You may not know this, but there are other choices besides internet web hosting to host your website. Of course, there are ups and down to hosting your website from place to place, so here’s a brief rundown of some pros and cons for hosting your website at home vs hosting it with a reliable web hosting provider.

Hosting at Home

Yep, you can host your website from your home computer if you want to! You can do this by using your home computer’s system resources, your DSL or high-speed internet connection, and web space. Using Microsoft Word or other free products, you can design a simple website and put it online.

Pros: It’s nearly free! You only have to pay for your internet connection, home computer, and any web design products you’ll use to get online.

Cons: There are…a lot of cons to this, unfortunately. I’ll just list three of the biggies. 1) You can’t use your home computer for both hosting a website and as a computer, unless your computer is MASSIVE. It takes a lot of resources to run a website. 2) Your internet service provider likely won’t provide you with a dedicated or static IP address, which is necessary for good SEO (search engine optimization) and ecommerce web hosting. 3) There’s no support hotline, so if your hard drive melts, you see a blue screen with white text, or get corrupt files, will you know what to do?

Web Hosting from a Reliable Web Hosting Provider

You already knew this was possible, but it’s the most popular method for hosting your website.

Pros: You get technical support if you choose a provider from our Top 10 Web Hosting List. You also get a free domain name, unlimited emails, and you don’t have to worry about melting your hard drive, backing up files, or your internet connection. Web hosting companies have better internet connections anyway, one that will never or very rarely be down. You can also purchase dedicated or static IP addresses easily, so ecommerce and great SEO is never a problem.

Cons: It’s slightly more expensive, though if you run into trouble on your home computer, trust me, the cost will be tenfold more than what you’ll pay for reliable hosting service from our affordable hosting providers.

You’ve bought the best web hosting plan you could find. You’ve registered your domain name and picked out a website template, added your site content, optimized your links and text and images, and even learned how to FTP in the process! Maybe you have even added an ecommerce storefront to help your customers purchase products with your company or you have begun blogging about your industry, customers, discounts, or philosophies.

Whatever you have done, none of it matters unless people know where to find your website. Period. This is why people spend a fortune on advertising (both online and offline) through SEO or search engine optimization practices.

But there’s one thing many professional SEO companies don’t want you to know – the simple fact is, you can advertise your website successfully yourself, without spending a dime. I’ll repeat that, as it’s extremely important – you can advertise and get your website noticed, for free! There are two ways:

1) Purchase Hosting From our Recommended Web Hosts

If you haven’t yet purchased hosting, we recommend the following web hosts to businesses, ecommerce ventures, or bloggers:

* IX Web Hosting
* ThinkHost
* Hostmonster
* StartLogic

These web hosts are considered the best web hosts in the world and are ranked highly in our Top 10 Web Hosting List as a guide to help you choose the best provider. We are telling you about them here because every single host mentioned offers a package of FREE online advertising credits! That’s right, 100% free advertising for your business. So sign up with any of these best web hosts and save big on SEO.

By advertising yourself, you will not only learn the best practices for your specific niche or industry but gain relevant experience in that industry. You are in charge and you don’t have to hire staff to assist you. You are the boss.

2) Use Google & Yahoo to Monetize Your Website

If you already have web hosting, you can simply signup with Google and/or Yahoo to advertising your website using what’s called Pay-Per-Click services: i.e. you only pay when a potential customer clicks on your advertisement. Plus, your ad shows up first in Google or Yahoo sponsored results, so you get better business and more of it!

A recommended budget is around $100-200/month for a small business or $200-1000 if you really want to drive those sales.

The good thing is, Google and Yahoo let you experiment, and there are multiple ways to advertise using their PPC (pay per click) technology.

Writing great meta tags can offer some support in getting your website ranked in Google, Yahoo, and the other major search engines. With the help of best web hosting providers and search engine optimization, your website can be at the top of the list for any given search term. Meta tags aren’t as popular or important as they used to be, but they can still assist in getting your website recognized in the biggest search engines.

So using a new example domain name, “thebestwebhostinglist.com”, here’s some helpful tips on writing great meta tags for your website hosting!

1. Keywords

This part of the meta tag generator is the least important, actually, as it was really abused in the 1990s by webmasters trying to erroneously achieve top ranks by deceiving the search engines. But using the proper keywords, this gives a slight more importance to your website over another competitor who doesn’t have them.

So in the keywords field, you will want to enter around 5-10 keywords or search phrases that you would like to get ranked for. For example, TheBestWebHostingList.com wants to get ranked for people searching for “web hosting guide”, “best web hosting”, “top 10 web hosts”, and maybe even a specific kind of hosting service like “ASP hosting”. So in their meta tags, the keywords would be: “web hosting guide, best web hosting, top 10 web hosts, ASP hosting, thebestwebhostinglist.com”. Notice we added the actual domain name in the keywords. This is also important in case someone looks up “thebestwebhostinglist.com” in Google instead of just typing it into their browser.

Continue to Part III on writing great meta tags: Describing Your Website, brought to you by thebestwebhostinglist.com

Building and designing your website is only the first step in getting that website noticed online. Once you have a reliable website provider hosting your site and a web design you are completely satisfied with, you will need to move into the realm of SEO (search engine optimization), which can be tackled in several simple steps, the first of which are called meta tags.

Meta tags have actually been around since HTML was put into practice and they are merely descriptive words and phrases used to properly categorize your website in the search engines. There are millions upon millions of websites in the world, so Google and the other big search engines use meta tags as one form of identifying where your website belongs in search results.

For example, if you purchased web hosting for the domain name BlueHatsForSale.com, you are going to want to come up first in Google for the search term “Blue Hats” because potential customers will see you before they see anybody else. So in your meta tags, you need to supply the search engines with some necessary information so that they can place BlueHatsForSale.com in the forefront of relevant search terms. This merely requires some knowledge of 1) the search terms you would like to get ranked for and 2) a description of your website that will assist in #1 and also aptly describe your website to potential viewers.

Please check out part two of this article on Writing Great Meta Tags, brought to you by thebestwebhostinglist.com