How To Get Free Websites, Hosting and Domains from Microsoft

Everyone has heard of the “free website” scams and also the legitimate but crappy websites. Many times it is just a glorified profile page or sub-domain. Either way it totally stinks for optimization. The alleged free websites are usually so full of extra code your site gets what is called “code bloat.” Besides that you usually have to pay for a domain name and they have you point it at a sub-domain. This is not good for SEO.

Real website, real domain, and free hosting

Microsoft Office Live Small Business

The best way to run your own site is always to pay for your own hosting, domain and install a free version of Wordpress. If you need to do everything for free we have a plan you can follow and still obtain success.

Why is it free?

Microsoft is very aggressive in trying to get businesses to use their service. They are so aggressive that they will give you a free website and a free domain, (both real) and also free hosting. They offer a free guide to get your website started here.

Content management system that is SEO friendly

Anyone can get this service for free except you do have to register with a credit or debit card. If you cancel your account within one year you will have to pay for it. I have had a site with a Page Rank of 2/10 hosted there for over two years for free. They have full featured contact list managers, email newsletter software and blog. The site is easy to use and easy to manage. Most content management systems perform poorly for optimization but this system Microsoft set up is great. You can control your page titles and meta description and keywords.

Office Live and Office Spaces work together

You get a live website where you can pick a domain if you wish. We did not pick one for this demonstration but just left it as a sub-domain. Click to see Optimization Tutor’s Office Live web page. Here we just i-framed this website as a demonstration. The blog for these websites is on spaces.live.com. Click here to see Optimization Tutors Spaces Live set up. You can embed your blog posts from spaces.live.com to your office.live.com account even if you chose to have a custom domain. Remember that the domains are free and they work like a real website and not a forwarding domain.

Microsoft provides exceptional resources

Microsoft provides a 5 step process for making your website look great. Click here to see it. They also have a list of pages every website should have and why. Click here to see it. They also have a fanominal resource page designed not just to help you build a site but how to run an online business. See it here. We found their help items very informative. Many times they have instructional videos also that help you with your step by step instructions.

Not just free website but whole business solutions

The important thing we want to emphasize is that Microsoft isn’t just offering a free website. They are offering an applications platform that provides everything you need to run an entire business. They have spreadsheets, doc files, reports, and everything else you would need to run an online business. Their contact manager, email newseltter manager and document manager are rivaled only by Google’s internet business applications. They both have their pros and cons. We love Google also and will discuss their offers later. For right now they do not offer free domains and Google.Pages is being fazed out.

Microsoft helps bring you customers

They have website analytics built in which includes pay per click tracking if you chose to go that route. The nice thing is their are so many other MSN.com, Live.com and Microsoft websites that easily drive traffic and customers to your site. If you answer questions in the public Q&A rooms they show up in your spaces.live.com blog which then is incorporated into your website. It works like Yahoo Answers and Linkedin Answers. Business owners and customers search in Google, Yahoo and MSN to get answers and these social Q&A pages rank well when someone else had already asked that same question. If you answers are there and especially when your answer is voted the best, then you stand a good chance of obtaining business.