Interested in How To Start a Website/Blog in 2021?. With the rise of social distancing and the work from home economy, more businesses are moving online and building their own websites. In fact, there are nearly 1.5 billion websites in the world today.
One big reason is that the barrier to entry is low and there are easy ways to make a business website with no coding knowledge required. With numerous website builders available, the process is now pretty easy and you don’t need a web developer.
A dedicated website offers many advantages over channels like Facebook and Instagram, allowing your business to showcase all the brand elements the way you want.
It also provides a steady flow of information to interested consumers and lets you influence their buying process.
With a business website, you can:
- Announcing news and updates.
- Offering discounts and promotions.
- Providing your address and contact information.
- Giving customers a way to contact you via a contact form.
- Showcasing the services you offer.
- Displaying your products.
- Generating leads.
- And many more.
To help you get started, I wrote this detailed guide on How To Start a Website/Blog in 2021 in easy steps.
This ultimate guide includes everything from planning and setting up your site to publishing your website and attracting your first customers.
Let’s get started.
It’s pretty simple: you need to have a plan before creating your website/blog.
A proper plan can help you design the important elements of your website that you can’t afford to forget.
At this stage, you should start brainstorming and thinking about things like for your website:
- The pages and sections of your website that are essential (your sitemap).
- The main focus area of the website.
- The topics you want to cover
- Your design and color considerations.
- Headings and subheadings required.
- Header, footer, sub-pages, and sidebar design.
- Your home page images and messaging.
One great way to approach this planning is to draw mind maps of the entire website-making process.
Here are the steps that can help you achieve it:
- Write a simple outline of the pages that you want to include on your website.
- Visit and study in detail the website of your peers and immediate competitors. For example, if you want to start a new eCommerce store, you should search for terms in your niche and find competitor websites. Then take a look at their messaging, layout, and pricing.
- Open a spreadsheet and take notes about the keywords you want to target, the pages you’ll need, your target audience, and a unique value proposition.
- Perform SEO research on relevant keywords and how to incorporate them into your website to drive more organic traffic. I cover this in-depth in my ultimate guide to starting a blog for beginners.
Remember, visitors are impatient and need to understand what your website is all about at a quick glance.
For example, you don’t need every single piece of information on your home page. A strong headline, sub-headline, and call-to-action should quickly give visitors the information they need.
And don’t overcomplicate the planning process – websites can evolve and change over time.
Once you know the pages you need, the keywords you want to target, it’s time to move to the next step.
Choose Your Domain Name For Your Website/Blog:
One of your first brainstorm when starting a Website/blog is your Domain name. According to a Nielsen study, there are more than 500,000 brands worldwide in over 2000 product categories.
Needless to say, it’s challenging to stand out among the competition. Businesses have to create a pace in the consumers’ minds using unique brand elements and value propositions.
To that end, a unique domain name can help immensely. The good news is that many website builders can help you add brand elements easily.
Take BlueHost, for instance.
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Bluehost is part of a massive corporation, Endurance International Group (EiG), which owns various hosting providers and has a colossal market share.
They obviously have the financial muscle to pour millions into marketing. That probably accounts for the huge amount of (overly) positive Bluehost reviews online.
I read several of those reviews and most talk about their fabulous support (really?), good prices, and scalability options. But in those reviews, there’s very little about their actual flaws.
Hey, even WordPress recommends Bluehost.
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Starting your Website/Blog with BlueHost is by far the easiest I have found.
Next, businesses can start concentrating on the website’s layout and design.
Designing Your Website/Blog:
Once you have decided on the Domain name, your next step on how to start a Website/Blog is the design of your website, which is the first thing your prospective customers see. Poor design is a major turnoff for buyers.
In fact, 75% of website credibility stems from its design and 88% of users may never visit a website again after bad user experience. Therefore, you cannot afford to compromise on your website layout and design.
As they say, ‘the first impression is the last impression.’
Similarly, a well-designed website makes a positive impression on a potential customer’s mind. Luckily, there are a ton of website tools out there so that you can build a great-looking website without needing to hire a web designer.
Here are some of the tips for your website’s layout and design:
User-Friendly & Mobile-Friendly.
Your website should be user-friendly and intuitive so that customers can easily find what they want.
Apart from this, mobile optimization for your website is equally important. According to statistics, 74% of all website visitors become recurring if your website is mobile-friendly. That’s because most people spend around 70% of their time online on a mobile device.
One way to make your site more responsive is by adding relevant CTA buttons. It also redirects users into the direction you want.
Here’s an example:
Customizability for your Website/Blog:
Another critical requirement of how to create a website/blog is customizability. It also helps you differentiate your business from your competitors and stand out from the crowd.
Over the years, visual appeal on the internet has become just as important as the delivery of useful content. Under a time limit of 15 minutes, 66% of people would rather see something beautiful on the internet than something commonplace. Hence, the website layout should satisfy the senses and, at the same time, provide crucial information.
Fast Loading Time for your Website/Blog:
One of the problems that websites face today is slow loading times.
In fact, 53% of users leave a mobile website if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. As a result, businesses lose more than $2.5 billion every year. That’s why your website needs to ensure fast loading of pages to retain leads and customers.
You can use PageSpeed Insights to analyze the drawbacks of a slow website and provide suggestions to make it faster.
Use Right Visuals for your Website/Blog:
Businesses need to add visuals to their websites to align with the changing preferences of the audience. According to statistics, customers spend 88% more time on a site that has videos. Clearly, adding visuals is a great way to pique the customer’s interest.
It also helps you engage your customers, enhancing your chances of conversion. This can ultimately impact your revenue.
Here are some essential tips to look out for when selecting the design of your website/Blog:
- Crisp navigation of the website.
- Redirect your visitors to your homepage directly.
- Use whitespace to increase readability.
- Identify broken links and other errors.
- Make it unique.
- Use personal images rather than stock images.
Which Pages are Needed for Your Website/Blog?
Once you start your Website/Blog The next step is to figure out the pages that are needed in your website/blog. It’s essential to have a clear plan of action and clarity on what you hope to achieve with your business.
So how can you identify the pages you’ll always need?
Every business is unique and has a different story to tell. The pages your business will require may also be different from your competitors.
However, some pages are indispensable and are more important than others.
The Homepage:
Usually, your homepage is the first thing that a user will see on your website.
Research says that most visitors stay on a website for 15 seconds. They hang around for a longer time only if they see something interesting, or else abandon it right away.
Follow these tips to create an engaging homepage:
- Mention who you are and what you do.
- Make sure the design is compelling.
- Direct your visitors to the necessary pages using a fluid navigation structure.
- The homepage should exude your brand identity.
Apart from this, your homepage should include the most crucial information about your business, like:
- Business name
- Company logo and other brand differentiators, for example, a jingle
- Brand character
Ideally, all of this should be available to the visitors without having to scroll down, increasing your chances of influencing the visitors.
Service/Product Page:
Your product page is where you sell your product or service and convince the visitors that you’re better than your competitors. This is the part where you offer value, and nudge the visitors towards the conversion of a sale.
You can follow these tips to create an excellent product page:
- Keep your product URLs clean and concise.
- Use high-quality imagery of products.
- Add real testimonials from satisfied customers. After all, 69% of consumers recommend a business to their peers after a pleasant experience.
- Incorporate succinct descriptions about product and service features.
- Highlight the brand promise to the consumer and what they can expect from your business.
- Make it mobile-friendly.
- Provide a secure checkout process.
- Add social sharing buttons.
Also, be vocal about the shipping of your goods, return policies, damaged goods policy, and your free services.
The ‘About Us’ Page:
The ‘About Us’ page is where you talk about yourself. It’s also one of the essential pages of your website.
Here, you can highlight things like:
- How you started your business
- Your mission & vision
- Your core values
- The ideals you swear by
- The problems you want to solve
Here’s a great example of the ‘About Us’ page from Salesforce.
Notice how they added a personal touch by talking in the first person and displaying pictures of their team members.
The Contact Section:
Your Website/Blog needs to make be easy for their audience and clients to reach them.
Thus, your contact section should include contact details like:
- Your phone number
- Email address
- Postal address
- Social media accounts
- And more
Here’s an excellent contact page example:
A ‘live chat’ widget will also help you immediately address customer queries, further enhancing customer experience.
The idea is to make yourself readily available to your customers.
Blog Posts:
Writing regular blogs on your website helps you rise in the search engine rankings, create your niche in the marketplace, generate your own set of followers, and increase website traffic.
It’s also important that your blogs add value to your readers, help them perform specific activities, and solve particular problems.
There are many other pages you’ll need, along with specific links that will interconnect the pages. This varies from business to business. Thus, conduct thorough market research to understand the pages that are essential for your business. You can also evaluate your competitors’ websites to identify important webpages.
Website SEO:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important tasks of website creation. Without proper SEO, all the time and effort you put into creating your website/blog could be for nothing if you don’t get traffic. You need visibility on search engines to boost your online presence.
That’s why you need proper SEO for your website. According to statistics, 75% of people never scroll beyond Google search’s first result page. So you cater to only the remaining 25% of the audience if you’re not on the first page.
Plus, organic traffic is essential for any business since more than 90% of all online activity begins with a search engine. Thus, you need to ensure your website ranks on the first page itself.
However, that’s easier said than done.
Reputed websites with a large number of backlinks usually dominate the first page of search engines.
Try it yourself. Search “SEO guide” in Google and see the results yourself:
If you look at the Moz website, it has a domain authority of 93, and over 18,389 established links. It’s quite clear that Moz’s dominance is difficult to break when it comes to first-page ranking.
So how do you break into the first page?
Here are some SEO tips for doing just that:
Long-Tail Keywords:
It’s essential to understand how people search for things online. And according to statistics, over 70% of users search using long-tail keywords.
As you can see, searching with a more descriptive phrase has its advantages. For starters, the cost and risk are low, and the probability of conversion is also high.
Therefore, aiming to dominate long-tail phrases is a better strategy than trying to dominate space for short keywords. Moreover, long-tail keywords are also easier to rank for.
Amazon also leverages this long-tail keyword strategy and makes over 57% of its sales by utilizing it. The reason they are effective is that they’re more specific than short-tail keywords, which can sometimes confuse the search engine.
Local SEO and Market Research:
If you’re a local business, there are certain local SEO tips that you should implement when creating your website/blog. These include creating a Google My Business listing, getting Google reviews, and tailoring your content for local city searches. For example, target keywords on your page could include things like “Best Pizza in Detroit, MI” or “CPA firm Chicago, IL.”
Market research is essential to identify the relevant keywords in your business. There are various local SEO tools like Ubersuggest, Google Keyword Planner Tool, etc. to help you understand the important keywords.
It’s especially important to find long-tail keywords that match your customers’ search intent. For example, the keywords for a business catering to the heavy metal industry aren’t going to be the same as those for the software industry. That’s why you need to know the keywords that are specific to your industry.
On-page SEO:
There are various techniques to implement SEO on your website/blog. It’s important to know what factors of the website you can control and tweak to enhance your search engine rankings.
On-page SEO is a process to optimize the content of your webpages and the overall structure of your site.
After the market research, you’ll know the most important keyword you need. A useful tactic is using this keyword in the heading and as well as in the first paragraph. It’s also helpful to incorporate the keyword in your URL.
Adding the keyword throughout your website will help you gain the attention you desire. Some experts suggest that at least 0.5% to 2.5% of the site should have the keywords.
The focus must be on having unique descriptions and content for all your web pages and sections. Otherwise, you’ll only confuse the search engine that won’t be able to tell the difference from other similar content. This can hamper your SEO rankings.
Here is a list of some of the essential on-page SEO techniques for your website/blog:
- Publish high-quality content.
- Optimize URL slugs and metatags of your web pages.
- Proper formatting of headings and sub-headings.
- Make your web pages mobile-friendly.
- Internal & External link optimization.
- Optimizing images and other multimedia elements.
- Take care of page load speed.
Off-Page SEO:
Off-page SEO is the technique to optimize your SEO via content that is not available on your website/blog. For example, getting your website linked to high-authority pages that generate a lot of traffic can help your website jump the SEO rankings.
Some of the other factors that can influence off-page SEO are:
- Social media and influencer marketing.
- Guest blogging.
- Brand mentions.
Mobile Optimization:
A 2019 study suggests that mobile devices account for over 48% of internet surfing worldwide. Even Google introduced the mobile-first index, recognizing mobiles as an increasingly important platform for internet activity. This emphasizes the importance of mobile compatibility for your website/blog. As a result, websites that have mobile optimization have a better search engine ranking.
Here are some of the mobile-first indexing best practices:
- Make it easy for Googlebot to access and render your content by using the same robot tags on the mobile site as well as the desktop site.
- Your mobile site should have the same content as your desktop site.
- Use correct URLs.
- Use high-quality images that are compatible with your mobile site.
- Verify both the desktop site and the mobile site in Search Console.
Technical SEO and Page Speed:
Page speed of your website/blog has been a direct ranking factor in Google’s search engine algorithm since 2018. Therefore, make sure that your website has great loading times and optimum speed.
You’ll also want to make sure you are tracking everything properly by implementing Google Analytics on your own site. With pretty much any WordPress site, online store, website builder, or hosting plan, it’s easy to set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Make sure you become familiar with different Google Analytics SEO terms like sessions, bounce rate, click-through-rate (CTR), etc.
Image Descriptions within your Website/Blog:
Google search engine views images differently than human beings. While we rely on visual signals, Google looks at descriptions and keywords to display images. Adding relevant descriptions to your images and incorporating the necessary keywords help Google display them in image searches.
This can also help you direct the traffic to your website, improving your site’s traction. Automated website builders usually make it very easy to add a description to every image.
Structural Integrity of your Website/Blog:
Most of the search engines use bots that search every nook and cranny of websites.
Their purpose is to understand the underlying format and structure of the website. It helps these bots form an idea of the overall hierarchy the website follows.
Naturally, properly structured websites will show up high in any search ranking. That’s because a structured website also shows a sharp improvement in metrics like the number of pages visited, the click-through-rates (CTR), and the average time spent on the site.
Create a Blog for Your Website:
Your website content is one of the most critical factors to send ranking signals. And it goes without saying that search engines depend heavily on your content.
If you’re looking to create a website/blog for your small business, make sure to do these three things correctly:
- Make sure that your content is unique.
- Update your content regularly.
- Offer relevant information through your content and provide some value to your target audience.
The more you write, the better will be your chances of driving traffic to your website/blog. You would have to write a lot more than your competitors to leapfrog them and move up towards the pole position of the SEO rankings.
So how long should a blog be? All the blogs you write must be highly relevant and descriptive and should add value to the readers. That’s why a small blog won’t work most of the time. Your blog should be able to tackle and solve problems head-on. And for that, you need to be verbose sometimes.
A survey of the content length of the most visible blogs proved the same.
So clearly, all the blogs on the 1st page of Google are over 2000 words.
But what should be the characteristics of a great blog apart from being around 2000 words?
Here goes:
Actionable:
The content should be actionable and nudge the prospective leads and customers down the sales funnel towards more conversions. Unless you generate new customers, you won’t survive in the long term.
Adding relevant CTA buttons is one of the ways to make your blogs actionable for your audience.
Here’s an excellent example:
Use Images:
Humans process images 60,000 times faster than text. 90% of all information transmitted to the human brain is also visual. That’s why it’s a great idea to pepper your blogs with images that will help consumers process information faster and help you convert them into sales.
Write Step-by-step Guides:
Website visitors don’t merely want access to raw data or information. They can gain it from any website. Most of them want information mentioned in a more practical form. That’s why writing blog posts with topics like how to perform DIY activities or a detailed step-by-step guide is a great way to grab attention.
As a result, more and more businesses are focusing on content marketing to positively influence leads and enhance sales. When done correctly, content marketing is well worth the effort.
Apart from generating unique content, small businesses should also focus on content optimization, which can result in higher CTR (Click-through rate). This also helps your website climb the rankings.
Here are the steps to set up a blog in minutes:
Make sure to check out my detailed guide on Getting Started With BlueHost.
Summary:
When Starting Your Online Journey of How to Create a Website/Blog In 2020 you will have varying options. Getting started with BlueHost with WordPress will start your journey on the right path.
Many Businesses do not put effort into their website building and In fact, 38% of visitors stop engaging with a website if they find the website layout and design unattractive. 88% of visitors don’t return to a website after a bad experience. And many visitors simply leave a website if it takes more than 2 seconds to load.
Remember, plan your site in advance, get to know SEO, set up your domain and hosting, build your own website, and start attracting customers.
Check out the best website builders to make things easy for you.
Why not start a new website today?
To Your Success
Juan Villar
Disclaimer: My posts may contain affiliate links! Moreover, if you buy something through one of my links, you won’t pay a penny more, but I will get a small commission, which helps keep the lights on, thanks