There are many companies that do offer free hosting plans, but even though you may not be paying for it, the free web space will come as a cost.

Let me say there are certain times when you may want to use a free hosting provider.

• Keep in touch with family and friends for an up-and-coming special occasion
• Working on a school project

The above are not the only reasons why you may want to have a free host but if you building a website for profit or have a local small business and want to have a web presence, then you should not be using a free web host.

Why Not Use Free Hosting?

If you are looking to make money online with a web site, using a free hosting company does not look very professional. If you can’t take your business seriously, then I don’t believe your visitors will.

Many times when you have an account with a free hosting provider, you do not have your own domain name. Your URL may look something like this,

www.thebigfreesite.yoursite.com

You are actually a subdomain and that does not look very professional.

If you are using the free space because you have a local small business, using a sub-domain can be harmful to your business reputation.

Most business owners will use their small business name as their domain name to make it easier for people to find them on the Internet.

If you can’t afford to spend $5.00 a month to be seen online, then you need to review your budget for advertising as that is why many of the local small business are getting online. It is very cheap advertising. You don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars to be put into a telephone book that many people don’t use anymore.

Hosting Space

The hosting space since it is free is very limited. Because of limited space, you may not have room for all the web pages you plan on creating.

This could create problems for you in the long run.

You can actually purchase a hosting account with unlimited bandwidth and diskspace for under $5.00 a month at Hostgator.

As you can see the cost of web hosting is very affordable.

Many hosting companies even have a free domain name for life when you purchase your hosting through them.

Ads on Hosting

To generate money, most of the free hosting services will put ads on your site. You, unfortunately, will not reap any of the profit.

Once your site is online, you will not be able to put any ads on it, as most of the providers do not want you taking away from their profits.

So maybe free web hosting is just what you need, but before you start creating a website with a provider, make sure you answer this question honestly.

If my free hosted web site disappeared tomorrow, would it really matter?

You need to answer that question honestly, as I have known people that have devoted a lot of time and created large sites using free hosting space, only to find one day it was gone.

They not only lost income from it, but all the time spent designing and building the site just how they wanted.

They had to start over.

This free web site hosting program is only offered to public schools K-12 located in the United States.

Being a teacher is very difficult work but very important and Lunarpages hosting company would like to be able to give back to communities.

This free web hosting plan can help schools and districts create websites to keep parents informed of homework assigned and class projects, help communication between parents and teachers, share information between districts or other classrooms within a school and much more.

If you are a district administrator, school principal, classroom teacher or PTA representative, contact Lunarpages.com web hosting and see how they can help you become visible on the web.

Lunarpages free hosting plan provides unlimited phone and email support, unlimited email addresses and FTP accounts, 500 MB storage, and 20 GB data transfer for each new account.

As long as this free hosting account is used for educational purposes, there is no restriction on the use of the hosting plan as long as it is opened by a public school official.

Unfortunately, at this time private schools, colleges, churches, non-profit organizations, day cares, and public schools outside the United States are NOT eligible to participate at this time.

By creating websites, using this program may help teach your students more than just how to surf the Internet.

With all the other information they are being taught in the classrooms, learning how to create, build and maintain a website could be a huge learning experience.

Lunarpages free web hosting for schools.

Unfortunately, most people spend very little time on it. They decide on a few keywords quickly, optimize their pages for it, then publish to the Internet.

Most times then not, this results in very poor rankings in the search engine results page. That is if they are found at all.

Before optimizing your web pages for the search engines, you need to spend time figuring out exactly what keywords, or keyphrases,  you want to target.

Yes, engines are an excellent source of free traffic, but if you want to utilize them to their full potential, a little effort is required.

Ask Google

If you already have a website and not getting much traffic. One of the first places to start is to see how Google views your site.

One of easiest ways to find out what Google thinks your site is about is use the Google Keyword Tool and where it says “How would you like to generate keyword ideas?” Click on “Website Content”.

Enter your URL (just your homepage first) and see what information comes back. Then you can go back and check for the whole site.

Another way is to use Google Webmaster Tools.

Don’t have an account? Sign up free for Google webmaster tools.

Submit your site map and let Google “crawl” the site. This may take a couple of days, but it will be well worth it.

Once they crawl your site, you can see a lot of information in your webmaster tools account.

On the “Dashboard” page, you will see a section for Keywords.

It will show you the 5 top keywords of what the search engine “thinks” your site is about. Click on the more link and you will be able to see more keywords in order of significance.

If the top 5 keywords are not what your site is about, you need to start at your home page and begin your web site optimization.

Website Optimization

Read your home page. After reading, answer these questions.

• What is the main theme of the page and of your website?
• Which words describe the contents accurately?
• What words or phrases would someone use if using a search engine to find this information?

Once you answered these questions, write down the words and phrases.

Don’t worry if the list becomes very long, you can always remove some later.

When I started keyword optimization for my website (createawebsitetutorial.com), I selected one main theme. Then used popular keywords or phrases for each of the sub-pages that was pertaining to the main theme.

I decided on the popular keyword phrases two ways.

1. Thought about what information was need to help people with site creation.

2. Looked at my competitors websites.

Create an individual and distinct list of keywords for each web page. The other popular words would also be used in the navigational menu.

Each of the popular keywords for your different web pages should cover different areas.

It is okay to have similarities between your lists, but should not be 100% identical.

With your list handy, go back to the google keyword tool and type in the most broadest theme for your site.

See what phrases come up for the main theme.

Are any of the keywords that came up on your list?

If you have a blog attached to your site, you may want to use some of the keywords in blog posts or drop them entirely.

If other words look like they are searched for quite a lot, it may be a good idea to consider adding them.

But remember, you need to…

Keep the search engine optimization process in mind!

By now, your list is probably pretty full of very competitive, single-word terms such as “diet” or “health” or “money” or whatever.  Take them off the list.

I don’t mean to sound sound harsh, but if you’re a beginner, you will have no chance of achieving page one or two under such terms.

There are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of sites targeting them and even with excellent search engine optimization skills, are extremely tough to conquer.

Think about different variations of these popular keywords. If you were originally thinking about the keyword “diet”, look at using a long tail, about 4 – 5 keywords, like “quick weight loss tips”.

These terms may possible be easier to rank well under.

It is better to be in the top 10 for a search term with medium searches than to rank on the 15 – 20th page for a heavily searched term.

Select keyphrases that get searched, but that aren’t too competitive.

You can check to see if a keyword phrase is highly competitive by using Google search engine and type in the phrase with ” around the term.  example “quick weight loss tips”.  This will show you how many web pages are optimized for that phrase.

If it is only a couple hundred thousand, you may have a good chance at achieving top ranking.

Many webmaster also target common misspellings, if some of the keywords related to your site are often spelled wrong.

Be very careful doing this, as it is hard to efficiently target misspellings without damaging your site’s authority.

Would you buy anything from a person that can’t even spell properly?

Didn’t think so.. So, be careful with those misspellings.

At this point, you should have completed your keyword optimization process and now possess a pretty good list of medium-popularity keyword phrases for each of your pages.

I recommend you read basic on-page search engine optimization.  It shows where to place the keywords you selected in order to achieve results with the search engines.

Most web design software programs have an area built-in to the program allowing you to optimize for page title, description and keywords.

If you are using software that does not allow you to place in the meta tag information, you should find another program that will let you optimize your pages.

This information is found in the <head> section of a website.

Page Title

Between the <title> </title> tags, name the page using your main keyword in a small sentence.  Do not use “Untitled”,  “Page1″ or any other non-descriptive term. It will do nothing to help your search engine rankings. Also this is what the search engine results show as title to your page.

Description

Next write a description using the description meta tag. Which looks like this, <meta name=”Description” content=”yourpagedescriptionhere”>.

This needs to be about 2 or sentence long and contain your keywords or phrase once or twice. The search engines only “see” the first 160 characters, so keep it short and simple.

This information is many times used when you see a description on the search engine results page. If a description is not here, many times the engines will take short blurbs from your page and use in the results page.

Keyword

The keyword meta tag looks like, <meta name=”Keywords” content=”this,contains,keywords”>.

Include each keyword / keyphrase only once. Do not repeat your keywords over and over in the keywords tag.

Even though many of the search engines are not using the meta keyword tag when “crawling” your site, it does not hurt to get into the habit of optimizing each of the pages with it.

Header Tags

The header tags are within the body of the page but your visitors will not see them, only the search engine spiders will.

The <h1> tag shows the “spiders” this information is important. Try to use your keywords in a sentence within the <h1> tag.

The header tags are from used h1 to h6. Since <h1> is the most important each of the tags following, <h2> is the second most important, etc…

Think of each header tag as a beginning of a new paragraph when you write your page content.

Page Content

You need to make your content a minimum of 400 – 500 words.

Use your main keywords about 2 – 3 times in the top third of the page, sprinkled in the body and once in the last paragraph.

If the page has 500 words, then only use each of your keywords 5 – 6 times.

Rule of Thumb – keyword density for your pages should be less than 2.5%. Any more and it may look as you are spamming.

Example – If the page has 500 words, then only use your keywords

Do not try to stuff them in, but write the information so it reads correctly.

Images on Page

If you are using images on your webpage, you need to give them an “alt” tag. This tag serves a couple different purposes.

It will let the search engine spiders understand what the image is about and if a visitors cannot “see” the image your “alt” tag will replace it.

Do not try to stuff your keywords into an alt tag, only use them if it is relevant. It needs to be descriptive of the image.

Optimizing your web pages may not help right way with your search engine rank but as time goes by you may see your page rise in the search engine ranks.

This basic on-page search engine optimization needs to be done on each of your pages.

“What will my site be about?”

Trying to find a good and profitable website niche idea may seem difficult.

Once place that you can look is eBay.

eBay? Really?

Yes, Really.

They have taken all the guesswork out of trying to find different niches and even what is selling in each area.

A new ebook I created about building a website can help you locate different niche markets and even the micro-markets.

Complete Guide to Creating a Website

The reason that eBay is a good place to find profitable niche markets is that they have categories for everything that is sold.

When you take a look at the different categories (35 of them), they list all the subcategories under them and you can keep drilling down to find all the micro-niches within any area.

People look on the internet for information (or products) on how to solve their problems.

If you find (or have) a situation (or a hobby)  in which you can help people solve their problems, you can make money with a website.

eBay is not the only place to look for profitable website niche ideas.

Your Own Backyard

Many beginners try to start making money online with trying to sell “how to make money online” products.

The bad idea of this is THEY have not made money yet.

Remember what I said before about what people look for on the Internet?

How about looking outside your door.

Do you live in a high tourist location?

Start a website of all the interesting things to do and even all the free stuff that people can do while there.

Are you finding ways to help the environment?

Write about what you are doing and explain to people what they can do also.

Extremely good with money?

Can you squeeze a dollar and get a dollar and a quarter out of it because of your spend-thrift ways?

Have a large family and found ways to cut back at the grocery store?

There are so many different ideas you can use to help you build a profitable website but you need to do research and see what would work for you.

Can’t think outside the box? Here is a list of website niche ideas to get you started.

When looking for your website theme use the superhighway (Internet) for what it was intended for….Finding Information.

There are still great profitable website ideas that have not been tapped into yet.

What Services Do I Need In A Web Hosting Plan?

• Money back guarantee
• No set-up fee
• Affordable cost
• Own e-mail (example: webmaster@yoursite.com)
• Excellent Customer Support
• No ads
• Private domain registration (optional)
• Toll Free Support
• Affordable domain renewal

Some web host companies will offer you great incentives to sign up with one of their plans but once you have signed up, they may have hidden fees.

So when you compare one web host to another make sure you are actually comparing the closest web hosting packages that you can.

Domain Name

Some of the web hosting providers will include a domain name included with their packages.

This may be a good option for many people.

The downside of this is that when you have a domain name included and you are not happy with your web hosting provider, you may not be able to “keep” your domain name if you transfer to another hosting company.

The reason is that your domain is included for only the time you stay with that hosting provider.

No Advertisements

If you are purchasing hosting, you should not have any of their advertisements on your web pages.

That is usually only for the free hosting companies as this is how they make some of their money.

This chart will help you compare affordable web hosting.

Best Web Hosting Companies

With so many companies vying for your business, how do you really know which company would be what you need?

That is a difficult question since everybody has certain wants and needs for their individual websites.

Long Term

Long Term condition was not stated above in the items to think about when you are comparing web hosting services.

How long do you plan on being with this company.

Are you looking to create a website and just keep building on it or do you want to create mini sites that you will be working on.

How Long Online?

I know you are making your website to be online for a long time, make sure the web hosting company will be able to grow with you.

Do research on how long the company has been in business by reading reviews and asking on forums that you participate in.

Your hosting package will be an on-going expense so take time to really take a look when you start to compare web hosting plans.

There are so many books and information on designing your own website, but I found very few ebooks on how to make your own website.

So I made one (which is free) to help people learn the basics of creating a site.

If you are a beginner trying to figure out the how to of:

• building your own site from scratch
• keyword research
• make money by creating a site
• best software to use
• website layout
• tools needed
• generating traffic to your new site

Then this book is for you.

It does not matter what you are creating a website for and even if you don’t know what you want your site to be about, this basic guide shows you where to get ideas to make your own.

Complete Guide to Creating a Website

It may seem like a difficult task to undertake but I have taken all the steps, consolidated them and explained with images to help you learn.

Make Money by Creating a Site

Even if you are thinking of creating one to make a profit, this guide explains the basics of how and where you can search for profitable website niche ideas.

If you already have an idea, this guide also shows how you can find  micro-niches within a niche area.

Creating a New Site

If you are a beginner this guide will help you learn the steps or if you’re a new webmaster and having problems generating traffic, it shows what you can do to help bring in targeted traffic.

You don’t need any special skills or be proficient in HTML to start building your own.

Complete Guide to Creating a Website

They all wanted me to buy this product and that product.

It seems all of them told me I needed to buy a domain name and web hosting first, then start creating a site.

Heck, how can I even decide on a name when I was not sure of what I will be creating a website for.

I needed help with first of all finding a niche.

Where do I look?  How do I find out if it is profitable? What about competition? Is there alot?

So many questions and the books never gave me answers. Only told me to buy a domain from this registrar and web hosting from this provider.

It was so very frustrating. Even more frustrating when I was trying to make a website that the search engines would find. And better yet, visitors would find me.

My creating websites tutorial does have a lot of steps and I realized there needed to be a quick guide for beginners to make it easy.

So even though there are many steps to creating a website, I decided to create a free quick start book to guide you on how to start building a website.

Before Creating a Website Name

This free book starts you off with learning how to find a profitable niche, doing keyword research and spying on your competitors.

Then guides you on which website software would be good to use for making your own site.

It gives you the basics on helping you start to create your own website from researching a niche to understanding and learning how to drive traffic to your site.

Want to Make Money With Your Website?

Sure you do.  If you don’t know where to start, my quick guide explains to you how you can get into affiliate marketing and start making money with your site.

Not sure if there will be any affiliate programs to fit into your theme?  Don’t worry, as this is a complete tutorial with images to help you find affiliate programs just for your theme.

The tools that are used to research your information before you build are free.

The only costs you will have is for a domain name, hosting and web design software (you can use free).

So take a few minutes and see this Complete Guide to Creating a Website.

It seems more and more people are creating videos instead of writing content to attract visitors to their site.

Don’t get me wrong, I think video is a great way to get your information out to many people, but what I have found is when I am looking for information on the internet, I need to “watch another video” to obtain it.

Give me a choice.

Let me watch the video or read the article.

There are many times when I am looking for information, I just want to skim different web pages until I find all that I am looking for.

But with videos, I am unable to do that.  I have to watch the whole video to get information I want.

That can be very frustrating since some of the videos could be up to 10 minutes long and if I was able to read an article, I could just skim to the parts I want.

Videos can be a great asset when you are giving someone step by step instructions and having that personal touch that seems to be lacking on the Internet.

But so many times, I have watched videos and they drag out what they are talking about.

If you are using videos on your site, but do not have an article available for someone to be able to read if they are under time restraints you may be losing that visitors attention.

Take the time to write articles in conjunction with videos. This can be a great asset to helping many more visitors on your website.

Think outside the box when you are creating your videos to help capture people’s attention.

Sure, there are thousands of people that love to watch the videos, but just think for one minute if you take the time to capture the attention of the people who still like to read articles also how many more visitors you could obtain.

Yes, if you are trying to figure out all the steps you need to create your own website.

No, if you have a step by step tutorial to help you through.

You will find it very difficult, time consuming and extremely frustrating to get your own website off the drawing board and live on the Internet if you are not using a guide to help you.

You don’t need to pay someone to build a website for you because even with very little computer skills you can learn how to plan, design and build your own web pages so that the search engines and visitors will be able to find you.

How Can I Create My Own Website Easily?

By having a step by step tutorial which shows you the complete website development process.

Here is a how to create a website tutorial, which is free so you can learn from start to finish the easy way to begin building your own website.

Many sites tell you to register a domain and get web hosting.

Well, there are many more steps that you need to do.

Don’t worry as the free tutorial explains to you how to plan, research niche website ideas, design web pages, search engine optimization, generating traffic to your site and even how to make money from your website even if you don’t have a product to sell.

I have seen so many articles that say creating your own website is so difficult that you should pay someone else to do it.

Don’t Pay Anyone To Create a Website That You Can Do Yourself!

There are many web design software products available online you don’t even need to learn HTML (but it is a good idea).

Even if you don’t know all the internet jargon, this website development tutorial explains everything you need to know.

The great thing about taking the time creating your own site is you will have complete control over it. So that, as you need (or want to make changes) you can do them yourself.

The biggest step is the first one.

I know when I first started creating websites it seemed they never seemed to work.

I was so mad and was ready to quit.

That is the reason I created my website tutorial.

To give others what I did not have when I was learning how to create my own site. A Step-by-Step Website Tutorial.