By Karen Thomson

Before you even consider starting to build your first website, you need to think very carefully about what you are going to include in it. For instance, you should not create a site that promotes numerous unrelated affiliate products. As you can imagine, a potential customer will not want to wade through fishing tackle supplies when she came to your site looking for handbags! What’s more, the search engines won’t approve of it either; they won’t be able to distinguish what it is you are trying to sell and therefore won’t rank it well for any of your products. The more products you have on your site means that they have to compete with each other to be viewed when what you really want is a fewer amount of related products that complement and enhance each other.

Here is a basic list of things that you must consider when creating your first and each subsequent website.

• The website needs to be clearly laid out, with separate pages for different topics within the overall subject matter.
• The site will need to focus on a specific subject which is aimed at a distinct audience.
• Both outgoing and incoming links to and from worthwhile and excellent top quality websites should be included.
• Diverse pages should link into each other where relevant.
• There should be plenty of superb content packed with useful information.
• Any affiliate or referral links need to be sprinkled throughout the web page in the relevant places; they need to be tested to see what works the best.
• The correct use of keywords and phrases which will help attract visitors and improve positioning within the search engines need to be used.
• And finally, you must include an Internet site map to make it less difficult for visitors to move around the Internet site and find what they need. This is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap just for the sake of having one.

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. They can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

Don’t get overwhelmed by the amount of things on this list, they may take a little time to put together but they are not difficult by any means. Once they are in place, you can tweak and test your site and add new content to keep it fresh and interesting which in turn will keep the search engines and your website visitors very happy indeed!

Karen Thomson is a successful Internet Marketing Consultant. If you found this article useful, claim your free social media for business e-book and more goodies, available at http://simplecashblogbonus.com
This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com