WELCOME TOEASY WEBSITE 101 FACTS & MYTHS
Here are some of the facts and myths that I like to share with you.
Website Hosting: Myth: Starting a website is expensive, hard to do, and you need professional help Fact: Getting started is actually very easy. All you need is a credit card and about 15 minutes of free time. There are literally hundreds of companies that offer web hosting and you should do some resource into what they offer and how much it cost. I have added some useful tips in my manual that will help you decipher all of the specifics and it's no where near as expensive as you might think. For example, just hosting this website right here cost only about $6.00 a month and it took one phone call to set it up. That's it. So, for the price of one large cup of coffee latte I have my own website. I am not associated with any internet company and do not ask or receive any rewards for endorsing certain companies. My advice is based solely on personal experience as a self-employed internet website owner. Webmasters and Internet Companies: Myth: You need to hire a professional or an internet company to design a website Fact: I am not a professional, but I can create a website and optimize it without the help of professionals. This website and my main retail website are two perfect examples of how someone can create and optimize a website without spending a fortune on professionals and companies. Along with the manual, you will receive plenty of website templates and samples so that together we can create a website that will fit your needs. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Myth: Only a real pro can optimize my website and it costs a lot of money Fact: WRONG!!! You can optimize your website without spending any money if you know what you can and can not do. The search engines and the professionals do not want you to know the basics for two simple reasons. Search engines rely on paid advertisements such as pay-per-click to generate their income and professionals want you to pay them. If you know how to get a good ranking on the search engines, you can save the money on the advertisement and you don't need to pay the professionals. That is also why it is so hard to find straight answers from the so-called experts. I spend many hours trying to get the most basic information and it seems to me that it is deliberately confusing. There are hundreds on experts with hundreds of opinions or solutions and all I can say it: Look at my results. My opinion is that the most important first step is to design a website that the search engines will like and then work around that. If you have a clean and easy website, then both the search engines and your clients will like it and optimizing it will be a breeze. Link Exchanges and Page rank: Myth: Link Exchanges take a very long time and it's almost impossible to get a good page rank Fact: There seems to be a lot of talk of link exchanges and how you need hundreds of good links to your site to get a high ranking on a search engine. May so, if you have a website that the search engines don't like and you need to compensate for the screw-ups. When I first started optimizing my main website http://www.mprugs.com, I believed this as well and spend many frustrating hours and days trying to get as many links as I could. Then I noticed that other sites had higher search engine results without as many back links and it made me wonder why. I learned that my website was not user friendly for the search engines and once I made some changes, the placement became better and better. As you improve your website, you will also improve the search engine placements and the page rank has absolutely nothing to do with it. Personally, I think that Page rank was invented by Google to mess with our heads. For over a year, my website with an average page rank of 2 was listing much higher than other sites with a page rank of 4 or even 5. As of October of 2006, many of the pages on my main site have a rank of 3 and I still rank much higher than most that have a higher page rank. Check for yourself and see. Shopping carts, Pay-per-click, and other merchant tools: Myth: Adding additional features can be expensive and I need lots of equipment Fact: Many companies will do whatever they can to sell you goods or services and some of it sounds darn important. Like my own experience with my credit card machine. I realized early on that I needed a credit card payment system for my clients and this was before Paypal and other online services came along. So after spending some time searching around the internet, I signed a lease agreement with a credit card company for a terminal and a merchant account that I thought was a good deal. Sure enough, within a year I realized that I did not need a terminal and I was paying way to much for something that was a complete waste. Better yet, the company was actually being investigated by several states fraud and I consider myself to be lucky not to have gotten screwed for more. I simply did not know where to look and what to look for. As a result, I was suckered into something and I'm sure just about everyone has a similar story. There are lots of services and tools that you can and should consider and I will share with you what they are and how to use/implement them. The last thing you need is to get suckered into something like I did and I will do my best to keep you away from these predators. Also, there are many free and useful tools and websites that you can use and I will introduce them to you so that you can maximize your results.
HOME ▬ Information ▬ Ordering/Payment ▬ Shipping ▬ Links ▬ Contact
Copyright © 2006 Mike Panah |