The opportunities for success online are enormous and growing every day. The number one question on every beginner’s mind is – How to Make a Website. With this short paper I provide the fundamentals for where to begin in making your website.
First, let me say that “how to make a website” does not involve using free templates or online wizards when creating a website. There is one exception which I will cover later. How to make a website involved mastering the skill of simple web design using what is called a web editor. There are simple web editors and very advanced ones to make a website with. For example, my member site offers tutorials to beginners which I teach how to make simple websites using an included and simple editor. After learning on the low-end editors, most web masters choose to upgrade to a more robust editor. My editor of choice is Dreamweaver.
Learning how to make a website also involves understanding how search engines rank websites. After all, it does no good to create a website if it has no chance of ranking well in the search engines. The site’s design plays a major role in how the search engines will rank the page. Too often beginners who do not know how to make a website well will invest much time and effort into building a site only to later discover it does not rank well due to severe design flaws. The new webmaster simply must learn the fundamentals of how to make a website before investing the time and effort into building one.
Beginners, who do not know the basics for how to make a website, often are attracted to ready-made templates and/or online wizards which allow them to make websites without much or any knowledge of web design. The problems with these methods are that they often involve making sites which contain duplicate code, bloated code, or both. Either of these two problems can ruin any chances of the new site ranking well in either Google or Yahoo – the two main search engines all sites need to rank well in.
As I mentioned earlier, there is one exception to using a ready made website. For those beginners, who do not know how to make a site themselves, using a WordPress blog is an alternative. One does not need to know how to make a website in order to take advantage of a blog formatted website such as one created with WordPress. Not all topics are conducive to a blog format however. Also, if choosing to use a WP blog, it is important to do some research for how to make the blog as search engine friendly as possible; there are settings which should be changed in the blog in order to help its possible standings in the search engines.
How to make a site also involves understanding how and where to host the site. It is vital that the new site have its own domain name and not be tied to a free host as a subdomain. One should not invest time and energy into a site which actually belongs to another domain. That is like spending time and money working on a rent house; it makes no sense investing in something which is not your own. All the work involved in learning how to make a website and the time invested should go toward building a real asset which owning a site represents. Learning how to make a website which ranks well in the search engines involves using simple code which the search engines can easily read. If the code is too congested, the search engine spider will likely give up before completing the entire scan of the site. Additionally, there are a few other basic steps involved in making the site search engine friendly.
Through keyword research, a group of popular keywords should first be collected. Each of the site’s pages will be optimized for one of those keywords. This means that the keyword should be in the site’s title, file name, in a heading tag on the page, and mixed into the content at a rate of about 3% to 7% depending on the length of the keyword; longer keywords should have a lower density than shorter keywords usually. There are other SEO techniques which should be researched while learning how to make a website. However, the basic techniques stated here are the core principles which should be followed.
In my member’s site I teach beginners how to make a website. Normally, I see people with no prior experience able to assemble a reasonably attractive website in a matter of weeks. Once a beginning Internet marketer learns how to make a website and apply search engine optimization techniques, the sky really is the limit for potential online success!
