5 Steps To Getting Your Business Online

Although the majority of small, medium and large businesses now have an online presence, many are not making the most of their website. Whether you have had a site that has been online for a short while, or you are looking to launch one, taking five simple steps towards promoting your own space on the web will take you a long way.

1.Choose a reliable web hosting package

Hosting bundles are now available to business owners in abundance, but not all packages will offer everything you need. Think about what you wish to use your business for, do you need e-commerce features? Emails sent to your domain? Social media widgets? Make a list of everything you need on your site and check out hosting bundles that offer those features.

2.Learn basic SEO

If you don’t intend to hire out an SEO expert, learn some basic SEO skills yourself. There are plenty of guides available online, all of which will guide you through the steps you need to take in order to push your website through the ranks of major search engines. Be wary of sites that offer top rankings in 24 hours; SEO takes work and you should be prepared to put it in.


3.Design a website full of useful content

If you have chosen to develop your own SEO skills you will have seen one phrase repeated over and over again: “Content is king”. This phrase is repeated so often, because it works. By giving your site an easy to use layout that is full of useful content you will keep both your visitors and major search engines happy. Do keep optimizing your content with keywords, but strike the balance between your content being reader and search engine friendly.

4.Promote your site

How you choose to promote your website is up to you. Many web hosting bundles will offer free PPC vouchers and useful gadgets such as RSS feeds for your blog. Try and test these means of promotion as much as you can so that you can get a feel for what works for you. You might also want to look at exploring social media. By building Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr pages, you can utilize a form of advertising that is extremely effective. Also, think about writing useful articles for your websites blog, that you can then promote via social sharing sites such as Digg and Reddit.

5.Maintain your site

So many business owners fall foul of just sticking their site online and leaving it to fall in to the abyss of low search engine rankings. It has been thought for many years now that Google, Yahoo and Bing prefer websites that are updating on a regular basis, preferably every day. This doesn’t require much work; a simple 350 character blog post will suffice. Periodically change your sites layout if you find that it needs modernizing, but don’t do this too often as your visitors will want a sense of continuity.

Getting a site online need not be expensive, or difficult. By following the five simple steps above, you will find that you get your online presence off to an excellent start. The above plan is simply a starting point; don’t be afraid to start exploring other means of making your site successful. Whatever you do, they key thing to remember is that a site with constant useful content will always fare well with search engines and users alike.

Article written by Stephanie Wagner who as a freelance blogger and writer, has spent many years exploring web hosting for beginners. She is not affiliated with Aplus, but she does recommend them for their easy to use hosting bundles.

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