Setting Up a Website

A Brief Guide to
Creating Your Own Website

How do you get your website into the Search Engines?

First, there are two things you need to do to your website pages:

Add keyword and description metatags and title to each page

These go in the HEAD section of each page and are not viewable when the visitor goes to your website. They are read by search engines "spidering" your site to figure out how to include you in their listings.

Keywords are the words you think people will type into the search engine to find your site. For example, if you have a site that talks about 1960's pop stars, some good keywords (besides "60s pop stars") would be "Beatles", "Kinks", and "Herman's Hermits".

The title is the official title of the site, for example, your company name or the domain name (URL). It's very important to include your targeted keywords in this title.

The description is a sentence or two that tells visitors what they will see when they visit your site.

The do-it-yourself hosts mentioned here have sections that let you do this. They are important and should not be ignored.

If your host lets you edit your own HTML (the code behind the web pages), you can generate your own metatags using Scrub the Web's Meta Tag Help.

For a more complete (though harder to use) tool, try Web CEO, which is free.
Embed the keywords you've chosen into the text in a natural way. A good, free tool for testing how well your page is optimized is SEO Chat

If you find you need help in accomplishing this and other SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tasks, consider hiring a Search Engine Optimization Firm

Then, submit your website to directories

Automated search engines like Google or MSN will find your site automatically if any other website links to yours. This means you don't have to submit your website to these search engines. However, in order for them to find a link to your website, you must cultivate those links by submitting to so called "human edited directories".

Here are some important ones:

You probably should advertise in the Yellow Pages. (you can get 30 days free by clicking on this link.). They're a highly ranked website, so their link is worth a lot, and people do use the Yellow Pages. Another highly ranked business directory is Business Directory Advertising (Again, you can get a discount -- $50 off by clicking on this link).
Open Directory Project, or DMOZ, was the first such directory. Its listings are used as a basis by many other search engines.
Skaffe is a popular directory. They charge for a listing but you can get around that by volunteering to be an editor, judging other people's submissions (and your own)
Local.com has both free and paid listings
Anoox offers free and paid listings and cheap advertising opportunities.
Yahoo has both a search engine and a directory. They also have a paid directory, which costs several hundred dollars but is reputed to give your website standing with other search engines.
Entire Web puts links on member sites. Charge for quick inclusion is about $25. a year. There's a free option that takes longer.
Hedir (short for Human Edited Directory) is both a directory and a peer review site. They can give helpful advice for improving your site.
JoeAnt accepts non-commercial listings for free.
Commercial sites should be submitted to Jayde and Thomas Regional, which are both free.

You should also look for specialized directories and "online communities" such as Silver Surfers Guide for the over 50s. You may have to sign up in order to participate, but the signup should be free.

More about Search Engine Optimization >

Don't forget social sites

You can set up a page for your business for free on Facebook. Similarly, you can get free Promotion for your business on Yelp

Finally, trade links with related websites.

Trading links with websites that complement yours serves two purposes:

It brings traffic to your website from the sites that put up your linking information
They provide links for the search engine spiders to follow to find and then index your website.

It is important that these sites be relevant to your own, otherwise you are simply wasting the time it takes to solicit and upload links.

This sounds like a daunting task, but fortunately, there are sites that are designed to help you find relevant sites. One of the biggest is Link Market, which claims to be the #1 Free Link Exchange Directory On The Web, and certainly provides a lot of willing link partners. You'll find it will pay you to sign up for their $25 a year membership so that you can limit link requests to relevant link partners. The only catch is that you have to be able to take the HTML they provide and embed it in your own pages. You can get around this by using the URL information that appears after "<a href=" as the link, and then copying everything that appears between <a href...> and </a> as the linking text. The part of their link that follows this can simply be pasted into your page as text.

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