day. What got you to them to begin with and why do you go back? I’m not suggesting you copy someone else’s work, just suggesting that there are millions of web sites out there and none is 100% original. Take a look around and get some ideas.

2) Keep it simple and clean. Google started with a blank white page and a single search box on it. There was no question what you could do on that site. They’ve evolved a lot since but simple and clean is the way to go. People tend to have very short attention spans on the web so if they come to your site and don’t get what it is right away, they will leave and are unlikely to come back. Make it very clear what you do, what the site offers and what action you would like them to take. Don’t be afraid to make it over simple to start.

3) Just get started. Any web site should be an evolution and if you try to make it perfect before you launch you will never launch. Put something down and make it better every day.

Some of my favorite designed sites:

-Twitter - Simple and easy. There make it very clear what they want you to do. Create an account and tell people what you are doing. Not much to it

-Google - by keeping it clean it is always very fast to load. Too many pictures and animations slows a site down. Make sure yours loads fast and does what it is supposed to do well. Do like Google does!

-Netvibes.com - its a more complex site but they do a great job of walking you through the steps and the design is sleek

-Blogger.com - clean and simple

-CB2.com - well thought out shopping site, elegant style. Easy to find what you are looking for. A little slow but nice visually

Given that most people start the web searching experience on Google or other search engines, getting listed on the first page is incredibly valuable and like anything of value its incredibly competitive. First and foremost you should know that SEO is an art more than a science. Google does not provide much more than guidelines about how their search algorithms work and so anyone who promises they can get you on page 1 of Google is probably lying. You can certainly pay for ads on Google using their Adwords system but to be listed highly in the natural search results on Google requires patience, effort and some key know how. Obtaining high rank in Google can change your business but given that they can change their algorithm (and do) at any time and given you have no control over this, SEO should be part of a larger marketing plan. Don’t rely on it, even if you have good placement today.

Keyword Strategy

First and foremost in SEO is coming up with a strong keyword strategy. The trends in Internet searching are interesting as searches are getting longer and more complex. That is good news for web site owners as it opens up opporunities to get top placement for a wide variety of phrases that are significantly more targetted. What is your site about? What words and phrases will users type into Google to find the types of products and services you offer. Think of all the permutations. Ask your friends what they would search. There are some keyword tools provided by Google that show you trends in searches. Review competitive sites. Search these phrases on Google and see what comes up. This will give you a good idea on how competitive your keywords are. This list is key. Once you have your keywords and phrases, figure out how to work them gracefully into your pages. Do not try and trick Google. Search Engine SPAM is a sure way to get kicked out of the Google search. Keyword strategy is not about tricking the search engines it is about using words and phrases that users will search on and will get your site found.

Content Creation

One simple way to improve traffic from search engines is simply to create more relevant content. More content will ultimately drive more traffic as long as that content is relevant and optimized properly. Writing articles, sourcing content, adding product reviews will all help create a wealth of relevant content that will get indexed in the search engines. Another great way to add content is to have your users do it for you. This is often referred to as user generated content. User generataed content is one of the best weapons you can put in your arsenal. In fact, if you look at many of the most visited sites on the Internet you’ll notice that most have a huge amount of content and you may also notice that many of these sites rely on the content created by their user communities (E.g. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Craigslist, etc.).

Content Optimization

Content optimization is simply putting together a process to organize your pages so that the search engines can read the pages, understand their content and index them accordingly. Emphasize the phrases from your keyword list as part of this strategy so that the search phrases that are important to you are driving traffic to the appropriate pages on your site. There is a lot to optimizing content but some basics are use filenames that have your keywords in them (E.g. dog-walking.html rather than page2.html), title all of your pages, include text that is relevant, cross link your pages to one another, avoid images with text in them where possible and replace with text, create a site map of all the pages on your site. Look at the html on pages that are highly ranked. Watch what they are doing and do the same.

Link Strategies and Directory Submissions

While the keywords and content on your site determine which phrases will get your site found by searchers, it is the inbound links into your site that will determine where in the results your site will fall. Studies have shown that if you are not in the first 3 pages of search results (I.e. the top 30), your site will rarely get visited. The relevance and the quality of the inbound links to your site are critical in improving your search engine results. There are certain paid listings that can dramatically improve your search engine rankings but there are many blogs and sites that will have relevance to you and are already highly ranked that might be willing to swap links with you or even link to you simply because you add value to their site. In general the more high quality, highly ranked sites that link to your site, the higher your rank will be.

Measure everything

Use web analytics to view where your traffic is coming from. Google Analytics is free and a great resource but there are plenty of others. I check my Analytics almost every day to see how many people are visiting my sites and how they are finding my sites. That way I can always improve.

Think of a web page as a file similar to a Microsoft Word document that you have created and saved on your PC but rather than a Word document, your file is an .html file. Its true that many web pages are generated dynamically at the time a user visits a site but for the purpose of describing web hosting let’s discuss these pages as if they are static, meaning they never change. So each web page you create is a file, such as about-us.html or welcome.html. When a visitor to your site wants to view a web page on your site they enter the URL of that page in their browser either by typing it in or clicking on a link from another page to your page. At that time, your web page is actually downloaded to their computer and displayed in a browser such as Internet Expoler (IE) or Firefox. But where is it downloaded from? Where does it exist for browsers to be able to find it. The answer is a web server. A web server is simply a computer or series of computers with some special characteristics. It is a computer that stores your files and can be found by anyone browsing the internet at any time. Obviously this can’t be your home computer or laptop. Those computers aren’t (or shouldn’t be) accessible to anyone on the web and nor are they always on. This is where a web server comes into play. Web servers are typically very fast and powerful computers that can handle many requests at one time. They are always connected to the public internet so that anyone can access the web pages on those computers. When you put your html files on a web server then anyone in the world should be able to view them. A web hosting provider is a service provider company that manages web servers for you. Typically they manage thousands of them in a data center that has redundant power, multiple high speed internet connections and people on staff 24 hours a day to make sure these computers are always up and running. There are both shared web servers and dedicated web servers. A shared server simply means your files are on the same computer with other web sites. This is very common and highly secure. Those other web site owners on your shared server will only be able to make changes to their html pages and you will only be able to make changes to yours. Millions of web sites are on shared servers (including this one) and for most small web sites this is sufficient. I’d suggest that if you are reading this blog, that probably means a shared server is fine for your needs at least to start.

That was a lot of technical mumbo jumbo. Suffice it to say, to launch your web site you need a web hosting provider and there are hundreds including Yahoo!, Bluehost, Godaddy and many more. You should be able to get good web hosting to launch your site for around $10-$20 per month. If you plan to do commerce on your site (I.e. sell things) then you will have to pay a little more but most web hosts offer that as an add-on. Your web host should also provider e-mail and most have other add-on services you can purchase.

Sometimes you find a name that is registered that is not being used. You can try to find the owner by using the WHOIS database that keeps track of who owns each domain. Go to this link and enter you domain name and it will tell you the contact information of the person who owns any domain on the web. Many people use private registration so their personal information is hidden but there will always be a contact email address that you can send a note to if you are interested in contacting the owner.

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp

If you want to purchase a domain from someone you will have to transfer ownership. This can be a multi-step process but any domain registrar (godaddy, register.com, yahoo!, namebargain.com, etc.) will all offer these tools.

When you’ve found a domain you like that is available, create an account at any of the hundreds of domain registrars and you can purchase the domain on the spot. Most domains are about $10 per year. You can add other services such as private registration or parking pages but to simply take ownership of a domain you should not pay much more than $10.

The point is, there are many good domains out there that are unregistered you just need to be creative.

So…

Rule #1 is don’t panic. There are plenty of names you can find that will work. But you will have to be creative. Mixing and matching words. Using funny endings. Make up words. Put combinations of words together. You will find something that works

Rule #2 is make sure you domain is easy to spell and easy to remember. When you’re at a cocktail party you are going to want to tell people about your great web site. And you’re going to want them to check it out when they get home and hopefully tell their friends. I don’t like hyphens or numbers in domains if that can be avoided. Avoid words that are hard to spell. Try it on a few friends before you commit and ask them how they would spell that.

Rule #3 Google and other search engines do appear to give some credit for the words in your domain name so it is worth considering if your site is about dog walking and you want people to find your site when the search on “dog walking” (E.g. dogwalkingrules.com) you may try to use those words in the domain. This is not a hard rule, just a suggestion to think about.

Rule #4 There are many domain squatters out there sitting on good domain names. This is annoying but it is a reality of the internet. What they do is buy up lots of names for about $10 / year from a domain registrar and then sit on them. They run ads on the sites to earn revenue while they wait for a buyer to come along and purchase the domain for a much higher price. You can find some good names from these folks and if you are unable to come up with anything available it is possible to find a good name for anywhere from a few hundred dollars to up to a few thousand. I would never recommend paying more than a few thousand for a domain name unless you know you are going to build a huge multi million dollar brand. The only exception to this is if the domain already gets a lot of traffic. That is a different story but in most cases it makes more sense to find a name for cheap and use the money to drive traffic to your site. Since traffic is ultimately what will make you rich and famous

Rule #5 The days of people putting random words in the browser and adding .com are over. If someone wants to find information about dogs these days they likely start by entering a search into Google not by randomly putting dogs.com in their browser bar. More on search engine optimization later but remember there are domains out there and thanks to Google and other search engines, the name of your site is a lot less important since people will find you in other ways.

In thinking of the name for this site I tried a lot of combinations. howtobuildasite.com, websitetutorial.com, stepbystepwebsite.com. I knew the site was going to be a guide to help people build their own web site so as I tried different combinations I finally found one I liked and that was available. I registered the domain at namebargain.com for $9.48 per year and the process of finding a name and registering it took about an hour. So it can be done with little time and very little money and that is step 1 in launching a web site.