Every
business needs a
website. Gone are the days when you could get by without one and so the question is, where do you begin? Now most new businesses don't have a big budget for a website unless the web
is their business. So, how can you get a great web site on the cheap without paying thousands out to a web
design agency or hiring your very own web developer?
Well, let's start with the basics first. Before you can have your own web site you need a hosting package (you can of course go with one of the many 'free' web site deals around but they're not really ideal and you will eventually outgrow them). You will also need at least one domain name. Lets take them in turn:
Hosting packages:
- Web space - you will need a package that offers a decent amount of web space (100MB is good for starters and you can always add additional space for a nominal fee).
- You should also have a decent amount of bandwidth available (usually expressed as MB or GB of traffic per month) and I would say that 1GB/month is the minimum for a business web site.
- Database - MySQL is popular and you should make sure you have at least one in your package. You will need it for most business web sites, especially if you a Content Management System (such as Wordpress or Drupal or Joomla).
- Reliability - Look for a guarantee on uptime and avoid anything that is less than 99%.
- CGI Scripts - look for one that allows you to install scripts and comes with easy installers for the popular packages such as Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal.
- Stats package - most packages come with the option to download raw server stats but ideally you want one that offers a more graphical way of looking at your stats, such as AWStats. This will help you to see who is visiting your site, where they came from, who referred them, which pages they look at and how long for.
Domain names:
- You should register a domain name with your business name in but this should not be the domain that you use for your actual site... I'll explain why in a minute.
- You should also register at least one domain name that contains a keyword for your business (see below).
- If you are in the UK its important to register a co.uk and probably the .com version too. You may want to register the .info and .biz variants too, if only to stop others registering them and confusing potential customers.
- I recommend using the same company to hold all your domains so that its easier for you to manage them, rather than registering through a variety of companies.
Now, a word or two about
SEO (
Search Engine Optimisation). Now, I am no expert but have picked up one or two tips along the way, usually the hard way. One of the most important aspects to SEO are keywords. Keywords are used by
Google to decide where you page should rank in its
search results. Let's say that you sell houses (i.e. you are an estate agency). When thinking of what keywords you would use on your site you would of course include 'house', 'flat', 'apartment' etc amongst them. You would also want to include 'buy' and 'sell', maybe 'rent' too if you do also advertise properties to rent. Now, if you are an estate agency and none of these keywords appear in your site then its unlikely that anyone will find your site! So, think about what your key business activities and objectives are and choose relevant keywords.
The whole area of SEO is huge and even keywords are a complex area and not easy to get right. Trial and error will be required. Some research tools are available for free, king amongst them is Google's Keyword Tool, but there are others (just Google 'keyword tools'). There are hundreds, possibly thousands of companies selling their services as SEO experts but they will charge you for their services. Expect to pay around £200 a month minimum! For now, I recommend reading as widely as possible (there are plenty of free articles on the web and Google has lots of free resources). Do this before you spend a penny on advice.
Finally (for this article) lets talk about choosing your actual domain. I said earlier you should choose at least one doamin that includes your company name but not to use this as your 'public; url. What do I mean and why? Well let's say your company name is Ace Estate Agents. You would try and register this as one of your domains, so www.aceestateagency.co.uk or www.aceestateagents.co.uk would be your starting point. You may want to look at www.ace-estate-agents.co.uk and www.ace-estate-agency-co.uk too. You may feel the latter ones are easier to read but without proper research its almost impossible to tell. Cheaper to register both variants than make the wrong choice in my view.
However, these may not be the best domain names for your site. Remember that you want keywords relevant to your business on your site? Well, it so happens that your domain name is an important factor in how Google ranks your site, so ideally you want a keyword in your domain, Now, estate agent and estate agency are indeed keywords for our example business so we could leave it at that. However, there are zillions of estate agencies on the web. A quick Google search shows over 81 million sites for the search 'estate agents' and 120 million for 'estate agency'.
So what about other keywords? Well, most estate agents cover a specific market, either geographically or type of property. Let's say our example company sells and rents property in London. A quick search for the keywords 'London property' produces over 93 million hits so we can see that its too general. However, lets say that the company is in the market for premium properties worth over £1 million. Searching for 'Premium London property' produces just under 12 million hots, much better. So, using those keywords would rank you higher on Google when people search for properties worth over £1 million in the London area. In this example you would therefore want to look at domain names like www.premiumlondonproperties.co.uk or www.premium-london-properties.co.uk. You would then use this domain as your public url and have all you other registered domains for this business point to that one. This means that when someone searches for estate agents in general your general domains would appear in the search results but if they click on the link on Google's pages it would direct them to your public url, in this case, say, www.premium-london-proprties.co.uk. If they are indeed looking for a premium property in the London area, great. You got them to your site even though they didn't do a specific search for premium London properties. If they are instead looking for properties outside London, it's still of some benefit to you, especially if you AdSense on your site to direct traffic to other sites that aren't your direct competitors, such as sites that specialise in property outside of London. In that way you may end up generating some income for visitors who don't come to you for premium property in London.
Of course, your preferred domain names may already be taken, so you need to think creatively and to think carefully about your target market and your key business activities and objectives when choosing your keywords.
So, to summarise; you need to register at least one domain and to find your self a hosting package that meets your needs for the least cost. Be sure to check industry magazines and online for an idea of the best hosting companies around. .Net magazine publishes a directory of hosting companies and often does reviews too.
