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Start your own
business DogiPot Pet Waste Stations, Service and Installation
Business
Resources Flint River Ranch Health Pet Foods
Scoop Masters Home Security System Association of Professional Animal Waste Specialists Quit paying long distance, toll and local toll charges on your phone!
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Answers to Your Questions 3. How can I build a good web site? Before I address this, I want to give a little background to this whole internet thing. I built my first website in 1998 at a time when it was just cool to have a website. I didn’t plan on actually using it to advertise my business and there was not a whole lot of traffic on the net back then. How things have changed! My web presence went from gaining 3% of my new customers to getting about 25% of new Scoop Masters customers. I suspect it will get higher, even to the point where it passes my work trucks in regards to obtaining new customers. I’ve gone from "Sure, build a website if you have some spare time" to "That should be a high priority." I had my Scoop Masters site built in 1996 by bartering with one of my customers. I scooped his house and he built me a quick website, and I have it hosted by a different customer and still do to this day. The only problem was that whenever I wanted to make changes or add some content, it took several weeks to get it done, because it could only be done when my customer had the time. And being a college student, spare time was a commodity for him. So I set forth to learn how to build web sites. Back then I needed a book like An Idiot’s Guide to Web Sites for Dummies just to open an HTML editor. Fortunately, today there are several great, cheap computer programs that make it real easy to build a great website. You don’t even have to know html, xtml, or any kind of L to build a functional web site as you’ll find out below. The first thing you need to do is find a domain name. That’s the name you use for your website, such as, www.yourname.com. You can easily search out domain names for free at any number of web sites, or simply click here to find a name. Be sure to use "dot com" and not "dot biz", "dot org", "dot TV" or "dot net". You can add those names at a future date, but at the moment most people intuitively type "dot com." While you’re at it, you’ll need a place to host your site. This is the place where your web site actually resides so people can access it 24 hours a day. You can click here to find a host at a very reasonable rate. Once that’s done, you can start building your site. Actually, you can build your site anytime then upload it to your host when you’re ready. If you know how to write htm or html, or any number of codes used to
design web sites, then you can build your own site with any text editor.
If you’re pressed for time and want to get one done a little faster, then
you can try, Web Easy Professional 7 where all you have to do is
enter your information through a wizard program and your page is made.
Another useful service for those who have limited time and brains, you
can Build a Professional Website with Homestead.
When you design your web site, you need to keep a few things in mind. I learned a valuable lesson from a person who called for service and complimented my web site. This is what he told me. "I really like your web site! Its simple, direct and to the point. I don’t care about fancy graphics and animation, I just wanted information about your service." And he thanked me! Many people build web sites to be cool, to show off their programming skills, or try out new, fancy javascript applets - whatever they are. But you are promoting your pooper scooper service. People want basic information like how to contact you, how much do you charge, and do you service their area. That’s pretty much about it. So make those features readily available on your site and scrap the fancy animation and flash programs.
Once you get your web site up and running you’ll want to look into search engine optimization or SEO for short. This is the procedures used to make your web site visible to search engines. While this is a constantly changing science, there are a few things you want to keep in mind when building your site to aid in the search engines ability to find you. The most important part it the content. All that text that people read on your site for information about your dog poop pick up service is the same text that webcrawlers read when searching for your site. (Webcrawlers, spiders, bots, etc. are terms for how search engines find and classify your site.) When someone searches for pet waste removal, they don’t want a bunch of sites about gardening. So make sure that your content contains everything that your site is about. Mostly dog poop! One more thing about text. Make sure it is actual text that you type and not pictures of text. The bots can’t read pictures of text. The next thing you’ll want to do is make a title tag. The title should simply be what the site name is and what it does. Make it less than 80 characters and if your editing your own htm or html code, you’ll want to place the title tags right under the head tag in your page. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s OK. It’s just a little tech talk about web pages and even though it’s relatively simple to do, it does take a bit of time to learn. You could read a book about web building or ask a friend who knows web design, or simply hire an SEO company to optimize your site for you, but that could get costly. The previously mentioned programs will also help you in creating your "tags". Anyway, after the title tags, you’ll want to add a description tag. This is what will be displayed in the search results when someone finds your site on a search engine. Make sure the description contains all your keywords that are on your site and keep it limited to about 250 characters. That’s actually a lot of information to put in a description tag, so don’t be shy about adding details like listing the cities you service and other services you perform like litter box cleaning, disinfecting etc. The last of the basics include a keyword tag. This tag simply lists all your keywords pertaining to your site. In the past several years, the keyword tag has been misused and abused, and as a result has not been used as much when it comes to finding and indexing your site in the search engines. But, you still want to put them in, just make sure that the keywords you use are the same ones in your actual site. That’s where the misuse has come from. People would add keywords that had nothing to do with their site, just to get the traffic, or they would add them by the thousands. It’s just not necessary anymore to do that. In fact, your site could get downgraded for doing so. Just keep your keywords limited to about 20 or so and you should be fine. There are many more things you can do to get your site "found" by the search engines, but these few things mentioned above will give you a good start. Otherwise, you’re going to spend all your time working on your web site instead of building your business. Once you build a decent business, then you can concentrate more on your web site. Now, get busy!
© Copyright 2008 Scoop Masters USA Inc.
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