With the many easy to use website builder programs available on the market, building your own website is a great options for many work at home moms. It saves money, which is often in short supply for a mom starting her own business. The problem is, without experience, many moms miss important key elements, which directly affect the traffic their website will receive and in turn, their success.

Here are 5 basic website elements that every website should have to get your started.

Simple Navigation: An easy to navigate website is very important. Keep the confusion to a minimum. Have all you sections listed in your navigation bars near the top of the page. Be sure to include text links within your content as well. This linking will help your search engine rankings and provides customers a direct root to what they are looking for. If you talk about a product in the content, link to the page where they can see or order the product right there.

About Us Page: For a home business, the About Us page is critical. You want to let people be able to get to your know a little. Understand who you are, why you started the business. A little personal insight lets your potential customers feel like they know you a little, which establishes trust.

FAQ Page: A frequently asked questions page is crucial in providing immediate answers to the most popular questions your potential customers may have. It is impossible for you to be at the computer at all times and in this day and age, everyone expects immediate service. Having this page easily accessible means customers can get the answers they need right away, without waiting and will eliminate the need for you to answer the same questions over and over again via email.

Alt Tags on Images: Alt Tags are simply giving a name to your image in the image properties. As a result, when your mouse travels over the picture, the words or phrase you put in will show up. This is an excellent way to get your best keywords onto your page in a few more places. Images are often picked up by Google Images or similar searches and result in more traffic. Simply go into the properties of your image when you are placing it on your website and you will see a place to enter your alt tag or it might say mouse over. Give your image a good name, using your keywords whenever possible. Just be sure they are relevant to the picture.

Title Tags: It may seem simple, but it’s incredible how many people don’t realize they need title tags. The title tag is what you see at the top of your web browser when you visit a web page, it’s the name of your page. Most website builders have a place for you to enter one, making it easy. Your title tags should include your keywords. Your title tag can be a phrase as well. Your website pages should have different title tags on each page, relevant to what is on the page, but also incorporating keywords whenever you can. Take a look at some popular websites and your competitors and see what shows up at the very top of your screen. Those are title tags and you need them for your website to rank well in the search engines.

Now that you have a website’s basic requirements, take a look at your own and see what you are missing and what you can improve upon. Take action to make the changes you need to and you’ll reap the rewards.

Barbara Ryan is publisher and co-editor of Mom2Mom Magazine , an online magazine written by moms for moms. Barbara is also owner and designer of Cherish Collages, a custom Photo Collage Design business developed from the love of a digital photography hobby.

Blog is short for web log. A web log is a journal of sorts that is updated frequently to keep your visitors’ interest. Blogs are generally of a personal nature and express the opinions and thoughts of the webmaster. Blogs also contain links and other resources. Many people think of blogs as “online diaries.” Blogging is becoming a very popular method of publishing as it does not require any technical knowledge and it can greatly increase the popularity of your site. Some blogs allow the visitors to post and enter there thoughts and opinions as well.

A blog keeps people coming back to your site and a blog is also very helpful with the search engines because of the ever changing content. Search engines love new content!

Starting a blog is not hard. There are sites that provide this service for free.

First step is to take a look at some other blogs to get a feel of how they are done. Simply pick your favorite search engines, do a search for blogs and spend sometime reading and studying them. Get familiar with different styles, formats and content until you feel like you know what you would want to do with your blog.

You can then get started on your own blog. There are lots of sites whereyou can start your own blog for free:

BlogDrive.com
Blogger.com/start
LiveJournal.com/

Take some time to design your blog. Decide what color scheme you want to use and the type of layout you want. Some sites will have pre-designed layouts and templates to choose from or you can edit your own.

After you get your blog designed and set up, test it out with a few posts. Make any necessary changes you feel it needs. Once you have it tweaked, it is time to get started with your new blog.

Once you start your blog, be sure and promote it heavily. Post it in blog directories, announce it in groups and on boards. Put it in your sigtag.

Blog Directories:

BlogWise.com
BlogCatalog.com
BlogHub.com

Do a search for blog directory or submit your blog and you will find many more places to post your new blog!

Be sure and update your blog frequently and make it interesting. Give it some personality! DO NOT neglect your blog!

Don’t get discouraged if your blog is not an overnight sensation. As with any marketing, it takes time to get noticed. Keep it fresh and new and interesting and before long, you will be a master blogger!

Find lots more tips, articles, and resources at www.SeymourProducts.com .

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Internet entrepreneurs, work at home moms, network marketers… you’re all fed the same hype about how to promote your website, get leads, recruit members or what have you.One of the first things you will be told is to post your ads on forums. Lots.

This article is a guide to proper forum etiquette so that you don’t waste your own and many other people’s time.

The first thing you need to know is that forum owners deal with a ton of spam. I could easily spend an hour a day cleaning up spammy posts in the forum and deleting and banning members that don’t abide by forum rules. It’s unnerving to have to waste my time doing that rather then engaging in conversations on the forum and providing my members with useful information.

So from the forum owner perspective, spam is a very bad thing. On the other hand, to help out forum participants and to try to deter them from spamming every forum in the message boards, most forum owners will provide an advertising forum of some sort where you can post an ad.

If all you are planning to do is post ads on forums, then look for this particular section of a message board. Especially don’t post an ad in the introduction section of a forum.

But here is the thing about ads. Nobody really reads them. Your time would be far better spent actually engaging in conversations on the forums you frequent. You will gain the trust and loyalty of the forum population if they get to know you. They will much more likely decide to sign up for a biz op under someone that they talk with in a trusted forum then from some fly by night forum spammers post. Doesn’t that make sense?

You will be taught that posting your website link on many forums will help to build your websites backlink popularity which will in turn increase your websites ranking in the search engine results. The truth is, your post is most likely going to be deleted as soon as the forum owner or moderators find it. All you really will have done is wasted your time.

How you can be certain that you will build your backlinks by forum posting is by putting your website link in your signature on a forum and including your signature in your quality posts. The website owner will be happy to have you posting and in turn will be happy to allow you a small advertisement in your signature when posting.

Another trick you might not know is this. If there is a keyword phrase that you would like to rank well for in the search engines, use this as the ‘anchor text’ in your website link. That means if you want to rank well for a term such as ‘ameriplan business opportunity’ – then you would type that into your signature and have that link to your website.

Keep a folder of forums in your favorites folder on your browser and spend some time every day going to each of the forums. Make it a goal to leave at least one quality post and a few welcome posts to new members.

Informative and engaging comments, coupled with a well optimized signature will win you far more traffic and prospects in the long run. And you might even pick up a thing or two through your engagement on the forum!

Lori Redfield is a Freelancer and Internet Entrepreneur. Visit her website, FreelanceMom.com for more business ideas.