• Niche Market
• Business Model
• Domain Name and Web Hosting
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Site Architecture and Usability
• Keyword Research and Content Development
• Web Analytics
• Marketing
• Venture Capitals
• Persistence

Niche Market

You want to pick your niche market and ensure:

• You will have a head-start to your competitors by being the first company to launch a site in this niche market
• You will still be passionate about the niche in the next 5 to 10 years

Use Google Ad Planner to discover if there are already competitors in this niche market and to clearly define your target audiences (or potential customers).

Business Model

You want to figure out the core values that your small business website will provide to your users and customers. Your site should offer a solution to a problem of your users, by providing a product or a service. Your end goal is to monetize from your website, so you will have to sell the product or service.

With your service or product, you may want to provide a time-limited free trial, or a free membership with limited features. You want to give your users options to upgrade the service to paid memberships.

If at some point it is appropriate, you should also consider increase revenues by offer advertisers to place ads on your site. Unless you are negotiating with each individual advertiser, it will be easier to sign up as publishers on some reputable ad networks. Based on your site’s content, Google Adsense and Google Affiliate Network can target highly relevant ads to your website. Commission Junction is an ad network that offers the largest variety of advertiser offers.

Domain Name and Web Hosting

Your site’s domain name essentially represents your online business’s brand. When choosing your domain name, consider the name’s brand-ability for your audience, and rank-ability and link-ability for search engines. This leaves you two options:

• Keyword-rich domain names
• Brand-able domain names

A keyword-rich domain name allows you to incorporate generic keyword into your domain name. As Google values a keyword within the domain name for ranking purpose, your generic keyword should rank well in the SERP. The disadvantage is that many keyword-rich domain names are too generic which contributes little value to branding.

Good examples of keyword-rich domain names are SearchMarketing.com, SearchEngineStrategies.com, WebMasterWorld.com, SEOBook.com, WebTrends.com, and Hotels.com.

A brand-able domain name is the first essential step to build your brand which gives your site a point of distinction and your users an identity that is memorable. People take your website more seriously and are more likely to link to your site. The downside is that your site may not rank well on generic keywords that describe your products or services.

Good examples of brand-able domain names are Amazon.com, eBay.com, Yahoo.com, Alibaba.com, Digg.com, Ning.com.

At this stage, incorporate your SEO geotargeting strategies and choose a reliable web hosting solution such as Blue Host to ensure your site’s 100% up-time.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Site Architecture and Usability

When starting small, you will have some advantages over the established big websites in search engine optimization. SEO consists of both on-page and off-page optimization techniques.

With on-page SEO, find the best practices from Google SEO for Beginners. Google SEO Starter Guide demonstrates Google’s perspectives for optimizing your website.

With off-page SEO, it is all about natural link building and link baits. Google is strongly against the deliberate link building via paid links or paid posts.

Site architecture (or internal site structure) is about incorporating the correct internal link architecture with URL structure and page naming convention allows your site the solid foundation for future expansion.

SEO is usability. By creating good website navigations (main menu and breadcrumbs), you can reduce your site visitors’ bounce rates. You must also optimize the conversion rates by implementing professional design, proper wording, video instructions, and customer reviews.

Keyword Research and Content Development

You must discover the keywords that your potential users or customers actually use when they are searching for your products or services. Create your keyword list using the SEM keyword research tools.

Start by creating the basic content for your website, with both your users and SEO in mind:

• SEO Copywriting 2.0
• Content Optimization for Search Engines

With more and more content being created each day, duplicate content issues will eventually arise. Google has explanations about the duplicate content penalty and has also come up with a method for webmasters to tackle canonical URLs.

Web Analytics

Having a business model for monetization, you will then need to measure how your users are using your site and track the ROI.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool for this purpose.

Marketing

Besides search engine traffic, your website also requires other sources of traffic.

• If you SEO strategy has been set up correctly, it will be easy to advertise on Google Adwords and track your ROI with Adwords Conversion Tracking. Ensure you understand Google Adwords Quality Score before over-spending your marketing budgets
• Consider creating your profiles or pages within and market your site through social marketing sites
• Recruit evangelists or industry experts to promote your services or products, so that other evangelists who are interested will follow
• Advertise on local newspapers to improve your brand awareness

Venture Capitals

Unless you are keeping your business small, once your site’s audience grows bigger and bigger you will need more venture capital funds.

Persistence

You can’t expect your business to be success overnight, so your never-say-die attitude counts a lot!

• Synthasite allows webmasters to create and edit websites online, while traditionally webmasters design web sites offline and upload them to hosting servers.
• It provides users a superstore of DIY-add-on-components such as widgets and templates.
• It allows a real-time platform for multiple web designers to collaboratively edit and create websites from different locations.

In the coming months, new features will be added to Sythasite which include,

• File management
• Social / collaborative site building with chat, sharing and invitations
• Component and template marketplace
• Service marketplace like SEO, graphic design and copywriting
• Blogging
• Content management system
• Affiliate network integration

Synthasite also provides channels of communications via online communities like Facebook and Google Groups, so that webmasters and users can give feedback.

The development of Synthasite is currently being funded by Lingham Capital, Miombo Capital and Incubeta.

Update:

Synthasite was renamed to Yola.com in March 2009.