Probably the holy grail of the internet I bet

How easy (cheap) is it for me to setup a basic website, and then attract in visitors with keywords? Never built a website before but am relatively IT savvy....

P...O...R...N.

Nuff said.

While Porn is indeed an option - What are you thinking about basing the website on Jason?

My blog for example was free and got 1,200 odd hits in the first day. In using Ad sense and allowing adverts to be placed on my blog you get a small % per click etc.

If you need any help coding etc - Do let me know. Happy to help.

If you can get links on well established sites it does help with google ratings etc

There is a reason that some companies exist to help search rankings. It's very very hard to get near the top without paying a lot of cash.

Unless your site is going to be on a pretty unique topic, "Badger farming on the isle of Mull" for instance.

You'll need to read up on metadata, keywords and search ranking strategy. Most of the big search providers have their own method of coming up with pages and you need to take a different approach with each. Google regularly tweaks theirs to stop people taking advantage of any loop holes and Google Bombing ("Tony+Blair" used to bring up search results for "Liar").

Even with lots of work you'll get beaten by the guys who have paid the companies to be listed first.

Websites you can get made up for free easily enough using Wordpress or some Google type things. If you want to do your own with its own hosting etc it's probably best to get someone to do it unless you just want something simple. It's very easy to make a website, it's very hard to make a good website.

There is a reason that some companies exist to help search rankings. It's very very hard to get near the top without paying a lot of cash.

I'd disagree, a lot of SEO is common sense, good coding and well written content. You'll always lose out to big companies that have dedicated staff for SEO, but for smaller sites that are reasonably niche/local then there's no reason that you can't get decent rankings without paying. A lot of the 'pay us to put you number 1 on Google' companies use free tools and the same tricks that you can employ yourself, at no cost. It really depends on how much free time you have and what your aims are.

While Porn is indeed an option - What are you thinking about basing the website on Jason?

My blog for example was free and got 1,200 odd hits in the first day. In using Ad sense and allowing adverts to be placed on my blog you get a small % per click etc.

If you need any help coding etc - Do let me know. Happy to help.

Its just for potentially offering local people detailing & VCDS tweaks. Would like to be able to think of generating a little sideline to be able to generate a little more funds. Not sure how a blog would work as never had one. As it would be literally a tiny element of any of my income (full time job will always take top priority regardless) I would like to keep costs low as possible.

Its just for potentially offering local people detailing & VCDS tweaks. Would like to be able to think of generating a little sideline to be able to generate a little more funds. Not sure how a blog would work as never had one. As it would be literally a tiny element of any of my income (full time job will always take top priority regardless) I would like to keep costs low as possible.

blogspot.com is a good place to start. If you were indeed looking for a 'free' website. I'm unsure how it works legally in advertising services as such? - It maybe best to read the T&C when signing up.

You can then list all services on the blog and then have a link in a signature on any websites you use etc.

Well, I don't "use" any websites as such. hence why perhaps I'd want a website name or two setting up and then somehow being able to design it myself. Trouble is my coding skills don't go beyond <img src="URL"> that I use on Ebay HTML to link to photobucket :S

Wordpress will pretty much do what you need. It started out as a blog engine (i.e. designed for one or more daily updates) but it can pretty much do the job of a CMS now and is dead easy to use (although designing your own themes for it can be a bit of a dark art). If you want to keep costs very low in case it doesn't take off then if you buy the domain name (a .co.uk is about £7 for 2 years from somewhere like 123-reg) I'd happily host it for nothing, I already do it for a couple of other small businesses as I'm paying for the service anyway and it's not expensive.

edit - Personally, if it were me, I'd just install Wordpress and set up a couple of pages about what you're willing to do, either put your contact details on there directly (if you don't mind the odd bit of spam :/) or use one of the several Wordpress contact form plugins that do spam checking and captcha. Then once it's up and running, it'll need almost no maintenance apart from logging in every so often and updating Wordpress and/or plugins (which is done via the web interface). Any questions or requests people have for you would just go straight into your email which you probably check daily already. It doesn't have to take away from your full-time job at all, really

Have a look at GBBO.

Chris

Wordpress can be configured to have some pretty good sites and if you're looking at packages, then it's worth having a look at webfusion.