2015 How To Get A Cheap Website Built By Nina

Beginner’s Guide to Building A New Website 

Learn how to reduce the cost quotation of building a website, and understand exactly what processes are required to build a website. This is a beginner's step-by-step guide.

Website Building Start to Finish - What's Involved

We can compare your mobile phone to a website when learning the process.

• A domain name is the Internet address of a website e.g. www.1weekseo.co.uk (This is your mobile number)
• Website hosting is your mobile service provider (like O2) pay monthly or annually
• Website design (This is like Apple iOS, and mobile apps)

The global platform WordPress is the system I recommend to design and manage your site. It's a very popular online cloud system that lets you easily build a professional website without any technical IT skills. There are millions of free and paid templates to choose from. In WordPress, you don't design a layout you can't edit these templates, but you can very easily change major features, like the background colour and header image. 

I'd love to help!

Wordpress is generally considered the world leader in SEO Plugins, the most popular being Yoast. Every website is unique, so if you already have 20-30 images, banners, a logo, written content for 10-15 pages and a colour scheme in mind, then a website could be as cheap as £300-£400. Adding an Ecommerce functionality (online store) and / or more than 15 pages will increase the cost. You can’t get a cheap website without putting in the effort.

If you have little or no written content prepared, hardly any images, no logo, no banners, if you don’t know what design styles you want, this will result in many changes over the project timescale - more hours means an increased cost.

Tip 1 - How to get the cheapest price for a website built from scratch

If you go through this list of top 10 tasks and complete them all to save time, less hours that someone has to spend on creating your website means less cost. Number 8 is the most time consuming, writing content for a website. This is one of the most important factors that raises the cost of building a website. To get the best price for a website and to succeed in Google for SEO you must write 300 words for each priority page (Home page / About / Services / Products). There’s no one better to write content for Search Engines (Google / Bing / Yahoo) than an SEO Freelancer, primarily this content will be specifically sculpted and unique to your site and written by hand and crafted to reflect your keywords for your business, but this is not cheap so make the effort and invest your time in writing down as much information as possible.

1. Buy your domain and hosting ideally from a UK Host like 34SP
2. Browse Free Wordpress themes online or pay for a theme if you like
3. Employ a designer to design a logo and a promotional banner
4. Collate a Free online Dropbox folder and store all company images in one place in the cloud, so your website developer and SEO can pop in online at any time to upload and use
5. If you don’t have one, create a free Gmail account for your Google Analytics
6. Once you have this, create FREE Google Cloud Drive documents online
7. Make a list of all your website pages in a Google Drive Document
8. Write content for all your pages - between 300-400 words for each page minimum on another Google Drive Document
9. Note social media URLs, Twitter, Facebook logins on your Google Drive Document
10. Think of the keywords you would search in Google for that you want people to find your website, then add your geographical areas to research your competitors - write these down using the online FREE Google Cloud Drive service to share easily with your SEO

Why will my SEO person NOT write content for the website build price?

As a business owner there is no one that knows your client base or industry better than YOU. Asking your SEO or website development company is asking the impossible. Every web development and design company will outsource this content writing at an additional cost if you can't write content yourself, or simply don't have the time. However - if you can write down 5 or 6 paragraphs for a page, a skilled SEO freelancer will be able to transform your text to 100% fully optimised textual content for Google and other search engines. If you can't think of what to write I will send over a list of questions for you to answer so I can write content based on your response! SEO’s are quite happy to rewrite content for your site but be prepared to pay between £20-£30 per page of 250-350 words which will include the essential HTML coding for H1 and H2 headings, internal linking and sales style to entice people to buy, or to call you on the telephone.

Tip 2 - How many pages do I need on my website for SEO?

The more pages the better! There are several sources that say Google trusts websites that exceed 10 pages so my recommendation for a website that needs SEO to make money would be to have 10 pages plus a blog, here is some inspiration:

• Home page
• About Us
• Contact
• Products / Services - minimum 5 - no maximum
• Testimonials
• Gallery (if required)
• Blog

Wordpress has a superb blog functionality and fresh content updated regularly is a sure fire winner for search engine optimisation. I strongly recommend having a blog to share your news.

Tip 3 - How long will it take to deliver a website from design to launch?

For this we work in 5 simple steps and dates:

1. Agree content delivery date - will the business owner provide content, will this be outsourced to a blogger, or written by an SEO?
2. Agree Site Design and Architecture Date - Wordpress template choice, colours, menus (top/side). Artwork for Banners, banner and images, content, gallery etc
3. Agree Site Functionality Freeze Date - Import plugins like a Contact Form, Yoast SEO, perhaps eCommerce plugins, and bespoke HTML side widgets etc
4. Important: Agree Design Freeze date - No more changes after this date. Any changes submitted after this date will be billable at the minimum of one hour’s work for amendments.
5. Agree Launch Date. Test. Now is the time to market your website with SEO.

How long will SEO get me to Google Page 1?

There is no SEO company that can promise or predict any rankings. Find an honest SEO and he or she will discuss your keywords and your competition sites (you did this research earlier in Tip 1) for a local business like a Plumber in Bristol this will be easier than ranking throughout the UK for the search term “Buy [product] Online UK” SEO results are directly correlated to investment. Underhand tactics that try to trick Google no longer work (mass linkbuilding) ineffective timewasting (changing meta tags every month) are still available from overseas SEO who promise you Google page 1 for a few $Dollars. Please ignore these sales calls.

Tip 5 - Agency SEO versus a Freelance SEO

Historically website design companies and website development companies offer SEO services as a bolt-on package after your website is launched. Proceed with caution and ask for a bullet point list of exactly what tasks they will do for you. Some agencies say that they will ‘Optimise meta tags’ and charge you a monthly fee when this is a one-time task. Avoid buying bulk backlinks, or articles published to multiple websites as duplicate content, or even the dreaded 'articel spinning'. Web design companies specialise in building websites, and frequently outsource their SEO website marketing to overseas companies rather than hiring a specialist in-house. Additionally, when you ask for a list of tasks it’s unfortunately common they will refuse to tell you exactly what they have done, often spouting technical jargon to confuse you so you stop asking questions. Research freelancers and agencies online to read past reviews of their work.

Tip 6 - Avoid buying backlinks because someone told you that is SEO

Any SEO worth their salt knows how important getting links to a website is, so whether you’ve been doing your own SEO or hired someone to do it for you, it’s likely the topic of building links has cropped up. In the not-so-distant past, paying for links from relevant (and often irrelevant) websites was rife in the SEO world, despite Google saying this was against their guidelines. After warning webmasters for several years to avoid this practice, Google finally put their money where their mouth is in 2012 with a major algorithm update called ‘Penguin‘. It aimed to de-value poor quality, paid links and increase the value of links from authoritative sources. Today in 2015 the quantity of backlinks is nowhere near as important as it was back in the 1990’s and early 2000’s so never buy backlinks, even if they are for $5 as these will damage your website reputation and it will hurt your pocket to pay to recover.

Free You Tube video to improve SEO Search Engine Optimisation

FREE VIDEO personalised for your business

Video search engine optimization (SEO) is becoming increasingly popular and if you have a business and haven’t taken advantage of this tool, there’s no time like the present. Did you know that 2 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day?

The popular network has the power to give your business massive exposure and if your video happens to go viral, your company could become the next overnight sensation. Video SEO can help increase the visibility of your video, making it more likely to be seen by your target audience.

The bottom line is, if you haven’t tried making a video for your business and optimising it for search engines, you are missing out on some great opportunities to attract new customers, connect with your target audience and show people that your business can be fun and entertaining while still keeping the level of professionalism that is expected by your current customers.

I am offering this opportunity to you for FREE.

What do I need for this FREE video?

Your website URL

Your logo in JPEG format

A selection of images of your products / services

A short intro text and outro promotional text for the video

Contact details - sales email / address / telephone / contact name

Webmaster contact or CMS login or FTP access

Google login

I can help with ongoing SEO Website Optimisation, Google AdWords, Google Analytics reporting, and much more. I promise Google Page 1 results with an Adwords campaign.

If you are looking for something long term and gradual I can work a few hours a month upkeeping and maintaining your site's presence.

Small Business SEO starter package - 7 day boost

If your website is new and has no SEO, then I can help in 7 days. If there is no imporovement in search results in 1 week, there's no charge.

I would recommend the following to perform in search engines - the essential on-page tasks need to be implemented (if not already in place):

1. Keyword research and agreement on top 3 keywords, reporting from Google Analytics - competitor research
2. Optimisation of the meta title, meta description, meta keywords on the home page and landing pages to compliment the agreed keywords
3. Header tags need to be amended, H1 tags should be in place, even H2 and H3 etc
4. Home page text – more text should be added featuring keyword rich content to enable Google to read easily
5. Landing page text – more keyword rich to suit the product, also meta information and header tags to suit
6. Alt tags should be attached to images on home page with keyword description

Essential off-page tasks required are:

1. Logging current keyword positioning within Google search engine results to demonstrate website visibility improvement in the future (benchmarking)
2. Verification in Google Webmaster, Bing and Yahoo by installing HTML code and verifying once uploaded
3. Adding the business to Google Places
4. Linkbuilding from other sites (Directories and article writing)

Further recommended off page tasks are:

1. Creating a blog on Blogspot (Google owned)
2. Creating a YouTube video from Picasa images and embedding on the home page, optimising the video with keywords
3. Creating a Facebook and Twitter account for interacting with customers
4. Linking the blog, Twitter and Facebook accounts via buttons on the homepage

Most tasks can be carried out within 7 days as the initial bulk load of work.

Following on from this only a couple of hours per month would be needed to maintain blog, update Twitter / Facebook and to write one article a month for linkbuilding and web presence improvement, continually looking for more linking opportunities and competitor research.

PRICING QUOTATION:

Work is carried out on an hourly basis, not a monthly retainer. Initially there will be a lot of hours to implement the basics, then a few hours per month to maintain.

For the essential on and off page tasks this will take 12 hours.

For the recommended off page tasks this can be left to the following calendar month should budget be paramount – 5 hours.

Monthly maintenance would be 2-3 hours.

To summarise:

Month 1 = 12 hours
Month 2 = 8 hours
Month 3 = 3 hours

Ongoing monthly 2-3 hours – linkbuilding, on site tweaks, Analytics reporting, comparing search engine results versus benchmark, maintain blog, update Twitter / Facebook and to write one article a month for linkbuilding and web presence improvement, continually looking for more linking opportunities and competitor research, on call for advice as and when.
For demonstration of Google page 1 keywords from previous clients, visit www.1weekseo.co.uk

PR Fire press release - SEO in Bristol

PR Fire Press release : How To Find A Good SEO in Bristol

Advice for small businesses, article written my myself. Although based in Weston-Super-Mare, SEO work that I do is carried out all over the UK and I thought I would headline the article as Bristol to have a catchment area of Avon, Somerset and my nearest city.

100 free SEO tips

I am experienced in all of these, should you require a quote for some or all of these, please contact me.

1. If you're launching a new site, or new content, write an introduction and submit it to share sites like Digg, Reddit and Now Public.
2. Create a Yahoo Group in the niche your site sits.
3. Create a MySpace account and use it to publisise your site.
4. Bookmark your site on Del.icio.us and if you're really keen, add a Del.icio.us button to your homepage.
5. Create a Technorati account and "claim" your blog.
6. Submit your site to free, search engine friendly directories. An excellent list can be found here.
7. Conduct a survey. This is an excellent way to generate offline publicity.
8. Place a free ad for your company on Gumtree.
9. Syndicate your site's content by using an RSS feeds.
   Submit your RSS feeds to agregator sites like FeedBurner, Squidoo, Feedboy, Jordomedia, FeedBomb, FeedCat, rssmad, feeddirectory and feedfury. Stolen from DigitalPoint
10. Write an article related to your site and submit it to article sites.
11. Sign up to StumbleUpon and get your friends to Stumble your site.
12. Create a custom 404 page so that even if someone encounters an error on your site, they are re-directed somewhere nice.
13. Set up a 301 redirect to take traffic from your non-www address to your www address. See here for more info.
14. Add a link to your site in the signature of any forums you post on.
15. Tell your friends about your site. It's free advertising.
16. Speel cheek ur stie. Nothing appears more amateur than a site with typos or spelling mistakes.
17. Test your site and make sure it appears correctly in all major browsers.
18. Buy enough hosting. No one likes a slow site.
19. Don't worry about PageRank - worrying about PageRank is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.
20. Offer something for free. Free is good. People tell their friends about free stuff.
21. Tell your neighbours, you never know what contacts they might have.
22. Offer your users as many ways as possible to contact you. MSN, Skype, Yahoo etc all complement email, phone and a real address.
23. Advertise your site on Craigslist. It's free, relevant and localised.
24. Do NOT use frames.
25. Submit your site to DMOZ.org. It may take time, but it's worth it.
26. Create an XML sitemap of your site and submit it to Google.
27. Get a custom t-shirt made with your website url on it, and wear it often.
28. Ask a large breasted lady to wear one too.
29. Sign up with an affiliate programme to sell your product, or if you're a publish, make some cash!
30. On your Contact Page ask people if they mind receiving your newsletter.
31. Send out a newsletter!
32. Go to a free seminar for Website owners. You might learn something.
33. Find quality and relevant blogs and leave a comment (with a link back to your site of course).
34. Don't pay people to submit your site to search engines. It's a waste of money.
35. YouTube and Google Video are excellent portals on which to launch a viral campaign.
36. Giving away an eBook is an excellent way to generate word-of-mouth about your site.
37. Sponsor a Wordpress theme or a phpListDirectory template.
38. If you sell products that are advertised on television by the manufacturer, add "As Seen on TV" to your site!
39. Avoid proprietry technologies like Java and Active X.
40. Put downloadable content on your site, but make sure it's not manufacturer specific - so mp3 rather than wma.
41. Learn about CSS. It's the new HTML.
42. Contribute to related subject areas on Wikipedia.
43. Ask bloggers and other Web site owners to review your site and/or products.
44. Have user friendly page names - most tools comes with some way to avoid http://www.yourdomain.com/pgInfoPage...CFE3AEDAF8DD9D
45. If you must have a Flash homepage, make sure you have a "Skip Intro" link.
46. Tell your local rag about your site. These newspapers are desparate for stories and you may well even get a pic of your ugly picture published.
47. Become a leading authority on your chosen subject.
48. Donate money to a charity and most will place a link on their site back to you.
49. Abide to W3C standards - it will help your site in the long term.
50. Your local community sports teams offer cheap, but highly effective sponsorship opportunities.
51. Publisise your site on related forums - but don't spam!
52. Ask bloggers to write about your site or product - in return for a link of course.
53. Offer a competition related to something in the news - so football around the time of the World Cup etc.
54. Add a "Tell a Friend" function to your site, so people can easily recommend you to their mates.
55. Have a Sitemap on your site to allow users to navigate around quickly and to aid the search engines.
56. Have a nice keyword rich title at the top of each of your pages. Users and search engines both like descriptive titles.
57. Include a Feedburner button on your site so people can easily subscribe to your feed.
58. If you use PPC then create a landing page for each of your AdWords - it'll boost your conversations no end.
59. Appear on Dragon's Den :)
60. Create a Press section on your site where can you store all your press releases, logos and banners.
61. Add a link to your site from within your eBay profile.
62. Ask your friends to give you honest feedback on your site.
63. The best way to find someone to do any kind of work on your site is through personal recommendation.
64. Gain exposure by submitting photos and pictures to Flikr.
65. Share your banners on banner exchange sites.
66. Make sure it's easy for your users to subscribe to your RSS feed.
67. Create a "lense" for your site on Squidoo
68. Ask friends, collegues and associates to "Favourite" your blog on Technorati.
69. You can add a Bulletin to your MySpace account promoting your site that all your MySpace Friends will see.
70. Response to your customer's emails promptly, even if it is with a simply auto-responder. No one likes to wait 3 or 4 days for an acknowledgement of their contact with you.
71. Get a professional Copywriter to give your site a once over. If you are on a tight budget, limit to the just the homepage.
72. Make a list, "Top 10"s work well. Update it regularly to give your visitors a reason to return.
73. What did you learn today? Tell other people and they might learn something too.
74. Do you have really hot content on your site that geeks would love? If so Slashdot will bring you a mass of traffic.
75. Deep link directories are an excellent way to promote inner pages of your site.
76. Meta tags might carry less weight than previously, but you should still have them on every page.
77. Ask your Gran for feedback on your site. Never ignore the silver surfers.
78. Include a "Add to your Technorati favourites" button on your site.
79. Google Analytics is free and will tell you all you need to know about who's visiting your site.
80. Search engines will find you. Don't pay money for your site to be "submitted".
81. Don't be afraid to link to other sites, especially if they are relevant and to highly respected sites.
82. KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid: use CSS to control layout, style and colours and use HTML text rather than graphics to represent text.
83. Validate your HTML and CSS. It'll help ensure your site displays well in all browsers.
    Small pages sizes and optimised graphics will give your site a snappy feel and won't require users to wait around for it to load.
84. If you plan to submit your site to lots of directory or article sites - create an email especially for this. Delete it when you're finished to avoid spam.
85. "Link baiting" means writing some killer content that people will want to link to. Like a "101 Tips to Improve Your Web Presence" list!
86. If your chosen field is technology related then write a "whitepaper". That's a posh name for an article.
87. Google receives roughly 50% of all search requests, Yahoo 25% and MSN just 10%. That's a good rule of thumb as to how much emphisis to put on each.
88. Make sure you have a robots.txt file in the root of your Web site. You can use this to control search engines, but if nothing else it'll reduce the number of 404 errors in your Weblogs.
89. Free online games, a forum or chatrooms will give your users a reason to come back to your site.
90. Ebooks with re-seller rights make an excellent "free gift" for your site.
91. Upload your product feed to Froogle. It's FREE!
92. Add ALT tags to all images
93. Search out unanswered questions on Yahoo! Answers and add your site as the "Source".
    PageRank is vanity, ranking is sanity.
94. Yahoo are catching up with Google with an excellent set of webmaster tools called Site Explorer.
95. Don't buy traffic. It's un-targetted and won't convert.
96. Pay Per Click advertising gets you fast results - and if it's handled well can be very profitable.
97. Upload a favicon.gif file so that your users have a nice icon when they bookmark your site.
98. Create a blog on blogspot (like this one)
99. Post responses to Yahoo! Answers (you can search questions with keywords)
100. Create and maintain a good LinkedIn profile - with a picture - research has shown people like to know who they are talking to

[Thanks to Matt K for his work in compiling this list]

Bristol / Somerset / Weston-super-Mare SEO consultant

The sooner people get over the idea of "top of google" as being a definition of SEO, the better. But it DOESN'T suit all businesses, just as other mediums don't. It's real, it's here to stay and for most businesses who plan correctly it can be hugely profitable.

You wouldn't believe a TV ad agency if they told you they could get your ad placed in the X-Factor breaks for £100, so why would you believe you're going to double your business for an equally suspect fee from an SEO company.

Research. Research. Research. People get scammed because in most cases they fail to conduct ANY research at all in the first place. It's basic business acumen. If you feel let down by a previous agency or consultant I would love to hear your story.

With a brand new website, position 1/2 in Google is achievable (in free organic search) with keyword research and regular emarketing I'd say 6 months in all honesty. I'm not going to lie about this and anyone who says different will just be taking your hard earned cash! However - with Adwords I can get you to google page one in a matter of hours. What adword daily budget would you set yourself?

I have worked with new sites and currently work full time on contract for a company who launched in October 2009, 39 hours a week just to put it into perspective the man hours involved are substantial.

The services involved are:

• Installation and reporting of Google Analytics
• Submission of URL to Google Webmaster tools, and code installed into your site to verify
  Simialr code verification for Alexa, Yahoo, Bing
• Adwords reporting, keyword researching
• Directory submission with full listing and images
• Article writing (500 words) submitting to article sites and press release sites
• Blog creation on wordpress, Blog on Google (blogspot)
• Google maps directory verification and submission
• DMOZ submission
• Posting on forums, creating identities
• URL submission using a tool for global search engines
• Facebook, Twitter, social networking accounts, creating proper profiles
• Setting up Google Alerts for competitors and your own URL to track appearance on the internet
• Meta tags and meta description for your website, Alt tags on images, proofreading for grammar etc
• Web page copy composition in a style to suit you

What I say to my clients with a low budget is to agree an arrangement of so many hours a week and I continue through this list and take payment as we go along. The work I carry out with contracting is done in the evenings and weekends.

Based in Weston-super-Mare I carry out remote work - there's no need for a visit - however if you are based in Bristol or Somerset I am happy to pop in and have a chat face to face about your SEO and website optimisation expectations.