27 Aug 2009, Posted by christie in Blogging Bytes, 21 Comments

How to start a website

The following is a guest post by Jenny Dean.  I’ve known Jenny online for about a year, because we linked to each other’s cat sites last fall.  Her sites are of  wonderful quality and full of excellent content, and I always truly enjoyed reading them. You’ll find that Jenny is a great person, so if you have any questions please feel free to ask in the comments or email her.

I’ve been building and operating two sites for almost two years now and have learned a tremendous amount of information.

My sites, www.floppycats.com and www.antioxidant-fruits.com were created from my passion for cats and fruit. I build the sites through Site Build It! (SBI) .

As a first time website builder two years ago, I was looking for a company that would teach me how to optimize my sites for Search Engines as well as teach me other tricks of the trade.

Benefits of Site Build It! (SBI) :

• Sites can be built using templates or HTML code
• Has a 10-day Action Guide to Help You Build Your Sites with Proper SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Helps You Build a E-mail Following
• Allows Visitors to Post Their Own Stories, like Your Ragdoll’s Story on Floppycats.com or Your Fruit Recipe on Antioxidant-fruits.com which helps to build content and drives traffic

Other important items I have learned from following bloggers:

• To help traffic, leave good quality comments on people’s blog with a link to your website.
• Post on a consistent basis. Decide when you will post, whether it’s daily, weekly or monthly and be consistent. If people are following your blog, they will continue to follow if the postings are consistent.
• Give yourself a time limit. For example, on my SBI sites I want to have 300 pages before year’s end. I am currently at 171 and 117 on www.floppycats.com and www.antioxidant-fruits.com respectively
• Integrate Google Adsense and other programs to help make revenue on your site
• Welcome any comments, whether negative or positive on your site. It simply means people are reading and are interested! It helps drives traffic to the site as well.
• Be passionate about your topic, because if you are not, then you will not want to keep your website going.
• Brand your website or blog and be sure to have a hip logo, which you can get from Logonerds – $27 Logo Designs.
• Use URLs that have meaning, like http://www.floppycats.com/how-to-start-a-website.html instead of http://www.floppycats.com/website.html people want to know where they are going when they click on a link
• Connect with your readers via social media like, Facebook, MySpace, etc.
• Always thank your readers for visiting your site!

There is much I have yet to learn, but I believe websites will be forever evolving; therefore there will always be a lot to learn. When I doubt what I am doing, I just build more content, as I know in time that will be the most helpful thing for my sites. If you have any questions for me, please don’t hesitate to
Send Mail.