I have twelve websites. I have produced three by myself and the rest were designed by different developers. This has given me a chance to make many different mistakes along the way. Here are some of the lessons I have learned.

1. Not researching keywords before designing a site. This is a critical site production step. For example, to sell farmers auto insurance in Houston, use keyword research software to identify the most important keyword, plus several more in order of search volume or importance. You or your designer would use the primary keyword, plus maybe one or two more, and optimize the home page for those words. Additional pages would be optimized for your other selected keywords. Don?t build the site first and then think about what keywords to try and pull.
2. Not building site optimization into the site design. Many people are only concerned about the artistic features of their site. Then they discover there is no traffic and hire someone to optimize the site (Been there, done that!). Try to get a designer that is good at optimization and have it optimized from the start.
3. Not picking a good hosting company. I have tried 5 different hosting companies. Some are better than others in different ways. One that I like is Netfirms.
4. Hiring SEO companies without checking them out carefully, and without understanding what they should be doing. At first I thought that paying someone to submit my sites to the search engines would quickly result in site traffic. Wrong! Especially wrong if the site is not optimized. I now believe that site submission is not a key part of building site traffic. Next I thought that if I hired a SEO company with big promises my site traffic would surge. I gave one company $1,200 and after 4 months all they did was put 2 lines of spam (very small text that hurts search engine rankings) on my site! By then I had studied and learned the things a SEO company should be doing. I suggest studying SEO theory and techniques. It is not as hard as you may suspect. Then you may be able to do the SEO yourself using software like ?Axandra?. Or you will at least know enough to be able to help select a SEO company, and know if they are really providing good service. (I know there are good SEO companies out there)

I hope the information is of use if you are going to set up a website!

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