Still more website building advice!

I want to give you a couple of hints of things I learned the hard way. First it is NOT always a good idea to use a free web host. There are tons of places you can put up a website for free but the search engines will might not like your website. The search engines use "spiders" to crawl sites and determine what gets indexed in the search engines. Depending on how your site is set up and what it offers the spiders will also help to determine your rankings in the seach engines. The problem: All search engines use different algorythms to make these determinations.

Two things happen can happen when you use a free hosting service, first you don't get your own domain name. If I use a free webhost my domain will look like this: www.freehost.scrapbooking4us.com. I suspect the spider sees a ton of sites that start with www.freehost and tends to just ignore them. You will want your own domain name not only because it looks more professional but because it will help your rankings in the search engines.

The second thing you need to know before you start building is a little more about search engine optimization. You will need to make the content of your first page include all your keywords. If your site is about goblets you will want to think of everything about goblets that you can imagine, glass, antique, colored, drinking, water, etc. You will also want to use as many of those keywords as possible when you put together your index page. If you have keywords that don't match your index page the spiders don't like that much either.

You will want to write a description of your site and keep it under 200 characters.

After you get it up and running you will want to start promoting it. Some people swear by submitting your site to the search engines and others say it isn't necessary. I use a free submitter to be on the safe side. You will also want to exchange links with other similar websites to get good rankings.

Lastly coming up with a name: I came up with my name for www.katieshugs.com because I was working at home to be with my daughter (Katie) and wanted to include her name. Every other name I came up with was already taken and this one wasn't so I grabbed it. Now at that time I didn't know anything about search engines or I would have went with something different. For www.scrapbooking4us.com I spent a good hour trying to find a domain name that was available that included the term scrapbooking. I finally found this one and it was very important to me that I have the word scrapbooking in the domain name. I believe this will be a huge boost when someone searches on the term "scrapbooking".

There is a lot more information about building websites than just this but hopefully this will give you a little to think about and help you get started with your new business!

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