Beginner's Guide Checklist: 5 Steps to Getting on the Web                            

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Choose a domain name that matches your company name or best describes your type of business. Check your spelling. The shorter the name, the better. A short name is easier for people to remember and to type.

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• Define Your Goals
  
  The most important step in building your website is determining your goals. What do you want your website to do for you? Websites can do many things: provide customer service, sell products, promote services, gather information to generate leads, recruit employees, and more.
  
  Searching Yahoo! and Google for websites within your industry and for your competitors' sites will provide great ideas and develop a better understanding of the market and your competition within it.



• Write Your Content
  
  After defining the goals of your website, you now need to come up with a list of pages you want on your site. Pages may include a company overview, shopping cart, biographies of key personnel, industry information, blog, and submission form.
  
  Write the content for each of your pages. Remember, it doesn't have to be perfect. The beauty of a website is that you can easily update and add content at any time.



• Build Your Website
  
  Now that you have written the content for your website, you are ready to build it.
  
  The big questions are "Do you hire a designer?", "Can you build it yourself?", "Who will maintain the website?"
  
  With the tools available today, you can easily build and maintain the website yourself (see Step 4 below).

Make your own website with our website builder, EZ-Site Wizard. As the name suggests, you are guided by an intuitive wizard system.

There is no software to download or install. No HTML or design experience required. Choose from over 1,100 professionally designed templates!

Create an ecommerce store with Shop Wizard. The store seamlessly works with your payment gateway for receiving online credit card payments. The payment gateways currently supported include Authorize.NET, Verisign, 2Checkout, and PayPal.

Everything you need to create a professional website is included — site builder (EZ-Site Wizard), templates, web hosting, email, and FREE search engine submission!

• Site Optimization
  
  The site needs to be built so that it is search engine friendly. The search engines need to be able to follow links throughout your website and determine the prominent information.
  
  The most important factor in search engine optimization is content — for search engines this means words and lots of them. The search engines look at the text on your pages (as well as the name of the page itself) for indexing.
  
  Avoid flash and frames pages as search engines cannot index them.
  
  In addition, it is critical that your site be designed with META tags.



• Search Engine Submission
  
  Once your site is optimized, submit it to Google, Bing, and Yahoo! This is done from within EZ-Site Wizard.



• Reciprocal Links
  
  Links to your website provide traffic and can greatly improve search engine rankings.
  
  It's a fact, reciprocal links can make any site more important in the eyes of the search engines, and are often valued more highly than one-way links. But it is extremely important that the websites relate in either content or theme. Not just to the search engines, but to the people who visit.



• Paid Online Advertising
  
  Online advertising can take the form of pay-per-click campaigns and paid listings. These options should be considered carefully as they can get expensive.



• Printed Material
  
  Include your Domain Name on all marketing/print material such as letterhead, business cards, brochures, advertising, signage, and company vehicles.