The first thing you need to consider is your domain name. I suggest that you don’t just use your company name, i.e. if your company makes tartan paint and your company name is “Hamish Paints” don’t go for the obvious choice of hamishpaints.com. I would try and come up with a keyword rich domain name. Some search engine optimisers (SEO) would say that having keywords in your domain name doesn’t make any difference to your listings but I disagree. Google will highlight your keywords in the search engine results page (SERPS), which leads me to believe that keywords do hold some weight, and besides it will make it clearer to the searcher what your site is all about.

Keywords in your domain name makes a little difference, but not much. I believe it will start to make more and more of a difference as more businesses go online and establish a web presence. The reason I say that is because keywords are important, especially in the body of your website and as anchor text linking your pages together. To a smaller degree they are important in your title and description tags, even a little less so in your keywords meta tag. But the reason they are important in your domain name is because of the nature of competition. If you are running neck and neck in search engine rankings with a direct competitor and all other factors are equal then the keyword in your domain name could push you over the top. It increases your competitive edge.

As we all know all the good domain names have been taken and it’s almost impossible to get one-word domain names these days, so be inventive if you get stuck. I always find it helpful to visit www.dictionary.com and use the thesaurus to come up with names maybe I hadn’t thought of.

This is invaluable advice. Your chances of getting the best domain name possible for you are next to nil. You might as well get creative. Still use your important keywords, but get creative. As for using an online thesaurus for finding related keywords to the ones you want, that could be useful, however, if you do plan to use that approach then you should check your synonyms at Overture and WordTracker as well. In other words, include those synonyms in your keyword research.

Try and get the domain name extension of the country your company resides in as it makes it clear where you’re from. I know most people want to get a .com but if you are in the UK I believe a better extension would be .co.uk as it shows where your from. This will also help in the SERPS when people are searching for websites in the UK you don’t want to be competing with websites outside of your country if you can help it.

That really depends on whether you plan to do business on a global scale or not. If you plan on doing business in your country and limit your business to your geographic region then by all means that is very important - go for the country-specific domain name. But you are planning to do business globally then a dot com is better than a country code.

The one place you must submit your website is the Open Directory or DMOZ for short as this is where all the major search engines get their directory listings from. For more information on submitting your website to DOMOZ visit http://www.dmoz.com/add.html.

I would dispute that even this is unnecessary. DMOZ may carry some site ranking benefit because of its PR and the ability to give your website a boost in the search engines, but you’ll be waiting a while before you can get that benefit as it takes 6 months to a year for DMOZ to even list your website, if they do at all. In that time you could take your website from a PR 0 to a PR 3 with nothing but a blog. DMOZ carries some benefit, but I think it’s overrated.

Now its time to start designing your site. Before we go ahead and start creating a website in Dreamweaver we will need to get the layout and design in place first. If your want a easier way to design your site and your are not familiar with Dreamweaver or technically minded you can always use website builder software to create your website.

You’re better off designing your website in CoffeeCup. It’s free and easy to use. Dreamweaver and MS Frontpage usually insert their own proprietary code into yours and that makes it difficlut for the search engines to crawl your website. If you do all of your own coding then you should do it in an html editor that doesn’t include extra coding.

When it comes to website design you need to understand the most important part is SEO. You want your website crawlable. If it isn’t crawlable then no amount of beautiful design will help. In fact, it could hurt. Just do yourself a favor and don’t get too elaborate. Stay away from Flash files, frames, i-frames, and tables, except in limited fashion.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, June 17th, 2007 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.