What to do with your new Domain Name -The Absolute Beginner Webmaster (Part 2)

So you have a domain name and you have a web host. What should you do next? Well there are some things that you should do with some urgency! I tell you exactly what to do and how to do it.

I am assuming that you did not buy your domain name from your host. There are many reasons why it is not a good idea to do this. The most pressing reason is that should you have any type of dispute with your host, and these can arise even if you pay on time, then you can simply point your domain name at another host and carry on!

The first thing to do is to set up your hosting account to expect your new domain name. This means adding your new domain to the hosts nameservers. The way you do this will vary from host to host, some require you to email them the domain name and they sort it out usually within 24 hours. Others give you access to a control panel, in which there will be a section called 'Domain Administration' or something like that. In this case click on 'add domain' or the equivalent of it and enter your base domain name (ie mysite.com not http://www.mysite.com or http://www.mysite.com).Ask, or copy down from the hosts faq what the names of their nameservers are. Usually there are two and their names are simply the host name prefixed with ns1 or ns2, (eg ns1.myhost.net or ns1.spasmodynamic.com) but some hosts use more exotic schemes.

Once you have done this then you should ask for (or use your control panel to set) a catch-all email address for the site. This simply forwards all email addressed to any email address on the site to one address.

Now go to the domain registration company you use and login. You will find when you go to the settings page for your domain that you have an option to change the nameservers. Change these to your hosts nameservers. Be aware that it can take up to 24 hours for the changes to work their way around the internet, though you can often view your sites holding page (automagically inserted by yourhost) within a couple of hours.

During this time you can build a simple html page for your site. I recommend everybody hand codes a page at least once in their lives even if they do own a copy of Dreamweaver and this can be it for you! Before you start however because this is going to be a placeholder designed for the search engines to index we need to do a tiny bit of research. Hopefully you have read http://www.bukisa.com/articles/90037_birth-of-a-new-website-the-absolute-beginner-webmaster-part-1 and understand the value of keywords.

Do a search in google, for the main few keywords of your site on at a time. Write down the top 5 results for each keyword. Now go to http://www.webmaster-a.com/keyword-density-analyser.php and look to see in each case what the density of these words are on the pages. This will give you figures to aim for. Why can I not tell you a figure to aim at? Simple, Google applies different criteria in its anti-spam calculations to each subject area - whilst certain keywords may be acceptable at a rate of up to 18% of the pages content, some others become unacceptable at a mere 3.5%!

Now build a simple text page, make sure you have a title tag and a meta description tag. Important: Nowhere on the site should you put the words 'under construction' or talk about the site being incomplete! If you MUST do this then use an image to talk for you but do not name or the image or its 'alt' tag as under construction or roadworks or whatever. Make the image name the same as your keyword and the alt tag a sentence with your keyword in it.

If you know little or no html and you do not even know what an ALT tag is then a simple html tutorial is at http://www.webmaster-a.com/basic-html-tutorial.php

Must haves for your page - check these.

Title, No more than 66 chars long with your keyword as the first word. Should be an english sentence that makes sense.

Meta Description tag. No more than 120 chars long with your keyword towards the front an end. Should be two sentences which make sense.

h1 heading which almost repeats the title.

One or two paragraphs of text which is written so that your keywords make up a good percentage of what is said.

h2 heading

One or two more paragraphs of keyword rich text. Put one of the keywords in bold.

External Links, choose some websites that are on the third page of results for your keywords and put in a hyperlink to five or six of them.

A copyright statement that finishes with your keyword/phrase. For example - Site and contents copyright 2009 kluskies sable brushes.

Now upload your page to your host, you can either use FTP or your hosts file manager (usually on your control panel). There are plenty of free FTP (File Transfer Protocol) packages out there for both unix and windows. The next step is to use the keyword analyser on your uploaded page and double check the density to make sure you are at or near the limits you found earlier for your web sector. Adjust your text to suit.

Remember that as soon as you get your page indexed by the search engines (and we want this to be as soon as possible because it can take a long time to get decent rankings) you must change it once a week or so. This ensures they keep coming back for more and dont put you in the moribund and uninteresting sites category. This lack of chage in the holding page while they spend 6-8 weeks perfecting the final website is what most people get wrong!

Now you are ready to submit your site... or not! Read http://www.bukisa.com/articles/51959_the-best-way-to-get-your-site-into-the-search-enginesquickly on submitting without submitting!

Next time I will discuss building your site whilst taking SEO into account from the very start, making your content dynamic, and how to build links.