Oak Tree Web Design

Making Money from Your Website

noreply@blogger.com (Jon Langford) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:42:00 +0000

Now that your website is on-line and you have managed to attract plenty of visitors, you may be thinking of using the site to generate some income.
Obviously if you have product to sell, your income will be generated from sales, but there are many other ways to generate income.

Google AdSense
One of the most common forms of adverts are supplied by Google. Look to the right hand side of this blog and you will see an example. To implement these, sign up with Google AdSense, follow the simple instructions to decide the size and colour of the banner and you'll receive a short piece of html code to insert into your page. Withing minutes, Google will analyse your page and place adverts to related websites. If one of your website visitors clicks on an advert, you will earn a small amount of money. Not huge amounts, but if you have enough clicks, these small amounts soon tot-up.

In my next post, I'll highlight some other ways in which you can earn revenue from your website.

Search Engine Optimisation

noreply@blogger.com (Jon Langford) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:40:00 +0000

Having a great website is no good if no-one knows where it is. You can publish your web address on any correspondence or within conventional advertising, but visitors will also look for you via search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Bing or one of many other search engines of directories - The big question is... will they find you?

The procedure of getting your website listed on a search for particular key words is known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. There are a great many companies who will offer this service, but be extremely wary of wild promises and guarantees of top listings.

There are a number of ways to get the ball rolling yourself, if you have an average level of computer knowledge.

1. Maximise your inbound links - also known as backlinks. The internet is essentially a web of interconnected websites, all linking to one-another. The best sites have more links directed towards them and so a site with more backlinks is consider by the search engines to be more "worthy" than one with fewer inbound links and as a consequence they will rank it more highly.

It's easy to check the number of inbound links for any site currently indexed by a search engine. Simply carry out a search for "site:www.yourdomain.com" replacing www.yourdomain.com with your web site's address.

2. Create a Site Map - A Sitemap is a file containing a list of each page of your site which can be easily read by the search engines. The Sitemap could be a straighforward text file or a more detailed xml file. These are easy to create and upload to your web space using many free, sitemap generators such as XML-Sitemaps.com.

3. Use the free Search Engine Tools - The search engines provide free tools for webmasters to help submit and manage the way a website is indexed. Have a look at Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer or Microsoft Live Webmaster Center.
Each enable you to submit your website and sitemaps for indexing.

4. Ensure that the text of your website contains all of the important keywords. Pay particular attention to the title and description metatags within the page header and the displayed headings on your page.

For more information, take a look at Google's Webmaster Guidelines for hints and tips to make your web pages more search engine friendly.

Choose where to host your website

noreply@blogger.com (Jon Langford) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:39:00 +0000

The next consideration for your new web site is to find somewhere to host your site (storing the files that make the site). You may find that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) offers you some webspace, however there may be limitations on using your own domain name.

For the majority of websites it will be necessary to buy extra web space. There are a large number of web hosting companies, but both prices and the services offered can vary widely. Find out how much web space you might need and also whether there is a bandwidth limit. If there are restrictions, can this be upgraded and for what cost?

Depending on the design and content of your site, you may also need a database, e-commerce, and secure pages. Blogs, traffic monitoring, email accounts may also be included and may prove useful in the future.

The Oak Tree Web Design web site and this blog is hosted with Fasthosts and their basic hosting package should be more than sufficient for most websites.

Choosing your Domain Name

noreply@blogger.com (Jon Langford) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:38:00 +0000

One of the first steps to building your own website is to choose and buy a name for the website. This is called the website's Domain Name.

With many names already taken, this can prove difficult, but with a little inventiveness you should be able to buy something suitable. You should choose a name that correctly describes your company name or utilizes some of the keywords that a potential visitor may use to find the site.

Have a brain-storming session to get a list of key words for your site and then visit a company like 123-Reg or Fasthosts to check availability of certain name combinations.

The cost of a domain is not expensive and so once you find a name that is available, we would recommend that you buy it to prevent anyone else doing so. As soon as you have you domain name you can begin forwarding email in the format yourname@newdomain.com.

When buying a name, also consider buy some similar alternatives to protect your brand name in the future. Things to consider would be to buy the .co.uk and .com versions or perhaps consider some potential mis-spellings of your new web address.