If there’s one word that’s synonymous with the Internet it’s the word FREE. Whether it’s free advice, free software or free phone calls Internet people like free. But is it possible to build a professional and successful website using free tools, free software and free advice? The answer is a resounding yes and this series of articles will show you how.

This series of articles will cover:

• Free keyword research tools
• Content writing for people and search engines (SEO)
• Free website software for creating your site
• Free website traffic analyses
• Free website promotion

Before you read on there is one caveat. Free doesn’t mean zero effort, free just means no money changes hands, you’ll still need to put the time in if your free website is going to be successful. Also, you will need some money to buy a domain name and secure some decent hosting as I wouldn’t advise using free hosting.

Getting Started

Your first task is keyword research. If your website is going to attract search traffic it needs to use the words and phrases used by people who will be interested in what your website is saying. So before you think about design, HTML or anything else develop an understanding of your market.

For this we can  make use of Google’s Free Keyword Tool. Using Google’s Free keyword Tool you can discover words and phrases that are regularly used by people using the search engine. Don’t forget to change the match type to ‘Phrase’, the default being broad. For a simple overview of how to use the tool go to Google and type in the search phrase “Google Free Keyword Tool in Video” the first link, to Red Evolution’s SEO blog, will tell you all you need to know.

Developing a clear picture of what your target audience is searching for could give you a real advantage over your competitors. As a professional SEO I carry out many SEO reviews of websites and it’s clear the vast majority of sites don’t do it, preferring to simply have a guess.

If you are not sure about which keywords to use to kick start your keyword research there’s another great free keyword tool that can help. Seed Keywords is a tool that let’s you pose a question and ask people to tell you what they would search for to solve the question. Just Google Seed Keywords to find the tool. Used in combination with Google’s keyword tool it’s a great way to discover valuable keywords.

Once you’ve created a list of keywords you want to rank for you need to write your content. In Part II of this series of articles we’ll cover the basics of writing great web content that will be loved by both your site’s visitors and the search engines.

David A Robinson – Red Evolution (Aberdeen) Ltd
Specialist advice on all aspects of Web Development.

What are keywords?

Part of your website promotion efforts should entail some keyword research. Simply put, a key word is a word or series of words, that someone types into a search engine to find what they’re looking for. In other words, if I’m looking for “dog food,” I’d go to my search engine of choice, type in “dog food” and the search engine finds sites on the internet that have content that is relevant to the words “dog food” and I’m a happy camper.

It’s not quite that simple, but hopefully you get the gist of what a key word or a key word phrase is. There are several websites out there that query the Google database and search for and report on the keywords that people type to look for information.

Where do you get keywords from?
Google itself lets you query it’s database for free via the Google adwords keyword research tool. There’s a company called Wordtracker that also lets you research keywords for free via their free keywords wordtracker website. Wordtracker also has a paid option for performing keyword research. Generally speaking, there are paid and not paid solutions for keyword research but both options will give you a lot of data and keyword suggestions that you can try on your own site.

Researching these key words, you can tailor the content on your site in order to improve your rankings in the search engine results pages (serps). The purpose of improving your rankings is to get more targeted traffic to your site. Again, it’s not quite that simple, but that’s the gist of it.

I feel like I’m peeling an onion with this topic. Every step of the way, there’s an extra layer that needs to get dealt with as you move down to the core.

These tools also let you analyze your competitor’s website for the keywords that they are tracking/ targeting. If you own a brick and mortar store, these tools can also help you figure out how to better target your geographical area.

Next steps:

Plan and strategize:
a. Keyword research. Find out the keywords that people are targeting in your niche.
b. Come up with content that uses these keywords
c. Competitive Analysis. Find out what your competition is doing. What words do they rank for? What do you need to do to beat the competition and outrank them?

Bonus Tip
Get a Google webmaster tools account. The tool is free and lets you see incoming links to your site, when was the last time that your site was indexed by Google and other valuable information.

And now I would like to invite you to claim your Free Instant Access to an email course that talks about 7 different aspects of website promotion visit http://www.bigsexymedia.com to sign up.

From Rafael Marquez – The Quick Website Creation and Promotion Guy.

These days, it doesn’t make sense to pay a lot of dough to host your Web site. I am going to give you three alternatives that won’t cost you more than $5 a month. All three are great for people who don’t have a lot of HTML coding expertise and don’t want to shell out the big bucks to pay for graphic designers and programmers. I have built sites using all three methods and while they do have their limitations, they are all acceptable for handling the basics, and in some cases will do a lot more advanced things as well.

Let’s start off with GoDaddy. First, we choose whatever dotcom name your little heart desires, and hopefully is still available.. Next, we take a look at what GoDaddy offers for its own Web hosting plans. If you go to their sign-up page online, you will see lots of choices. Pick the Economy Plan for Linux. If you want to host more than one domain from the same server, you would pick the Deluxe Plan. You can get a better deal for two-year contracts if you call their customer support line rather than signing up online. Still, it works out to $5 a month, on top of the registrar fee to register your domain.

Why Linux? Because we will be using their WordPress..org installation, and that works better on Linux. You don’t need to know anything about Linux to run your site, you get the same great features of having a world-class blogging platform that you have with a WordPress.com hosted site, and you can do a lot more with it as well.

Included in the GoDaddy hosting account are a ton of free applications. Besides WordPress, you can install Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, PostNuke, various shopping cart applications, phpBB, and dozens more. The WordPress install is very straightforward and takes a few minutes, and once that is done you can use your Web browser to run just about everything that you require.

Using GoDaddy-hosted WordPress is great if your content can work within the blogging format, if you want better control over your pages than you would get with WordPress.com-hosting, and if you want to add ads and analytics to your site but don’t want to build your pages from scratch. One thing that the self-hosted WordPress isn’t as good as the dotcom hosted is the ability to stream video content. You are better off using the dotcom hosting and buying the 5GB space upgrade and running your videos there. Let’s move on to the second method, using Microsoft’s OfficeLive Small Business hosting account. What I like about OfficeLive SB is that you can buy your domain name through Microsoft, although if you plan on moving it to some other provider later on, that might be difficult. Microsoft also doesn’t charge you for the first year that you have the domain, and then $15 a year thereafter.

The Microsoft plan is great if you have Windows and a relatively recent version of IE (v6 or later, running on XP or Vista) that you are going to use to build your site. They give you some simple templates for your page design, and if your site is going to be composed of a few static pages, then this is a really fast way to assemble a site and the price is rock-bottom. They will also hide your domain registration from public whois queries as part of the deal. What about the third method? Check out the site Weebly.com. They offer free web site hosting, ties into Gmail and Register.com for domain registration as part of their package. I don’t care for Register.com because they charge $35 a year for registering your domain where GoDaddy and others charge less than $10, but what is appealing about Weebly is that you have a lot of control over page design and widgets and templates as well as integration into Google’s Gmail for your domain. The basic service is free, but if you want more than the freebie site – such as password-protected pages, audio players and support, it will cost the same as a more capable GoDaddy account, about $4 a month. All three will give you more email addresses than you know what to do with, and all are good starting places for your own exploration for other hosting providers, which are overwhelming. Feel free to share your own recommendations here.

David Strom is a noted speaker, author, podcaster and consultant who has written two books and thousands of magazine articles for dozens of IT publications such as Computerworld, eWeek, Baseline Magazine, Information Week and Information Security magazine. His blog can be found at http://strominator.com, and he can be reached at david@strom.com.