People are buying webhosting packages, domains, services and generally spending a lot of money on such things. A website is a kind of business and no-one can guarantee success. Before you start your first site, before you start learning search engine optimisation, there’s one thing which you should try. It’s a blog.

You can get your blog free of cost and you can test search engine optimisation strategies on it. It has great potential, because you won’t risk your established site’s position or popularity. If you’re new to websites you will learn how to optimise content in order to get maximum ranking and, of course, in order to earn money. You will learn a lot about things like on-site optimisation, website themes, anchor text, and more.

Let me explain my experiences. I firsly established my blogs in order to get more links which point to my most important websites. Yes, it’s great, because you can link to any article, subpage or whatever you want. There are no fees, no approval, simply nothing to make link building tedious work. If you write about interesting subjects, you can get a few links to your blog too. This way, you can easily get from 10 to 20 links without much effort. Use simple mathematics and establish 10 blogs. Each blog will be dedicated to one subject, but all the blogs will link together. So if you get 10 links to 1 blog, you will improve your other blogs’ importance by linking them together. It’s proven, that website A linking to website B gives some importance to website C, which is linked from website B only.

Apart from creating links, you can usually get some PageRank on your blogs too. PageRank 2 or 3 isn’t the highest one, but they’re quite good in the sense of relation between effort and money. Many websites have got PageRank of 2 only, but their webmasters need to pay for domains and other related web services. Any PageRank higher than 0 can be determined as a success, because you can use this PageRank value for the sites from which you link your blogs to.

But it could be very unfortunate if you establish your blogs for links only. Add some content there too! Use Google AdSense and let your blog earn money. If you have some friends which can help you, give them rights to post comments on your blog. This will result in fresh content.

Just for example, I’d like to show you some of my blogs and I’d like to tell you why I use them. Maybe they will be some kind of inspiration for your blogs or further sites.

• 1) Aquariums related blog (www.aquarium-database.blogspot.com). This blog is here in order to point to www.aqua-fish.net, to tell people about new articles and so on.
• 2) SEO blog (www.professional-seo-consultant.blogspot.com). I started this blog some time ago and after analysis, I decided to build this website. My friend who owns www.osid.co.uk, www.b4tv.co.uk or www.expatschoolsreunited.com helped me with this blog too.
• 3) Shade canopies blog (www.shade-canopies.blogspot.com). This blog was established in order to provide a link to my previous customer. After some time I found out that people visit this blog from search engines.
• 4) Another blog was www.decorating-feng-shui.blogspot.com which was used for testing purposes.

There are other blogs, but these above are most important.