• Hosting Plans With Built-in Website Builders Do Have Their Limitations •
• Be Aware Of Exactly What You Get For The Money! •

So, you’re getting ready to begin your online marketing career, and it’s really important to you to find an all-in-one type of affordable domain hosting. You want a website builder to be included with the hosting service? No problem. There are so many of these types of services available today, that it can be quite a task to weed through them all. If you are like I was in the beginning, I had NO clue about how one gets started on the internet.

Whether you’re a newbie, or even a semi-seasoned online marketer, you might not be knowledgeable about what separates a good hosting service from a mediocre one. You really need to be careful, yes CAREFUL of what the domain hosting service offers you before you plunk down your cash. There are a lot of crummy companies out there offering very little service for too much money.

And part of the problem is the dangling of the carrot in front of the newbie’s nose with the lure of a website builder as part of the hosting package. Some companies offer it free, while others charge extra if you want it included. Some site builders are pretty darn good and others just plain stink!

Which Domain Hosting Service Can You Trust?

Well, you are pretty safe with these two web hosting giants: GoDaddy or Yahoo!.  I do have a hosting account with GoDaddy, however do not use their “WebSite Tonight” sitebuilder tool.  I do have hands-on experience with the “Yahoo! SiteBuilder” as I have a few clients who use it and I’ve had to access it to teach them how to do certain things, and to upload SEO tags and such for them.

These site builders can be incorporated into the hosting packages. There are many price points and options, so please go to each company and compare for yourself.

Another company where I have most of my websites hosted is IX Web. They have great hosting package options for the money, except I will say their site builder is not as sophisticated as GoDaddy’s or Yahoo’s.  As a matter of fact it is pretty limited, but you can build a website with it.

Customer service provided by these three companies is very good.  You may have to hang on for more than a few minutes sometimes to get to a customer service representative, but I can honestly say they all try very hard to offer excellent support. I have only experienced polite and helpful reps when I have had to call for help. 

Of course there are many other affordable domain hosting services. And many offer pretty decent hosting packages.  Just stay away from their website builders! But suffice it to say I feel very confident in writing about and referring you to the three domain hosting companies discusssed here.

Let’s Take A Look At Site Builders

One of the biggest complaints professional website designers, and other internet professionals like myself can voice about the domain hosting + template packages, is that in many respects these companies do profit by creating unrealistic “newbie” expectations as to what can be achieved marketing-wise. Suggesting that you can have a truly professional website at the click of a button is not realistic.

What’s missing from these site builders is the knowledge about how to properly design for visitor AND search engine friendliness.  That knowledge of course comes from either you pouring over how-to tutorials, or hiring an experienced professional. 

I speak from experience as I started my internet marketing career using an all-in-one domain hosting service (name withheld because I can’t recommended it in good conscience) and I had no clue about website design, but I did get a website up and running. And I was lucky in that it included SEO how-to information (most don’t), but EGADS!

When it came time to hire a professional web designer (GraphicsWerx.com) to redesign my sites, I quickly discovered what a coding mess site builders cause. It wasn’t an easy task for me to clean-up and transfer 90 pages of content from a gobbly-de-gook of coding into my newly designed website template.

Anyway … I’ll be posting more about this in the future, but for this post, let me end with this: the vast majority of serious internet marketers will decide to progress from their “instant websites” to professionally designed websites or blogs within a year or two.

So be forewarned that your “site builder” built website will not be easily transferred into a professionally designed template. Plus more than likely it will be a bit of a hassle to transfer it to a new hosting company. For the newbie starting out, “instant websites” created by site builders are great, don’t get me wrong. Without them, many people could not be online trying to live their dream of working from home, having an online business, etc. But there are often many pitfalls.

I’d like to help you by alerting you to the major issues you ought to have a very clear understanding of before you sign up for your hoped for “affordable domain hosting with site builder”. I am addressing the most basic of concerns that someone just starting out should be aware of.  I could add scads more to this list.

1. Is my domain name registered in my name? In other words, do I own it?
2. Am I able to register my domain name with another company when it comes time to pay the yearly registration fee? Are there any hidden costs to do so?
3. Can my domain (website) be moved to another host? How long does the transfer process take?
4. Can I upload my own custom designed web pages and files, or am I stuck having to use your site builder?
5. Is there a limit on the number of pages I can have on my website? (often referred to as web space)
6. Is there a limit on the number of images I can have on a page or have stored on your servers? (again, this is referring to web space)
7. Can I write my own search-engine-friendly URLs?
8. Am I able to insert a Title tag, and the Description and Keyword Meta tags for each web page? Are these tags properly configured and coded within the site builder page?
9. Is there any limitation on a page’s content length?
10. Will there be advertising on each of my web pages? (I will call this forced advertising as you cannot remove it.)
11. If I want to sell products, is there a shopping cart feature, or does that cost extra?
12. What kind of customer service comes with not only my hosting package, but my site builder? (The hosting company I first did business with only had email support! Do you know how frustrating that was?? Yuck … make sure you can pick up a phone and call.)

Good luck in reseaching the right affordable domain hosting service. I’ve given you three safe bets … please check them out.

IX Web  •  Yahoo  •  GoDaddy

Make Your Blog Posts Search Engine Friendly
My Best Tips To SEO Optimize Your WordPress Blog

To make your blog posts properly optimized for high search engine rankings and to be more SEO friendly, I can offer a number of suggestions.  Surprisingly, many bloggers don’t pay any attention to SEO issues, so their blogs are basically lost in search-engine-land.

That’s a shame, as it’s really not hard to attain decent (or even top) organic search engine positions by following some basic SEO guidelines.  But I must briefly mention that to keep any blog in the top SERPs (search engine results pages), you need to continue to add quality content on a regular basis, and you also need good quality incoming links.

My SEO Suggestions to Optimize Your Blog Posts

The Title:  Here’s the first SEO step.  Your main keyword phrase must be incorporated into your post’s title, and it should be at the beginning, rather than the end of the Title if at all possible. 

Post Slug:  The slug (one of the built-in tools in your blog) is found over in the right hand side column of the WordPress editor.  By default, if left empty, the slug will automatically be filled with your entire title when you publish the post, but with the words all in lower case and each word separated by a dash.  As example, this post’s slug is:  how-to-seo-your-wordpress-blog-posts-for-high-rankings.  

The slug is just like the page name of a traditional html coded website.  But, you can manually type in whatever you wish the slug to be (it will not alter your Title).  Many people, myself included, will alter the words in the slug to be shorter than their Title, or maybe a little more keyword forcused than what their post’s Title happens to be.  I don’t make a habit of doing this, but every now and then do alter it for one reason or another.  

Blog Post:  Following “traditionally taught” SEO techniques, you should use your keyword phrase in the very first sentence of your post.

Contrary to a lot of information floating around the internet, it is not necessary to use H1, H2, bold, or italic codes as examples, on your keyword phrase in order to gain higher rankings.  But, for aesthetic reasons, you may wish to use one of these html codes to bring attention to the actual keyword phrase in your copy.

I suggest you sprinkle your keyword phrase throughout your copy.  Use the keyword phrase a little bit more than you would in normal conversation.  But don’t overdue it … you’ll look like you’re spamming.  Also, incorporate your keyword into the very last paragraph.

Tags:  Tags are a misunderstood, thusly often overlooked, part of optimizing your blog.  Make sure to use the tags at all times.  Include your main keyword phrase and then some keyword variations or modifiers.  Tags are sort of like labels, but in this situation, they are keywords that pertain to the content of your post.  Tags help make it easier for other people to find blog posts relating to a specific category, or subject for instance.  So include keywords that you think would help your post be found if someone were searching for it :-)  

Hyperlinks:  If your posts contains hyperlinks to other posts (or pages) in your blog, to web pages on other sites, or to affiliate programs that are related to the topic, it is a good SEO tactic to include a keyword phrase to hyperlink to them.  Of course make sure it is a keyword that pertains in some way to what your post is about.

Images:  I like using images in my blog posts whenever I can, since a picture often speaks a thousand words.  Make sure you include the “alt” tag in the image’s coding, and make sure you’ve placed the keyword phrase in there.  This helps give you a small rankings boost.

For Serious Bloggers, I Suggest and Use This Great SEO Plugin

All in One SEO Pack:  This free SEO plugin is an absolute must-have for any blogger who is serious about SEO-ing their posts.  You can provide information for a Title tag (yes, it can be completely different from the title that starts off your post); the Description Meta tag and the Keyword Meta tag.  Whatever you enter will be shown in the SERPs.  Download it and I promose you’ll love it.

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Is There A ‘Best Length’ SEO Guideline When Writing Content?
Do The Spiders Run Around Counting Up The Words On Your Page?

I have had more than one SEO client ask me how many words there must be for each page of content they write for their site.  I do understand their concern that providing informative content is part of building a successful website or blog, but quite honestly there really isn’t a specific number of words that determines good or poor search engine rankings.  

As a matter of fact, I’ve seen it advised in more than one place that for top rankings, page length really should be between 400 and 600 words (give or take a little, depending on whose erroneous information you read).  Or, I’ve seen it stated to never ever write less than 250 words.  None of this information is correct!

The Search Engine Spiders Don’t Give A Hoot About The Number Of Words On Your Page

You can absolutely positively 100% trust that there are not a specific number of words that your pages or blog posts need to contain in order for your site to have the ability to rank highly and to obtain high quality targeted search engine traffic.

The search engines get smarter and smarter every month, and with that comes the understanding that the number of words on a page does NOT determine it’s value from a ranking standpoint.  But, the number of words you write does matter to your visitors.  Are you providing the information they came to your site hoping to find?

If you are addressing the topic at hand, and provide a thorough, well written page of content pertaining to the topic, then whether you’ve written 200 words or 1,200 words is totally OK as long as what … ?  Right … as long as you provide targeted, keyword focused information.  Your visitors were searching for this information, and you ought to be providing excellent content for those visitors.

How about some free help to narrow down the keywords you ought to be weaving into your content? I suggest this freebie.

Your pages can be as long or as short as you feel appropriate in order to say what you want to convey to your visitor.  Every page or post is different, and in that respect each has a different purpose.  Quite honestly, the number of words on a page is not a search engine issue at all, but really a marketing issue. 

So, do your best to always over-deliver quality content on every page you write.  The search engine spiders know that each page is unique unto itself.  If I may use a bit of poetic license here, I can tell you that as far as the spiders are concerned … “bean counters they are not!”  :-)