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A guide for Newbies
to get under the Radar of the ever increasing mountain
of technophobia that faces a Web site owner starting
off.
There is of course a huge amount
to learn in setting up and running a Web Site, which
is why, I believe, that most newcomers tend to put their
trust in a web designer, aka webmaster and leave them
to get on with things hoping that all will go well.
Big Mistake!
It’s only when, having spent quite a lot of money, you
find out that your pride and joy is not giving you the
results that you imagined, that alarm bells can start
to ring. In my own case this took approximately four
years to sink in. After a promising start, with some
enquiries from the other side of the world, things not
only didn’t get any better but got worse!
Of course, if you are running and developing a new business,
which takes a colossal amount of time and commitment,
you don’t initially have time to worry too much about
the success of your web site. After all, a web site
will make you a zillionaire quicker than you can spell
the long version of SEO! Big Mistake!
I believe it is just as important to designate sufficient
time to understanding how a web site is developed, promoted
and maintained as it is to spend time on all the other
many facets of a fledgling business.
Many new business owners, myself included, thought in
the past that just by having a web site and on-line
presence AND a webmaster, that everything would be fine.
Visitors and sales would surely follow and increase
exponentially. Not So!
Probably the pace of change on-line is more rapid than
most businesses realise and therefore if you are going
to build a site AND do some reasonable level of commerce
from it, you have got to study and learn a number of
basics.
- Key word research should
really begin before you set about building your site,
because it can help with the choice of a suitable
Domain name and continue to assist in the titles and
scope of your eventual articles.
- Original and fresh content
related to your prospective field is a necessity,
and needs to be uploaded on a very regular basis.
Unless you are a very large company with an in-house
webmaster, this is probably the most crucial aspect
of developing a site in terms of getting good search
engine results
- Writing new pages can be
extremely time consuming and unless you have a suitable
S.M.S. package installed, enabling you to become your
own webmaster, it’s highly likely you will commence
the slow but inexorable slide to oblivion, other wise
known as Zero traffic.
- Build your site by all means
but make sure that you become your own webmaster,
having taken a crash course in the do’s and don’ts.
You absolutely must have the facility to control what
goes on within your site. If you miss out on this
vital aspect of developing a site, the chances are
that you will lose interest and stop creating ideas
and content.
- Learning to write your content,
even if this seems a bit beyond your reach to begin
with is another essential skill to be fine tuned and
believe me, once you have got under way it will become
easier with each passing day. Looking at how other
web sites operate and the standard of their content
will help you along the path.
- Articles on your area of
expertise, submitted to a number of reputable Directories,
will almost immediately get you noticed and start
to build credibility. These can be modified for use
as web pages and will provide ideas for new content
on a never ending basis. It has been my experience
in the recent past that articles can have a very advantageous
effect on search engine results. Credibility is something
you can never have too much of.
- Search engine optimization,
a very fancy term, with nearly as many, so called,
experts as there are sites on the Web and similar
in number to the droves of Web site designers! This
is a thorny topic and one best left to the experts,
for the behind the scenes work. However, it is my
belief that the best results come from fresh and original
content put up on your site on a regular basis. Results
from my blog of only two months existence, in terms
of link popularity, are outstripping my web site that
has been on-line for five years. This is all down
to regular articles on my chosen topic.
- A newsletter or ezine, is
a very good way of encouraging traffic to your site
and building your subscriber list that you can eventually
turn into clients, customers and sales. Offering an
incentive for your visitors to part with their e-mail
address can be by way of a free mini course or e book..
In the case of your newly published E-Book, offering
a free download of one complete chapter is something
worth considering and is a very popular technique.
This is all part of the credibility building process.
Once you get used to making regular posts to your
newly set up Blog, a newsletter should be relatively
easy to produce, without too much stress.
- A Business Blog is I think,
the way forward, for many web site owners who would
like to see an increase in traffic of a targeted nature.
They are easy to set up and have the advantage of
being virtually instant. One of the great things that
can help you in becoming more adept as a webmaster,
utilising your own blog, is that learning the rudiments
of html is not the nightmare that it may appear to
be. You can practise away to your heart’s content
adding and subtracting code from a blog post and see
immediately the result in the preview pane. You don’t
even need to publish this post. Again, getting used
to viewing the source code of other web sites and
seeing how they do things will give you no end of
inspiration.
Control is the key to success
in developing your skill as a webmaster.
It is, however, an achievable
goal to go from Meek to Geek in just a couple
of weeks, with a little effort!
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