Dutton & Co Internet Marketing Blog

Step 3: The Domain Name

Now it’s time to buy the domain name for your website. Ideally, your domain name should be your primary keyword followed by .com, .net or .org. If your audience is location specific, you should use a geographical TLD such as .co.uk.

Fortunately for me, howtogetridofstyes.net was available but if it wasn’t, I would have to use something that contains the keyword plus some extra words, such as howtogetridofstyesfast.com or howtogetridofstyesnow.com.

The vendor I use for my domain names is 123reg. They’re the biggest supplier in the UK, have awesome technical support and a very easy-to-use Control Panel (especially when you have lots of domains to manage).

Step 4: Hosting

Next, we have to set up website hosting for our domain. I use a reseller package from Web Hosting Buzz as they have excellent uptime and fantastic customer service – and their packages are great value for money.

Exact steps for setting up hosting and configuring the domain name are beyond the scope of this document but if there’s enough interest, I may provide full instructions for doing this in future – email me at dan@duttonandco.co.uk to express your interest.

I usually set up all emails on this domain to forward to a mailbox I use for everything.

Step 5: Website Configuration

The next step is to set up the website. If it’s a small website in a small niche, I tend to use WordPress and use the ‘blog’ format for the website. For more authoritative websites, I use Drupal CMS. Both can be installed from the CPanel provided by your webhost using the Fantastico applet.

In this document I’ll be discussing WordPress websites because it is (in my opinion) the easiest platform to use and Google seems to really like it and ranks websites using it higher. Again, I’m not going to go into tiny details of how to configure WordPress as it’s beyond the scope. Basically, after installing it I:

• Upgrade to the latest version

• Install and configure the following plugins:

  • All-in-one SEO Pack Plugin (allows you to set META description and META keywords)

  • HTML Sitemap Generator (Creates an automatic HTML sitemap)

  • Google XML Sitemaps (Creates an XML sitemap)

  • Google Analytics (linked to my Google Analytics account for getting web statistics)

  • Facebook Likes You (installs Facebook Like button and Google Plus One button)

  • Sometimes I also install one of the many social bookmarking plugins.

• Configure permalinks to display the name of each page in the url.

• Choose and install a theme.

• Create an ‘About’ page with a mugshot of me and a few words about the website.

• Create a ‘Legal’ page containing my privacy policy and website disclaimer (check out www.website-law.co.uk for some free examples you can use).

• Create a ‘Sitemap’ page (using the sitemap plugin).

• Add a text widget to the sidebar showing my mugshot, a little about me and the website and a link to the homepage.

• Add the ‘recent posts’ and ‘tag cloud’ widgets to the sidebar.

• Create the first post (basically a ‘welcome to my website’ post saying what you plan to have on your new blog)

Don’t worry too much about getting these pages and the first post absolutely perfect – hardly anyone will really read them anyway!

And try to include your primary keyword somewhere in your welcome post and ‘About’ page.

Although more stuff has been added to my howtogetridofstyes.net website since it began, you can get a basic idea of the structure by checking it out as it is now.

You can see the about page, legal page, sitemap, the welcome post and the sidebar widgets are still there from when I first built it back in February 2011.