What everyone launching a web site should know about online marketing

You have taken the steps to move your company forward and have a website designed for your business.  Being a new website owner is a bit scary when you consider that most new web sites receive very minimal traffic since search engines prefer to display older, more trusted web sites at the top of the search engines.   What can you do in the beginning?  Plenty! Start now on building quality links to your web site.   Use other established web sites to list your best content and jump into the fast lane with your online marketing.  It may take a new website 6-9 months to achieve rankings by Google search engines, but you don't have to wait when you have a comprehensive online marketing strategy. 

Choosing a good domain

While in the design process, make sure to register for a domain name.  This name should have your keywords or service/product/brand name included.  Deciding your market area is important.  If you only plan to market in the US using a .com would be best.  If you are targeting a particular country as the United Kingdom use an .uk or another appropriate top level domain.  Best name already taken?  Did you try adding hyphens or a short word to your ideal domain?  Often a slightly different version is still available.  It doesn't hurt your business to buy a .us or .net domain as long as your marketing clearly states your domain name.  Avoid buying tons of unused domains.   We recommend buying one domain for each unique business or industry you wish to target.

Buying an old or recently expired domain

The age of a domain is an important factor for search engines like Google which are built on historical data and trust.  Why buy a new domain and go through the long process of getting out of the Google Sandbox?  Find someone with an existing domain that is out of date but still has some content on it and back-links.  Offer them a small amount to buy it from them, you may end up saving 1 or more years waiting for your web site to take off.  Care must be taken not to destroy the links and content of the existing site.  You want to 301 redirects old URLs to the new URLs and wherever there was a back-link to a page, it is ideal that you retain the exact URL and only change its contents.

Affordable and Reliable Web Site Hosting

You will need to consider domain hosting and using a reliable company is best.  Do not work with hosting services that participate with gambling and porn sites or promote spam.  If your website is, language specific than best to use a hosting company from that country.  For example, your site is in Spanish using a hosting company in Spain if Spain is your target area is best.

Getting indexed and ranked in the search engines

Next, you will want to register with search engines.  Google, Yahoo, MSN are the three biggest ones with Google being the predominate one. However, registering is not the best way to get crawled by the search engines.  It is better to have a high quality link to your site from a respected and established web site.  See if your web developer or a business partner will link to your domain even if it is only temporarily. 

Another way to get indexed is to set up sitemaps such as Google Sitemaps.  Other search engines may provide ways to submit your urls as well.  You'll want to continually add fresh unique content to the website while developing backlinks to your pages from other web sites.  It is believed that adding unique content to your website will get the website crawled more often, but not necessarily ranked higher. 

Search engines will track incoming links to your website so always be working on adding links.  When you add a high page rank quality link, it is seen as a link of value and authority and builds trust for your website.  This is what search engines look for and it should be your main goal when you want to improve rankings.  We recommend following the search engine guidelines as close as possible while coming up with strategies to increase your online business.  Search engines track the rate of your growth as well so as they say slow and steady will win the race.  You don't want thousands of links appearing suddenly using bad automated black hat techniques..  Focus instead on building trust, adding links and fine-tuning your keywords for your new website is important especially during that first year.

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