Building your first web site is really pretty simple even though it can seem like an overwhelming experience. Your first step is to get your web building software. This will make your task much simpler. I used Homestead for hosting my web site and they gave me the software to build it for free. With Homestead you can easily make your pages, add a shopping cart, paypal buttons etc. There are other programs on the market that you can purchase but I haven't used them.
Your main page will be about what you are selling or promoting. Even with a personal web page you are promoting something, yourself. You will want to describe what you are promoting in both the title and main body of your start page or main page. For instance: "Susie's Soap" could be the title and the body could tell a little about the different soaps with links to other pages with a more in depth description of each. Some search engines will look at your title and the main body of your text when someone is searching on a particular keyword.
The next thing to consider is how your pages will be laid out. You will want to make sure that the page looks appealing and is not too busy. You want your customers to stay and look at what you are selling, if you have a lot of links on the page they might get distracted and move on to another site that you sent them to! You will want to choose colors that are easy to use, it is very frustrating to try and read a page that has light blue text on a light blue background.
Another thing to consider is the time it takes to load. Consumers want things "right now" more that ever. If you have a lot of pictures on your page or even if you have one picture but it is a huge file, it will take forever to load. There are a lot of people who won't wait for that page to load, they will just move on, even if it is a beautiful picture!
Finally, think about how your customers will purchase products from you. You will want the program you choose to be safe, secure and familiar to your customers. You might opt for customers to send you checks or to use PayPal. Paypal is widely recognized and easy to use, it is my personal favorite. Anyone with a bank account and an email account can send money and they have a very secure and safe site.
Once your web site is ready, you will go back and add your keywords and meta tags. Some search engines will use the keywords and others will use the meta tags. Your program should have a place to enter keywords. You will want your keywords to be appropriate words and phrases. For the soap company you would probably use "soap, handmade soap, bath products, bathing, soap making" etc. You won't want to repeat the same word too often or some search engines will view that as spamming. You will also want to think of phrases that are not so common. You might get more hits and higher ranking on "how to make soap" than you would on "soap" since all the similar sites will also be ranking on that one word. For your meta tags, the easiest way is to enter your title and keywords in a meta tag generator and let it make those tags for you. Homestead includes one on their site and it is very easy to use.
Submitting your site to the search engines is your final step. You will want to make sure you have finished all of the above steps first. If your site is not truly ready when the search engines come looking for it you will have wasted a lot of time. Some engines will not accept sites that are "under construction", if your keywords are too many or have too many repeated words you won't get an immediate chance to fix it and they won't tell you about it. If you don't have the same keywords and phrases in the main body of your text, you won't rank very high on other search engines. Make sure it is all ready to go and then start submitting!
If you search on the words "free search engine submission" you will find a lot of sites who will do the work for you for free. You will need to submit to the major engines yourself though. The major engines are google, yahoo, etc. Once you have submitted it can take months for them to get around to you though. This is why it is important to have everything ready. If they visit your site to rank it and it wasn't ready it will take many more months before they come back around to recognize the changes. You will want to submit your site at least every six weeks but not more than once a month. Again, thank you spammers! When using these free site submission services be a little careful. Look at who they are submitting to. If you see the initials FFA or the words free for all, RUN. Submitting to FFA's can also be considered spam and get your site banned by the major engines. If you do decide to submit to these sites anyway, at least get a separate mail box. I accidentally submitted to these sites through a free submission program and my mail box was flooded hourly the first few days and this went on for months.
Finally be patient. It will take awhile for you to be listed in the search engines so in the meantime do some advertising on your own. Find sites similar to yours and join their message boards, swap links and take advantage of all the free classifieds out there. Make sure to do some good networking instead of just advertising everywhere though. You can make some good friends and build a great support system through all these other sites!
Most of all, have fun with your site and good luck with your business
