This article will help you to create a good website with common seo principles in current industry. When I started my carreer, My dream was to start a website with good traffic and that will help all. But at that time I was not aware of Web Hosting and SEO related things. Later I studied basics of Web hosting and SEO, then started to experiment my knowledge with my site( http://www.seofreetools.net/ ). Thats the best practice to study SEO. Just start a site and experiment. Only thing is that, you need to spend the cost of a shirt.

Now a days I am thinking to write a simple article that will help all, who are new to Web hosting and SEO. I strongly feel that every one will have a desire to own a website. Also every one will like to add their website name with their address.

These are the 10 simple steps that I feel is the best practice to create a good website. Just go through this and enjoy the world of web hosting..:)

1) Domain Name Registration

First and very important section. You should careful about domain name. To find a good domain name, first you have to select a common keyword related to your website. That should be the Primary Keyword of our website.

There are lot of tools to find the suitable keyword for our business.

I will recommend Google Keyword Tool :

a) https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
b) http://www.google.com/sktool/

eg : If our business related sports shoe, then search with this keyword in these tools.

You can see two types of variables in search result.

i) Advertiser Competition

ii) Approx Avg Search Volume

You should select a keyword with High search volume and Lowest Advertiser Competition.

This will be the Primary keyword of your site. Next step is to find out a domain name containing this Primary keyword. This will helps you a lot in google search because domain name will get more preference in google search.

Eg: bestsportshoe.com,getsportshoe.com etc.

Try to select a domain name with less characters and meaningful word because it will be easy to remember.

Refer these sites to register a domain.
yourdomainvalue.com
triple.com

2) Domain Space Registration( Buy a space to host your website)

By getting a domain name you have an address but for existence you need to buy some space to host your website.

According to your site’s characterstics you have to select the web hosting plan.

The main factors we have to consider are

a) Plan fee => The amount we have to pay for a plan(monthly or yearly)

b) Disk Space => The total space(GB) to host our site

c) Monthly traffic => The total bandwidth allowed for site( if our site needs file upload and download functionality, then we need more bandwith )

d) Addon domains => If we need to host more than one site, consider this.

e) Developer tools => The tools needed to develop a site like php,asp,jsp,python,perl etc

f) Company => The quality of technical support of web hosting company

I will recommend http://www.gethostingplans.com/
for selecting a suitable web hosting plan.

There is a good search option to find a suitable plan based on main factors.

http://www.gethostingplans.com/search-web-hosting-plans/ss/

3) Point Your Domain to Web Hosting Server

Next step is to point your domain to web hosting server, where you are going to host your site.

Eg: If your domain name is getsportshoe.com and IP of hosting server is 208.43.209.22 , then you have to point the domain to 208.43.209.22. Contact your domain registrar to point this. It will take atleast 24 hours to propagate domain all over the world.

4) Create a Template for Your Website( Look and Feel )

Its very important to have a good look and feel for your site. The most important feature of successful site is that users should remain on site for long period. The site design should be simple, attractive and user friendly.

There are a lot of free quality templates available in market.

Please refer these sites
http://www.templateworld.com/free_templates.html

http://myfreetemplatehome.com/

http://www.oswd.org/

5) Page URL and Links

First we should select a suitable Primary Keyword for each page and also that is related to our page content.

We can select this by using keyword suggestion tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal).

a) Primary keyword must be an exact match with the file name of our page.

The search engines will give more privilege to the pages with url containing search keyword.

Eg: Primary keyword : women sport shoe

url1 : women-sports-shoe.html

url2 : shoe.html

The page with url1 will list first when user search with keyword women sport shoe.

Methods to implement this are

i) Use Frameworks
Use SEO friendly frame works to develop your site.

Eg: Joomla,Majento,django,Symfony etc

ii)Use .htaccess File(Linux server)

Using .htaccess files we can rewrite our URLs to include primary keyword of each page.

Eg:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^sp/([^/]+)/ show-plans.php?lid=$1 [NC]

b) Link Text( Text all of links in a page)

Link text is very import , Use primary keyword and synonyms of keywords as link text.

c) Backlinks( incoming links to a website or web page)

This will play a very important role in google pagerank( The rank or privillage given to each web page by google).

Google pagerank depends on number of quality backlinks from other sites.

Eg :

URL : http://www.gethostingplans.com/
Backlinks : 7

To find no of backlinks, search in google using keyword as “link:sitename”

Eg: link: http://www.gethostingplans.com/

We have several methods to increase backlinks.

i) Articles :

Writing and distributing industry specific articles is a great way to increase our backlink count and site traffic.

ii) Forum Posts :

Forum posts can help to raise our link counts, Please add a link to our site in signature of each post.

iii) Blog Comments :

Add comment to different blogs related to our business and please remember to add a link to our site.

iv) Free and Paid Directory Submissions :

Commonly used technique in SEO field. Directory based links can be of significant help, especially if they are from highly reputable directories, the two biggest being DMOZ.org and the Yahoo Directory.

Note : Find the perfect category for our site and check to see if it has an editor. If we see a link “Volunteer to edit this category” try and find another relevant location. Pages without active editors take much longer to get listed into. Once
we find the perfect directory submit our site every 4-6 months until listed.

Please Check this Link :

http://www.onewaytextlink.com/links.php?type=free&pagenum=1

From this page we will get thousands of free directory submission links and submit your site to these free directories.

6) Title, Keyword and Meta Description Tags

a) Primary meta keyword (The first keyword in the meta keyword tag)

First we should select a suitable Primary Keyword for each page and also that is related to our page content.

We can select this by using keyword suggestion tool of google.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

By comparingAdvertiser Competition and Search volume value of keyword we can select suitable primary keyword for each page.

b) Use 5 keywords in our meta keywords tag

Sometimes search engines might think we are doing keyword spamming and it won’t list our page. The search engine rank our keywords in the order that will appear. They will treat the first one as primary keyword and the second one a secondary keyword and so on. We should line our keywords up in the order of relevance to the page.

c) Use maximum 3 words in primary keyword

People rarely search for a keyword phrase over 3 words long. Two words in a keyword phrase is ideal.

d) Use our primary keyword in the first and last paragraph of each page

The search engines will give more relevancy to our page if they find our keywords at the beginning and at the end of our page. Also our primary keyword should appear in the first 90 characters of our content.

e) Use primary keyword as a text link in our page at least once.

Use primary keyword as link text in a page atleast once.

f) Title Tag

The title tag of a page plays most important role in search results at Google. Google chooses title tag as the heading of its search results.

Placement of our primary keyword should be at the start of the Title tag. We should make sure that all of our title tags are relevant, unique, and contain our primary keyword for each page.

Eg: women sport shoes provider

g) Meta description

Meta description should be between 100 and 200 characters. It is important to get a solid description of our page and most of the time google will show this as description of its search result. if it is less than 100 characters then search engine may not find it relevant enough to list. if More than 200 characters then search engines may truncate it.
All pages should have different meta description. Use all of our keywords in meta description, with the primary keyword as close to the front as possible. Definitely within the first 5 words of our description.

Put our meta description all on one line in each page. This will ensure that the search engines reads it all.

7) Site Navigation

Its another important that our website should be fully spiderable by the search engines. We must use Breadcrumbs for site navigation.

Breadcrumbs provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting/entry point of a website.
Eg: Home page → Section page → Subsection page

This will also spread google page rank from main page to other sub pages.

8 ) Image Alt and Title Attribute

Image alt and title attributes will play an important role in image search. Also add it with image based site navigation or links(where image as link text).

If we have an image linked to another page, the alt and title attribute text will be same way as standard link anchor text is.

9) Sitemaps :

It is a representation of the architecture of a web site. Its plays major role in search engine optimization.

Two types of site maps are there.

i) Sitemap page in the website

Eg : http://www.seofreetools.net/sitemap/

It should updated regularly because these sitemaps help search engine robots to crawl all pages from our site.

ii) Sitemap page submitted to google

Eg : http://www.gethostingplans.com/sitemap.txt

Create a sitemap and it should containg all pages of your site. Then submit it to google through Google webmaster tools( https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/). Check Google webmaster tools daily to track all urls are indexed or not.
Use this site to create sitemap file.

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

10) Track Perfomance of Your Site

Now your site is ready with basic search engine optimization principles but you have to track the perfomance of your site using different tools avialable in market.

a) Check keyword position in different search engines on daily basis.

Eg : keyword : 300gb hosting(http://www.gethostingplans.com/ as rank 6 in google search results because it is listed as 6th position when we search with “300gb hosting” as keyword)

We must watch this position using different tools available in this market.

Use this tool to find out the keyword position of your site in different search engines.

http://www.seofreetools.net/seo-tools/keyword-search-engine.php

b) Google page rank

Check your google page rank using
http://www.seofreetools.net/seo-tools/google-pagerank-script.php

c) Alexa rank(Traffic rank given to each site by alexa.com)

Check your alexa rank by http://www.seofreetools.net/seo-tools/alexa-rank-script.php

d) Number of visitors,seach keywords and visitor details use these tools to track all these things

(Google Analytics) https://www.google.com/analytics/

(Counter) http://counter.bizhat.com/

Lets start a website using above 10 steps and become a part of web hosting world. For any further questions please send a mail to sendtogeo@gmail.com.

Geo Varghese
http://www.seofreetools.net/