SEO TOOLS

Ok…. We came to a step where we have a good idea for a website. We checked the most popular search keywords in our niche market. We did the math and came into a conclusion that our website worth its effort. Excellent, you are truly ready for the next step.

Now it’s a good time to make some technical decisions or what I liked to call them engineering decisions.

In order to have a website it would be preferred to have your own domain. Although you can use many of the free hosting options, I wouldn’t choose that options. The main reason is simple: if you are going to put some effort to build your websites reputation, better to own it. For example: You can easily open a blog at Blogger.com but all the SEO work that you will do, eventually will credit Blogger.com.

It doesn’t cost big bucks to have your own website. You can use a service like GoDaddy to purchase your brand new domain, or you can look for an old domain that someone is offering to sell. In most cases to purchase a “second hand” domain is preferred. That way you will be avoiding from the Google sand box effect that I will talk about later on. However, please note that there is also a big risk to purchase a “second hand” domain if you don’t know how to check his history. Its might be a banned domain name by some search engines.

Now you will need to host your website. It will always be preferred to host your website on a dedicated server. It cost much then a shared hosting server but it guarantee that your websites IP address will not be shared by any other website. It’s not a crucial parameter but as many of the other SEO parameters that count, you will have to choose between the alternatives.

I have to warn you… the SEO marathon is full of decision that you need to take. It’s not an exact science. Some will support an argument that the others will oppose to.

Depends on your website nature you can use some of the popular open source system available today. If you considering opening a blog, I highly recommend to use wordpress open source blog platform. It takes less then thirty minutes to set it up. If you don’t sure you can install it yourself, asks someone else to do it for you. He shouldn’t charge you for more then few hundreds dollars for this task. If you need a more flexible context management system try Joomla. A good e-commerce system will be OSCommerce or ZenCart. They are all open source platforms but for the last that I mentioned you will need some professional help to set it up. You can always experience that fun of writing html code. The big advantage of doing so is to have a full control about the source outcome. It’s nice thing to do if you are planning 7-8 static pages on your website, but not if you need to be able to add pages dynamically.

One of the things that I was asked so many times is whether to have a one static page website or to have a multi pages website. I can tell you that form my experience some one page websites generate income much more then a multi pages websites. Forget about search engines when you ask this question. Think about your visitors. In most cases you will find that what you find most suitable to your visitors, the search engines suitable as well. Keep in mind that ALL the search engines try to track after how the human mind is searching for information and not the opposite opposed to some will think