Small Business Website

[matas]

Business for my step dad has been slow during this bad economy. I know this does not apply to all the businesses but it certainly does for him. He is hoping to increase his businesses by trying to get a website. The business offers commercial and medical cleaning services. I want to help him. He knows someone that can make a website and optimize for search engines for around $500. I saw some samples website, and they were not really all that great. Primarily he wants to appear on google when someone searches "cleaning company in jackson" or "cleaning company in ocean county" or something along those lines. I am pretty sure you have to pay a lot of money to google to reserve keywords, but can this be done any other way? So my final question is, can I get some piece of website maker application that would fit for what I want to do? The website does not have to be very elaborate, it just needs basic info with few sections. Thanks

 

[Red Squirrel]

Best bet is get a domain, some good hosting (avoid the oversellers like servage and 1and1. Pay at least 10/mo for hosting, anything lower and it's probably oversold, and will go down a lot - if he has business broadband he can even host himself - Easier for a starter).

Once the site is up and fully functional find a few extablished sites to link to it, either your own site, or a friend's site. This can even be temporary. Put it in your signature on forums too. My site iceteks.com has been known to get sites listed on google within days, just by putting a link on the home page, and iceteks is FAR from being slashdot as far as traffic goes, but it seems to do very good as far as google goes. So any equivalent site should do good too or even better.

Also when you do the site's content itself keep google in mind. IF you have a "About us" page word things in a way that the main keywords are talked about multiple times (but don't overdo it). So make sure the word cleaning is there a bunch of times. Bolding and stuff is not really needed, though I've never really experimented with that either way.

Main thing is you want the site linked to from a popular enough site. A city directory may be a good idea too.