How to Build a Website

Many Heritage graduates operate their own businesses. They enjoy the freedom and unlimited potential that can only come from working for themselves.

Owning a business has many advantages over working for someone else. You can set your own hours and you can’t be downsized or fired. If you run your business well, you can also make more money.

Working for yourself also has more challenges than working an ordinary job. You have to make bookkeeping arrangements. You are responsible for your facility. And, perhaps most of all, you have to find your own clients.

In today’s world, the first place clients are likely to look for your services is the world wide web. This trend can be an enormous advantage for you. Web marketing is extremely inexpensive by comparison to other types of advertising.

If you want to operate your own business, you need to build an effective website. Don’t worry if you don’t have a lot of technical skills. Anyone can build a website that can enhance their business. This article will provide you with a step-by-step plan to get your site up and running.

how to build a website

How to Build a Website: Screenshot from www.heritage-education.com

Step 1: Build the Site.

You can hire a designer to build your site, or you can do it yourself.
- Hiring a Designer - There are probably thousands of web designers in your city and you can probably find a good one who is not very expensive. A typical small business web site should cost $500 to $2,000 to build.
- Building Your Own Site – There are numerous easy ways to build a website. You can buy inexpensive software that uses wizards to walk you through the process, or you can use an online service that does the same thing. Visit the following links for more info:

Note: The services listed above are not affiliated with or endorsed by Heritage. There are many, many other similar services and we encourage you to shop around.

Step 2: Optimize the Site - SEO for Beginners.

The goal is to make your site visible by “popping” high on search engine rankings. All this will cost you is time & effort. Professional webmasters call this process Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

- Keyword List – Make a list of every search phrase your clients might use to find your site. Run searches for your keywords and look at the sites that pop high. What other keywords are prominent on these sites? Add these keywords to your list. Be sure to use local keywords. You may never pop high for “Massage Therapist,” but you can probably get high rankings for “Oklahoma City Massage Therapist.” Another good way to find new keywords is to use the keyword suggestion tool at: www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-suggestions-google Now prioritize your list by two factors: 1) Relevancy – the likelihood that a person searching for this keyword is actually looking for what you are selling, and 2) Keyword Popularity – You want to optimize for keywords people are actually searching for – Use the Keyword Popularity Tool at www.submitexpress.com/keytracker.php

- Put Keywords On Your Site – Now that you have your prioritized keyword list, you need to put your keywords on your website. You need to put the most important ones in the following places:

 Page Titles – The title appears in the bar at the top of the window in your browser must contain your most important keywords. You may have many pages in your site and each one is an opportunity to include more keywords.
 Body Text – Each page of your site should contain body copy. Include your most important keywords several times in the text.
&#61607; Header Tags – Before each paragraph of body copy, you should include a headline. Put your keywords in the headlines. In the html code for the page, identify the headlines by using header tags. Header tags look like this: <h1>HERITAGE EDUCATION</h1> Please feel free to copy this snippet of code and modify it for your own use.
&#61607; Alt Tags – You can name any images or tables on your site with your keywords. Search Engines can’t see images, but they can read what you named the image in your html code. Here’s an example of an Alt Tag: <img src="images/h1_massage.jpg" alt="x-ray tech school" width="610" height="79"> Your human visitors will not be able to see the alt tags.

- Links – In order to rank high on most competitive keywords, you need to get other web sites to link to your site. Start by asking everyone you know to link their site to yours. You will want to build a page on your site where you can link to other sites in exchange for their link to you. Inbound links are more valuable if they come from sites that contain info that is relevant to your site. The single best way to accomplish this is to find sites that are similar to yours and email their webmaster a link exchange request. This takes time and effort, but will almost certainly pay big dividends. Make Heritage your first link partner! We are happy to exchange links with any of our students or grads. Just email us at info@heritage-education.com.

- Submit Your Site – Once your site is built, you need to tell the search engines that it exists. Submitting is easy. Just go to the following urls and fill out their forms:

- Measure Your Rankings – The hardest part of web marketing is patience. Now that you’ve optimized your site, you need to wait for the search engines to send spiders or robots to your site. For a new site, this can often take several months.

Step 3: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising.

PPC advertising is, by far, the most cost-effective advertising method the world has ever seen. Traditional advertising media requires advertisers to pay for airtime or printed ads. You pay for impressions and your cost is the same regardless of how much response you get. In PPC advertising, you pay only when someone responds to your ad by clicking on a link that takes them to your page.

PPC ads are the “sponsored links” you see when you run a search. All of the major search engines offer some form of PPC advertising. We recommend starting with Google because it’s easy to use and because Google is the most popular search engine. To establish an account, just go to their sign up page and follow instructions: https://adwords.google.com/select/starter/signup/ForkAuth

Google offers free tools to their PPC advertisers for keyword management, conversion tracking, and traffic analysis. We strongly recommend using these tools. We also recommend using their geo-targeting feature that let’s you pay for clicks only when they come from your city.

When you start a PPC advertising campaign, we strongly recommend that you start with a very small spend and grow as appropriate.

 

 

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