Top 5 Easy Steps Before Creating a Website

1. Key Words in the URL
This is probably one of the top 5 most important parts of SEO. The reason being is because if your URL (website address) has the exact match domain for a key word or phrase, then you have a much higher chance of showing on the 1st page of Google. For example if you want to make a website about canine dog food, then register to your domain name as www.Caninedogfood.com Once your website has just a few backlinks and content about canine dog food your website will most likely show up on the first page once indexed. All you need to do before you register a domain name is do a quick key word research with Google Key Words tool, and find which key word or phrase relating to your website has the most traffic and low-medium competition. If you are interested in having a professional internet marketing company optimize your keyword research then I highly suggest SoCal Digital Marketing. Otherwise keep reading!

2. Register Domain Name and Selecting a Host

Domain Name -Once you have completed step 1, register your domain name. This will usually cost you $7-9 a year which is relatively inexpensive. I suggest Godaddy.com because it is quick and easy.

Hosting Service- Next, choose a hosting company and select a service plan based on the amount of traffic or domains you want to register. If you think you are going to have a large amount of traffic which takes bandwidth than go with a more premium plan. I use Hostgator.com  for my sites because the customer service is actually helpful. Hosting services should cost about $4 a month for basic plans to $12 a month for unlimited bandwidth plans.

3. Know Your Competition
Type in a similar key word or phrase to your website and see what shows up. Are your competitors paying for PPC (pay per click) campaigns with Google Adwords? If so, that means that your niche is competitive and you may have to work a bit harder for organic (natural) search results. However you can check your competitors sites and see who is visiting them and leaving comments. How is there website set up and is there anything your website can do better? Is there a forum on this site that has a large community built around it? See what makes these sites show up in the top results page and try to out do them.

4. Build Anticipation

Think of your website as opening up a new store because essentially it is a digital doorway to your business. Think about how retail stores generate a "buzz" in the local news when they are opening a store because they want the community to visit the opening day. This is the same model you should use for your website.

If you have a Twitter account start hinting that you have a site being constructed and even offer free promotional gifts to the first 100 visitors! Don't just stop on Twitter, use social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to promote you website to your friends and family there too. If you really want to start off on the right foot have a press release ready to be sent out the moment your site goes live. Make sure that you don't submit your press release before your site is actually up because you would be missing out on potential backlinks and visits.

Google Analytics Chart

5. Track Your Website

Once your website is live, I would immediately install Google Analytics to begin tracking your website traffic. Knowing how and where your traffic is coming from is vital information to marketing a website!









Follow these easy steps before your site is created and this will save you a lot of trouble with SEO.

Leave a comment if you have any other suggestions

How to use Google Analytics

The first thing you need to do before you start all that other search engine optimization stuff is, you want to be able to track and analyze your current website traffic. A free and very useful tool provided by Google Analytics does much more than that.

Google Analytics shows you where your website traffic is coming from by country, what key words (very useful) visitors are using to find your website, the average time spent on your website, your top 10 landing pages (first page people view), referring traffic sources and much more. Here is a picture of what your Dashboard will look like;

Google Analytics Example

In order to access the power of Google Analytics all you need is an email address and someone who can input one html code that Google will provide for you. You can even do it yourself it is literally copy and paste. All you need to know where in your html coding to place it. Google suggests to place the code above the </head> tag which can easily be found by clicking ctrl+f and typing in </head>. Just paste the code right above that header tag and you now have successfully installed Google Analytics. Visit Google Analytics to sign up. From their the program will automatically run itself and all you have to do is analyze!

Google Analytics utilizes some cool graphs and features to show you how your website traffic history is progressing.

By clicking on visitors over view, you can track how many visits your website receives per day/week/month and how many unique visits (individual IP address visits).

In the content over view,  you can analyze which web pages on your site are receiving the most traffic and the entrance pathways there. This is beneficial to check because if you have a "squeeze page" which is the sales page that says "CLICK HERE!" or "SIGN UP NOW!" you can see if it is the most frequently viewed page, how visitors are finding the page, and the bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage % of visitors that will view one single page of your website then exit. So the lower the bounce rate the more interested people are with your website.

Another great feature of Google Analytics is the traffic sources overview, this page lets you see how much traffic is coming from direct URL entries, search engines, and referring sites.

This helped me market my banks website by finding out which websites refer (backlink) to the banks website and what reviews they wrote about. This shows you more insight on what kind of traffic (hopefully quality) your being sent by other websites.

Detailed view of California Analytics

The last main feature of Google is probably the most interesting one. Click on the map overlay and it will provide you with a map of the world that you can click on to get to what city your visitors are coming from. All you have to do is click on the country, then state/province, and that will bring up little orange dots that will show you the specific city your visitors came from. Cool right (almost scary).

These are the main features of Google Analytics. I highly recommend using this program not only because its free but because big G knows there stuff and provides great information (they are the worlds largest information resource).

Let me know if you have any questions or comments about Google Analytics and I will be happy to assist you. Also if you know of any other note worthy website traffic reports then feel free to suggest them. I learned how to utilize Google Analytics from an Orange County Internet Marketing company called SoCal Digital Marketing click here to check them out!