To get your web site up on the internet so others can view it, you will need a web host. Hosting is important. You get what you pay for and many of the cheapest hosts don't provide all the services you will need as your online business expands. So, shop around and compare. I would recommend iPowerWeb at:
http://ads.ipowerweb.com/~afftrend/transaction.php?APID=42&affID=0000000000000015151 Once you have made your web site homepage and have a host server to put in up to the web on, you need to begin submissions to the search engines. I suggest that this is done as soon as you have something on your web site. What I like to do is make up just the index page and get it up. On this index page, I write some very relevant, keyword weighted content concerning the theme of the web site. Towards the end of this text, I put a paragraph saying that this is still a site under construction and it will be expanding soon, and over a period of time. I suggest that the viewer bookmark the site and come back in a week or two to see all the improvements and the increased information on the subject of the site.
This gives the search engines a keyword weighted text to munch on and spider. It also gives them a starting point from which they will see the site expanding and being dynamic over time.
Once I have this homepage up, I start my submissions to the search engines. You don't have to submit to all of them as many are linked together in networks and submitting to one will get you on others. You should submit to the big three: Google, MSN, and Yahoo. I also like to submit to some lessor search engines that index sites quickly and are linked into networks that get the big search engines to you faster. Lycos, Altavista, etc.
Every search engine has a submission page. For instance, Go to Google, click on "about Google" and on the page you are sent to you will find a "submit your content to Google" link. Fill out their small form and submit the site.
YOU JUST WANT TO DO THIS ONCE!! In the old days of the internet when the search engines didn't have good spiders and bots, the story was to submit your site and then each time you added a page, you would submit that new page. If you do that now, they consider that search engine spamming.
Go to all the search engine sites and manually submit your site. There are software and automatic submission sites, etc. but you want to submit manually so it doesn't appear to be spamming. It takes two weeks or more to have the lessor search engine's spiders and bots come to your site and one month or more for the big three. This is why you want to get something up and submitted as early as possible. By the time they get to you, you'll have more than just the mainpage on the site.
Google is the hardest to get on. They take their ever loving time about getting to your site and then they place you in the "sandbox" where you can wait a few hours to months or never at all. While in the sandbox, they will come back to see if you've added new pages and modified the ones they saw last time. They want the site to be dynamic. If they see little relevant content and lots of Adsense links on the page, you will remain un-indexed and in the sandbox longer.
The key to getting indexed and on the search pages is relevant content as we have talked about. And the content should be keyword weighted to the theme of the page and the site itself. Once you've been indexed, there are ways to increase your page rankings. These are also ways of increasing visitor traffic to your site. That's the next topic and for tomorrow.
In the meantime, once your site is submitted, then you can go about expanding it from one page to a complete web site all focused around a narrow topic. Do this quickly at first and then slowly. What I mean by this is you want at least three to five pages when the search engines first come to the site. Then, you want to add additional pages, 1-2 every week or so to appear expanding to the search engines. After about 6 months, you don't have to add pages so much but begin changing the content of the pages you have and add a new one every so often. The key here is you need to appear dynamic and that an actual person is going in and making changes.