Most people will make a website and be happy that they reached a couple of thousand viewers over the course of ten years. But wouldn't it be much more rewarding to make a website and actually reach more people? Of course it would, and that is what we're going to learn in this article.
You see, there is this misconception that if you make it, "they" will come. While this may work for a baseball diamond that is anything but true when you make a website.
Let me ask you a question. How did you find this article on how to make a website? The common answer will be, you preformed a search. But you never would have found it if I hadn't focused on one subject. While this may sound cryptic, it really isn't. To simplify things, let's run through a basic example.
And while I have already covered the steps involved in planning and researching a website in other articles, this will give you enough information to get you started in the right direction.
Plan To Make A Website
Before you make a website, you will want to pick out a topic. By planning on what your website is going to be about, you will be taking the guess work out of the coming steps.
The easiest way to do this is sit down and brainstorm. Write down all of your interests. Pick the one out that interests you the most. This can be anything as long as you're going to be able to write about it for more than a few weeks. One of the keys to success when you make a website is your ability to stick with it and stay on topic.
For illustrative purposes, let's say that you want to make a website about the Romans. Good, now we have a starting point.
One thing that will benefit you immensely when you make a website is knowing what kind of competition you will face. It doesn't matter why you make the site, either for fun or profit, you will face competition to some degree or another.
To do this, go to the search engine of your choice and perform an exact search. In Google this can be done by placing quotation marks around your words. If you only have a single keyword the quotation marks aren't necessary. The number of sites that come up will be your direct competition. For ease lets say 500 people have websites about the Romans.
Before we begin making a website on the subject, we need to know the search volume, or the amount of people that look for the keyword each month. This can be done in Google's AdWords Keyword Tool if you've used their search engine. It is important to get the data from whichever SE you've used. Again make sure it is the exact number of searches. As an example, we'll say 100 people are interested in our subject.
We now divide the number of websites by the search volume. 500/100 if you go with our numbers. This shows us that there are 5 websites for every 1 searcher. Your numbers will vary, but just remember, the more websites there are for each potential visitor the harder it will be to rank.
Now that we have our primary keyword, we can begin to make a website, one that has a chance of actually getting viewed.
Navigation - The Important Keyword Component
This is one part people often overlook when they make a website, still, it is a very important component.
Think of your website as a series of tiers. The first tier is the homepage. This gives your viewers and the search engines a starting point. Below your first tier is your second tier content. Here you will get more specific.
Building off of our example, we will say the homepage is focused on "Romans", and is a doorway into the more specific second tier like "Roman History", "Roman Emperors", etc. From here we would drill down to tier three where the bulk of your content will be located.
At tier three you will be focusing on the content. Under "Roman Emperors" you introduce what the page is about. You would also have a list of the many different rulers of Rome. And from there you would link to a page about each of them. If you make a website like this, you will be encouraging a natural transition from one tier to the next. People will be more likely to read further, and spiders will crawl your site deeper and more thoroughly.
While tiers actually belong to the navigational stage when you make a website, they are also effected by your keyword research. How? Simple, keyword research is just as import at this stage as when you picked a theme for your website. By researching what people look for when they search for a specific topic, you are giving them more of an opportunity to find it.
Each page, starting with the homepage to your very deepest tier, should be researched and planned. Following the steps I have already outlined earlier in this article, you are helping to ensure your success. This can be a very time consuming process and to some extent frustrating when you are having trouble finding keywords. These two reasons are probably why many people (beginners to experts) have invested in software to expedite and simplify the procedure of making a successful website.
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