A great template website tool – inexpensive, easy to use – is GoDaddy’s Website Tonight. When my kids (bless them, following the family tradition!) wanted to put up their first site, we used WebSite Tonight rather than getting our programmer to do a site for us.

This is because the kid’s site is fairly basic and I also wanted them to start building their skillset in this area – plus have the satisfaction of ‘doing it themselves’.

If you’re just starting out in business online, or your company is fairly small, a template site like this will likely serve you just fine until you’re making enough money to have a full-capability site done in PHP. But that will be easy because then you can just tell your programmer to take your existing site and reproduce it in .php programming language.

WebSite Tonight also has some tools in place so you can enter in your tags and keywords for the search engines – this will get your website indexed properly by the search engines and over time will improve your search engine rankings (enabling people to find you more quickly and easily). Here’s how to do it:

- Login to your GoDaddy WebSite Tonight Control Panel

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Go to:  Settings –> Configuration

Description: Make sure the description contains your top keywords (i.e. what will people be typing into Google when they are looking for your information?)

Keywords: And then choose your top 5-7 keywords to put in the keyword box (these can also be phrases, like ‘dangers of wireless’) type each one clean (no quotation marks or anything) and then separate each with a comma. Don’t put in too many keywords or Google will think you’re spamming.

also click the box that says “Redirect all visitors to [your domain]”

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Go to: Manage –> Organize Site

For each page:

- click on the page to highlight it
- in the boxed area on the right hand side, Make sure the BROWSER TITLE describes that page’s contents in a way that contains your keywords. For example, the Browser Title for my kid’s homepage is: “Kids WiFi Radiation Dangers” rather than just saying “Home”
- check the box “Restore default navigation” at the bottom
- click on “OK”

- then do the same sequence for each page of your site. Try to title your different pages with different keywords or keyword phrases.

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Go to: Manage –> Google Sitemap

These settings tell Google how to view your site in terms of how often you update/change your content and also which pages are more important and contain the best information on your site.

Click on the little question marks next to the CHANGE FREQUENCY and PRIORITY headings for a full description of what to set as your parameters for each page of your site.

The important thing to keep in mind is that you need to give EACH of your pages a different ranking – you can’t rank all your pages as 1.0 as this will just result in your site prioritization getting ignored.

And that’s it! Of course, you can do much more to optimize your search engine indexing if you have a custom site (again, I recommend PHP, rather than html or asp since you can expand and configure it with the highest degree of flexibility). But until you have the time or the finances to have a custom-designed site done, GoDaddy’s tools for SEO on WebSite Tonight are pretty good for a template site.

Now that you’ve got your site configured properly, be sure and check out my other blog post on How To Get Good Search Engine Rankings for more useful tips and tricks I’ve learned in my decade online.

soar higher,

Jini