The internet is now an essential part of everyday life, most especially for small business owners. An online presence is a must if you want your business to be found.
When building your own website, you can do it yourself, or use a website builder. Bookmark, for example, offers free hosting and free website templates. There are also some site building software you can use, such as WordPress.
However, all these have their limitations. If you want to do everything yourself, you need advanced skills and knowledge on website building. To start with, you need to know the following things.
1. HTML Language and CSS
You need to have HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) knowledge because web browsers can only interpret and view web pages created using this language.
You can easily find HTML learning resources online to help you acquire the skill.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) knowledge is also needed to gain complete control of your website’s layout and style. It allows you to implement changes on all your pages by making the changes on only one of them. Such changes include images, text fonts, and background colors.
2. Titles, Keywords, and Meta Tags
Having knowledge in these three areas will greatly improve the effectiveness of your responsive website. The title you use should clearly visitors tell about what your website is all about.
The HTML tags — referred to as meta tags — describing webpage content are used by Google and other search engines. These are important in supplying search engines with important information about your website including:
- Keywords
- Robots
- Author
- Language, and
- Copyright.
Note that overuse of keywords is not recommended as it is seen as spamming. Not using enough keywords, however, is also disadvantageous as it does not make your website visible to search engines.
3. Copyright Information
You also need to learn about copyright laws. You cannot just use any material online to put in your site, as those are owned by their respective owners.
These materials include texts (e.g., articles, blog posts, ebooks), images, videos, and songs, among others.
If you wish to use a copyrighted material, you need to contact the author or the copyright owner to ask for permission.
Copyright infringement can cost you a fortune if and when the owners decide to sue.
So whether it is clip art, photos, designs, templates, or website content such as articles, you must seek the author’s approval first before using them in your site.
4. Content
Before you build a website, you need to understand the importance of content. Creating high quality, informative content for your visitors is a must nowadays.
Whatever you write should be original, useful, and feature a number of your key phrases and keywords. How good your content is will be reflected by the ranking or rating it gets from search engines.
If it is highly useful and is relevant to your keywords, it will be ranked high and will easily be found by visitors via search engines.
You should therefore try your best to create informative and quality content to keep your visitors coming back to your website. Avoid publishing spammy or shallow content as your site will be penalized by Google. As a small business owner who wants your site to be found, you definitely don’t want that.
5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the key factor determining the rating of your website by search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Bing, among others.
You need knowledge about optimizing your site so that you can create a website that is noticeable by search engines.
The best way to do so is by improving the quality of your content. Beware of SEO companies that are out to get your hard-earned money through fake promises.
They may claim to optimize your website until it acquires number one ranking, but they can’t really do that. Worse, they might even harm your site through their spammy techniques.
There are a lot of tutorials online about SEO. Study it so you can apply it on your website.
Whether you want to use a website builder or do everything yourself, it would help to know all these things before building your website. By having an optimized and responsive website, you will ensure that your business is found online by your potential customers.
Ready to take action with what you have learned today? Create a Free Website with Bookmark!
Originally published at www.bookmark.com on September 19, 2016.
