How do you start a new website? Get some Google Juice!
The best way to start a new venture is to get a little Google Juice right away. What is Google juice? Making your site important in the eyes of Google and the other search engines so that when someone searches for something you do your website comes up on the first or second page, not page 3,000.
How do you get Google juice?
The 3 most important things you need are:
#1 START NOW. Google values ‘site age’ and you must add some basic words on a basic site to start the clock on the age of your site. Do not wait for teh final website design, get something on there immediately! The best way to do that is to figure out your website domain name and set up a basic WordPress.com blog, point the blog at your domain, and start talking about your industry. See JayBerkowitz.com for an example of a basic WordPress site pointed at a domain.
#2 You need other sites linking TO your site. How do you get links to your site? Write interesting articles (blog posts). For example, write about news in your industry, comment on current trends, answer the top 10 questions people have. Keep the questions and answers simple, this is not where you show off how smart you are, you are just placing the text on the site in case they are looking for it. For example I just wrote a simple blog post called ‘How do you start a new website?’
#3 You need content. Write one blog post every day. Yes, every day. 1-2 paragraphs, it is critical during the first few months to tell Google this new site is alive and refresh it every day to start to get indexed or ‘read’ by their automated spiders.
Where do you get a domain name? Try to get something short (it is hard because all good 1 word and 2 word domains are already taken, but they might be available for purchase. Don’t pigeonhole yourself with too specific a name. Most great companies start out with one direction in mind and end up doing something different. You can search for more names that are owned by someone but available for purchase at SnapNames.com and www.sedo.com
Good luck getting started and please feel free to ask any questions about starting a new site below, or post a link to your site in the comments once you get it live!
Photo Credit Flickr: Johannes P Osterhoff