Starting your own web based business can be a great money making idea and lots of fun, but if you want people to visit your site you really need to know what you are doing. There is a ton of materials on the internet about how to bring web traffic to your site, but starting off with a good foundation makes it all much easier.
1) Domain Name:
Lets say you want to open a portal focussing on poker rooms or sports betting sites. The first thing you need to do is to come up with a domain name. The Domain name is your URL or Universal Resource Locator. This is what people have to type in after http://www to get to your website. If you have a URL that is a popular phrase or grouping of words that are related to the topic of your site, you have a much better chance of it coming up high on a search. So if you are a gambling portal web site and your URL is onlinecasino.com you have a better chance of people finding it when looking for online casinos then if it were called bobscasinowebsite.
2) Content:
The next thing is that the content of your site must be related to the purpose of your site. If your site is for the purpose of making money then you have something to sell. Maybe you are trying to bring business to a casino website then the content on your site should be about things relative to gambling. Put casino reviews, tips on different types of casino games and whatever else you think may be interesting to someone doing a search on casinos and gambling.
3) Easy Navigation:
Make sure your site is easy to navigate. If it is too hard to get around then even if it is top of a Google search no one will ever use it. Each page should cover one topic, and it should not be crowded with banners and advertisements. If on your site you have videos then keep them all together and break them into relative areas of interest. If you have some videos of people getting caught cheating in a casino create a section for casino related videos and put them all in that section, this will make it very simple to search thru all your content to find what it is your visitors are looking for.
4) News:
News relevant to your site is also a great way to bring in traffic. Many people nowadays get their news online and not just world news. Maybe someone wants to read about the gambling bill that was passed in congress recently to ban money transfers to and from online casinos, a great advantage to having news on your page is that if it is well written and the topic of the article is a hot topic other news sources like yahoo and Google may take your article and put a link to it from their site. This would give you thousands of hits, and that is the goal.
5) Adding Pages:
The last tip I can give you for building a search engine friendly site is to make sure to add new content every day, it does not matter if this content is a how to article a news article, pictures or anything else but adding new content daily will increase your page rank and increase the chances of coming up when someone is doing a web search.
Conclusion:
If you incorporate all these tips when building your website I can guarantee it will make your job much easier, no one wants to build a site and then find out they need to star over from scratch, because ever day offline is potential money lost.