Posted: Mar 06, 2010 | Comments: 1 | Views: 396 | 
As the title implies, you will learn how to make a website for both fun and profit. If this strikes you as odd, you'll soon learn why there is no difference in the way you learn how to make either of these websites.
First you will need to research your chosen topic. It doesn't matter why you want to learn how to make a website on this topic, this step is absolutely crucial. Let me ask you a question. You wouldn't buy a car without researching it first, would you? Of course not, the same goes for when you learn how to make a website.
As an example let's say that you want to make a website about cars. The first thing that you will want to do is see how many websites you will be competing against. Yes competing against, even if you only want to make a website because you're passionate about the subject, there can be a high number of websites doing the same thing.
To do this, you will need to go to your favorite search engine and perform an exact search for your keyword, in this case "cars". For the sake of keeping things simple, let's say that there are 100 million websites on the subject. (While these numbers are for example purposes I guess the actual number to be much higher.)
Now that we know how many websites we will be up against, we need to know how many people look for our desired keyword each month. Many of the big search engines make this information available, you will have to find the one that corresponds to the one you made your search in.
Remember, we need to know the exact number of searches preformed each month. If you were to compare broad match keywords to the first number we collected, the result would be skewed.
Coming back to our example on how to make a website, we see that exactly 1 million people search for our keyword each month. Now that we have both the number of websites and the search volume we do a simple calculation, dividing the websites by the search volume.
For this we see that there are 100 websites for ever searcher. From that we can see that this topic would be the wrong one for starting to learn how to make a website. The competition is extremely high and the likelihood of ranking very well in the near future would be slim.
As I mentioned in the beginning, learning how to make a website stems from this early stage of planning. And the next step is merely a shot in the dark without the previous research. It is important to keep refining your area of interest until you zero in one you can gain a foothold in.
As we've seen, "cars" is far too competitive. But we're in luck, we don't really like cars as a whole, and in fact they are an industry rather than a niche. Our true passion is "red cars" and the competition in this niche is much lower. Now we can progress to the next step, registering a domain name.
This will be one of the easiest parts of the whole "how to make a website" process. But there are some things you will want to watch out for. First it is important to get your keyword in your website's address. Example: shineynewredcars.com As you can see, this gets our keyword clearly into the URL. There are two ways to style your URL, non-hyphenated as in our example and hyphenated. A hyphenated web address is easier for humans to read, and up until recently search engines also read them better, though this is less of an issue today.
Here is an example of what that would look like: shiney-new-red-cars.com. Just a word of warning though, while people find it easier to read such an URL, they find them much harder to remember. This can cost you visitors if they forget where the hyphens were when they type your URL in to the address bar.
Another thing to remember when you register a domain name, keep it apart from your hosting account.
What does this mean? Well many people in this early stage of learning how to make a website will often register both at the same time with the same company. While this may seem like a good idea it isn't.
Let me explain, when you rely on one company to take care of both, you run the risk of loosing both. The old expression about placing all of your eggs in one basket works really well here. If for some reason your account would be closed, you would immediately loose your domain name, too.
By diversifying, you keep your domain names safe. In the event that you would loose your website hosting, you can simply switch to another service and be back up and running. If you loose them both, there is less of a chance you will get your domain name back.
Author :
Benjamin J. Thomas
First you will need to research your chosen topic. It doesn't matter why you want to learn how to make a website on this topic, this step is absolutely crucial. Let me ask you a question. You wouldn't buy a car without researching it first, would you? Of course not, the same goes for when you learn how to make a website.
As an example let's say that you want to make a website about cars. The first thing that you will want to do is see how many websites you will be competing against. Yes competing against, even if you only want to make a website because you're passionate about the subject, there can be a high number of websites doing the same thing.
To do this, you will need to go to your favorite search engine and perform an exact search for your keyword, in this case "cars". For the sake of keeping things simple, let's say that there are 100 million websites on the subject. (While these numbers are for example purposes I guess the actual number to be much higher.)
Now that we know how many websites we will be up against, we need to know how many people look for our desired keyword each month. Many of the big search engines make this information available, you will have to find the one that corresponds to the one you made your search in.
Remember, we need to know the exact number of searches preformed each month. If you were to compare broad match keywords to the first number we collected, the result would be skewed.
Coming back to our example on how to make a website, we see that exactly 1 million people search for our keyword each month. Now that we have both the number of websites and the search volume we do a simple calculation, dividing the websites by the search volume.
For this we see that there are 100 websites for ever searcher. From that we can see that this topic would be the wrong one for starting to learn how to make a website. The competition is extremely high and the likelihood of ranking very well in the near future would be slim.
As I mentioned in the beginning, learning how to make a website stems from this early stage of planning. And the next step is merely a shot in the dark without the previous research. It is important to keep refining your area of interest until you zero in one you can gain a foothold in.
As we've seen, "cars" is far too competitive. But we're in luck, we don't really like cars as a whole, and in fact they are an industry rather than a niche. Our true passion is "red cars" and the competition in this niche is much lower. Now we can progress to the next step, registering a domain name.
This will be one of the easiest parts of the whole "how to make a website" process. But there are some things you will want to watch out for. First it is important to get your keyword in your website's address. Example: shineynewredcars.com As you can see, this gets our keyword clearly into the URL. There are two ways to style your URL, non-hyphenated as in our example and hyphenated. A hyphenated web address is easier for humans to read, and up until recently search engines also read them better, though this is less of an issue today.
Here is an example of what that would look like: shiney-new-red-cars.com. Just a word of warning though, while people find it easier to read such an URL, they find them much harder to remember. This can cost you visitors if they forget where the hyphens were when they type your URL in to the address bar.
Another thing to remember when you register a domain name, keep it apart from your hosting account.
What does this mean? Well many people in this early stage of learning how to make a website will often register both at the same time with the same company. While this may seem like a good idea it isn't.
Let me explain, when you rely on one company to take care of both, you run the risk of loosing both. The old expression about placing all of your eggs in one basket works really well here. If for some reason your account would be closed, you would immediately loose your domain name, too.
By diversifying, you keep your domain names safe. In the event that you would loose your website hosting, you can simply switch to another service and be back up and running. If you loose them both, there is less of a chance you will get your domain name back.
Author :
Benjamin J. Thomas
