SEOmaha

Let’s face it.

Not everyone comes from a background where they can just throw money around at the drop of the hat.

I’ve had more than a few people approach me and say something along the lines of:

I don’t have a lot of money right now. Is there any way that I can get a website up for my business, not spend a lot of money, but still make it into something that I can grow into something bigger later on?

Well, yes. Yes there is.

Registering A Domain Name

The first and possibly the single most important step when you’re establishing your web presence is choosing your website’s domain name. This is an important step because your domain name will be representing both you and your business - probably for a good, long time.

GoDaddy is an excellent registrar, offering extended domain registration times (longer than one year) and private domain registration for a low fee. Register your domain name for two years and get private registration. Your e-mail inbox will thank you later.

The domain name itself is an alphanumeric unique name that identifies individual web sites on the Internet. The domain can up to 67 characters long, but must consist of the 26 letters of the English alphabet, numbers 0-9, and hyphens (-). While a domain name can’t begin or end with a hyphen, you can have as many hyphens in the domain as you’d like.

A few key points to remember when you’re choosing a domain name for your small Omaha business website:

Select a .com domain

For most people, “.com” is the only domain extension that they think of when they type the name of your website into their browser for the first time. While buying a .net or .org won’t hurt, those domain extensions really should be redirected to your .com domain.

Keywords

When you start out, sit down and write out between five and ten terms or phrases that really describe your business or what it does. If your business sells furniture, for example, you would want to include “furniture” somewhere in the domain name, but you could replace “furniture” with “furnishings” or “qualityfurniture” or something along that line. Your domain name can help both your customers and the search engines recognize what exactly your website is about - so choose wisely.

Domain Uniqueness

Don’t choose a domain name that will easily be confused with an already-established website. The furniture business that I talked about shouldn’t choose “omahafurnituremart” or “nebraskafurnituremart” as a domain name. Also, don’t choose a domain name that’s just a pluralized or hyphenated version of an already established website. “Nebraska-furniture-mart” is not a good domain name.

Domain Length

The shorter, the better. People have a hard time remembering long domain names. For example, “thefurnitureplacewithbigdiscounts.com” is much harder to remember than “discountedfurnishings.com,” which is harder to remember than “cheapfurniture.com.”

No hyphens and no numbers

While some folks are pretty clever with domain names, keep it simple for your customers. If someone tells a potential customer of yours to go to “cheapfurniture.com” but your domain name is really “cheap-furniture.com” - well that customer just walked into another store.

Set Up Web Hosting

Once you have your domain name selected you need to set up web hosting. A web host stores your website’s files and serves the appropriate files to your customers when they go to your new domain.

It can be a good idea to use a different web host company than the company that provided your domain name. Some web hosting companies will give you a free domain name, as long as you buy hosting from them. The problem with that is when you decide you don’t like the web host any longer, they still have that domain name registered under their company name. It can take a long, long time and a lot of kicking and screaming to get that company to relinquish control over that domain name. It’s not worth the potential hassle - use separate domain name registrars and web hosting companies.

BlueHost is one of the better web hosting companies out there for people who are new to the game. Their banner is off to the right. Click it and sign up for two years worth of hosting. BlueHost usually charges just $6.95 per month if you pay for two years of hosting in advance.

Once you have done these two things, you can either set up your blog yourself, by pointing the domain name you registered at GoDaddy to BlueHost’s nameservers, then going into Fantastico and installing the latest version of WordPress.

Or you could pay me to do that all for you.

If you decide to hire me to set it up for you, I’ll also make sure that the new website is properly installed. I’ll install at least 5 different free, but high-quality themes that you can choose from to give your website it’s own “look.” Your blog will be set up with the correct permalink structure, a slew of useful plugins that will extend the blog’s functionality, and traffic tracking software.

Once I’ve gone over your blog, optimized the site for the search engines and set everything up for you, you can start posting articles immediately.