Online Marketing
Choosing the Right Name for your Site
Registering your business name is easy as long as it has not been registered already. If you want to be a limited company then you can check on Companies House to see that your preferred name has not been used. It’s also as well to do a domain name search to make sure that your name has not been used for a website somewhere else in the world. Most web hosting companies do this service for free but try Domaincheck as they do what it says on the tin and also include the full range of URLs and not just .com or .co.uk.
Choosing your Web Hosting Company
There are many to choose from but don’t always go for the cheapest. Yes there are free sites out there and yes they look..well cheap. You are not going to want gigabytes of storage for a small site so don’t be tempted by size but look for good customer service and whether they have platforms for what you want. WordPress now powers over a quarter of the sites on the Web and you may want a hosting company that makes uploading this software easy. Shop around. You can move companies later but it is not easy so try and make the right decision first off.
Swapping Links
You can swap links with other sites. For example if you manufacture screw drivers then one of your suppliers may be happy to provide a link on their site and you could also link to their site. Nowadays Search Engines have got wise to people swapping links to try and boost their rankings and ;inking too or having links from non-relevant sites is unprofessional and will also irritate your readers so its probably best not to do it.
Marketing Literature
Your marketing literature can be printed out from the site to give to clients. Remember that as the web uses 72 dpi (dots per inch) and printing companies use 300dpi your web pages would look fuzzy if they were sent to a printers to do professional brochures and you should talk directly to your printer if you need this kind of publicity.
Getting a Search Engine Ranking
This is down to a number of things. Don’t expect it to happen overnight because the longer your presence is on the web the more likely search engines are to find you and the more likely other sites will link to you. Someone needs to register your site with Search Engines and we recommend Google and Bing. The latter also includes the Yahoo site and this covers most if not all of internet traffic. Search Engines often look at your sites manually and they will have a backlog due to the sheer volume of sites being put on the web. Don’t forget traditional publicity helps enormously. Tell your friends and customers your URL and print it on your stationery and publicity.
Advertising on a Search Engine
Nowadays the only sure way to get a high ranking on a search Engine is to pay for it although standard entries are still free. It would be up to you to buy an entry on a Search Engine. There are many ways to advertise your wares on the internet but one of the best is Adwords from Google. Your site will appear on other webpages when people type in search terms covered by your site.
Using Social Media
There are many ways to advertise your wares now for free on the internet. Facebook was once a personal site but many companies now have a Facebook account. See our Social Media page for details of what’s available but Twitter is a must and it can also direct traffic to your site.
Search Statistics
You can get an idea of how many people are using your website for free by using Google Analytics or its rivals Bing. A piece of tracking code needs to be added to your web pages which visitors will not see. If you are using WordPress as your website platform then there are many plug-ins to make this happen seamlessly.