To be honest my inspiration for putting together these sets of lessons for the SEO school was from some of the conversations I have had when trying to explain the value of SEO itself. Perhaps the most recent one has been a local “mom and pop” jewelry store that had it’s meta tags set up as: diamond, gold, silver, earrings, necklace, MasterCard, Visa… and the list goes on.
Now trust me when I say I don’t blame “mom and pop” for not knowing how to set up their meta tags. I think part of the problem was that some people get into the mind set that they don’t understand this whole Internet thing so why bother. I don’t think anyone has ever taken the time to explain to them how they should set up their meta tags for example. I can’t tell you how many times someone will stop me in the middle of explaining something and say “Now you’ve forgotten that I’m still a preschooler on this and you’ve jumped to the second grade”. I have to have things explained to me simply and concisely so I understand why I am doing it and what it is doing for me, and that is what the SEO school is for.
With no assumptions I’ll start where I did, and where everyone has to: getting a domain and someone to host it. (this isn’t for a free blog, we’ll talk about that later)
So here’s the SEO school bus 101 on selecting a domain name. I spoke with a nice lady who had a major hold up with what her domain name should be. She kept getting frustrated that all the good names were taken. She was trying to start a auto shop that focused primarily on brakes. In her case she was wanting to have something with A1brakes_____. I had to explain that A and 1 only mattered in the yellow pages and not online. Take a few of these guide lines:
- Keep it short
- Keep it simple
- Make it easy to remember
The truth here is you are the only who is going to create relevance and credibility around your domain name, by you SEO efforts. Look at Monster.com, they didn’t make their site called www.The-Best-Website-To-Find-A-Job-Or-Find-Someone-To-Work-For-You.biz. Wow that may have been unnecessarily long but you get the point. Now I know you’re not Monster.com, but the same applies here for you. We’re going to make you work here at the SEO school bus, and you are the one that will need to build your relevance with the search engines no matter what you pick. If this is like getting into a cold lake for you, jump in, don’t just get your feet wet.
As for hosting the SEO school won’t start throwing out a bunch of hosting companies to select from, but what you can do is try a Google search for “website hosting” and find one from there. I would tell you to find one below $8/month if this is your first time, you’ll get everything you need. The easiest way would be to buy your domain and hosting from the same company.
The rest will be filling out your information, and wipping out your credit card. I think what you’ll find is that you’ve finally taken action to get something started, and actually invested your hard earned money on something you want to do. The SEO School Bus would like to know when you’ve taken the plunge, so you can move onto lesson 2.
