A business website is an essential aspect of running a successful enterprise. Without a website your company loses credibility and opportunity, as we all check Google first before we use a service or buy a product. Your website must also act as a reflection of your brand and feature all the important and relevant information your customers are searching for online.
To ensure you set up your site correctly to create the best impact, here is a quick guide featuring everything you need to know about starting a website:
Domain name
It’s important that you think of a website address and check that it is available to use. Once you’ve settled on an address, purchase the domain name and use this when building your website. It’s a good idea to ensure your domain name and company name are the same, so you are easily found when searched for.
Look into web hosting
Every website needs a host and this can be done for free via BT or Google but doesn’t come with any assistance or on top services, everything must be sorted yourself. Business web hosting from UK2 is a good option to consider when building your site, and allows you to create your website, receive a free domain name and have maintenance support from a team of experts.
You can use a basic template or pay a designer
When it comes to what your website looks like, you need to decide whether you’re happy creating one using a basic free template or investing money in a professional web designer to create a certain look for you.
Your site needs to be packed full of relevant content
It’s important that your site is contains keywords and relevant information for those browsing and that all this can be found in easy to access places. It’s also a good idea to consider incorporating a blog into your site, which will feature industry-related posts that answer questions people might have or feature updates on the business itself.
Ensure your contact details are easy to access
You’d be amazed how many websites out there don’t feature easy to access email addresses and telephone numbers or feature their opening times.
Get visitors to… visit/
Once your site is set up, featuring all the correct branding and lots of informative information about your business, then it’s time to actually get people to pay you a visit online. This is where SEO comes in and even if you aren’t a digital marketing expert there are still things you can do to improve your search rankings and visibility online:
- Do keyword research – then ensure all the important keywords are included in your on page content. Google adwords keyword planner is a useful tool for finding out which searches are best to include. However, do not stuff your content with keywords, you can be penalised if you use the same phrase repeatedly.
- Avoid using a splash page – these are homepages that require the visitor to click through to the ‘real’ site and can have a negative impact due to a lack of written content, therefore affecting your ability to rank in search engines.
- Put time into link building – off page is as important to your website as the on page content. That’s why you should try to get involved with writing guest posts for other industry related sites that will get people clicking through.
- Avoid duplicate content – above all do not use content from other sites or replicate content you have already written on your site on another page. Google will penalise you for it and it will affect your search rankings.
- Promote your site on social media – a good website needs a decent social media plan to back it up and sharing links to your site on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram will improve the rate of those click throughs.
- Do keyword research – then ensure all the important keywords are included in your on page content. Google adwords keyword planner is a useful tool for finding out which searches are best to include. However, do not stuff your content with keywords, you can be penalised if you use the same phrase repeatedly.
- Avoid using a splash page – these are homepages that require the visitor to click through to the ‘real’ site and can have a negative impact due to a lack of written content, therefore affecting your ability to rank in search engines.
- Put time into link building – off page is as important to your website as the on page content. That’s why you should try to get involved with writing guest posts for other industry related sites that will get people clicking through.
- Avoid duplicate content – above all do not use content from other sites or replicate content you have already written on your site on another page. Google will penalise you for it and it will affect your search rankings.
- Promote your site on social media – a good website needs a decent social media plan to back it up and sharing links to your site on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram will improve the rate of those click throughs.
Starting up a website is an important step for any business and one that requires plenty of thought, time and money to invest and the aim to use it to its highest potential.
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