If you are starting a website for your home business, the quality and accessibility of that website are essential if it is to help you succeed. Plenty of individual websites are for more personal reasons, such as blogs or photo sites to share thoughts and memories with friends and family.

But when your website is for your business, it’s even more important that the site be the best it can be. This doesn’t mean you have to go out and spend lots and lots of money on your site, but it does mean it should embody two main attributes:

1. It should contain accurate information that is helpful to site visitors and tells them what they wanted to learn from visiting your site.
2. It should be easy to find.

That second point, “findability” if you will, is what we’re going to look deeper at in this particular blog post. What good is it to have a fabulous, informative, and even attractive website if no one ever finds it?

Certainly, you can include your web address (the address you choose to buy when you go through the process of domain name registration) on any local marketing efforts you do. Put it on business cards, flyers, newspaper ads, and other forms of print media.

But many people use the internet to discover businesses, and this is where many entrepreneurs miss a lot of opportunity. There are literally millions of websites out there: how will the people who are looking for a business like yours get to your specific business site with so many others to choose from?

Search engine optimization. And one of the simplest things you can do is also one of the most affordable and easiest: start a blog. When you register a UK domain name, you’ll be buying a domain that you can use as both your main site or your blog; or, you could host a blog externally and link to your website.

But having an on-site blog is especially important, because search engines prize content over almost any other factor. What does that mean for you? Well, once you choose your domain name, get your business web hosting all set up, and have your site created and published, search engines will “crawl” your site, inspecting to see what is there.

The more relevant content they find, the more valuable they determine your website to be, and therefore, the more likely they are to suggest it to searchers who are looking for the type of content found on your site.

Blogs are a cheap, easy, and effective way of increasing the amount of relevant content on your site without altering its layout and appearance.

business web hosting · home business · local marketing · UK domain name · websites

Selecting, registering, and utilising a UK domain name is an exciting process, but it’s important to understand what you are looking for before you begin. Your domain name is more than just the web address of your website. It is part of your website’s identity, and can actually deliver a surprising amount of value to you as the website operator (and likely business owner of the company whose website is associated with the address).

What kind of value does a domain name deliver to your business? Well, several kinds actually.

First of all, there’s brand recognition and marketing value. This means that people recognise not just the name of your company, but also the name of your website. Having a website that is easy to find, easy to spell, and easy to associate with your company (for example, your business name is part of your domain name) makes for a cohesive, clear, and solid brand representation for your company.

This is important because you need to send a clear message for people to really absorb and retain who you are and what you do. Selecting a rock solid domain name for your UK website is a great way to keep your branding message clear and consistent across multiple mediums.

Secondly, there is search engine optimisation value. You’re probably familiar with search engine optimisation (SEO) by now, but in case you’re not, it’s basically this: when people query search engines looking for a certain type of information, the job of the search engines is to return the results that are most relevant to that query. If you’re a business, you obviously want to turn up near the top of the list when people search for what you offer and where you offer it.

Domain name selection and domain name registration, both in the UK and globally, can play an important role in developing competitive search engine performance. While there are many factors (largely including site content and incoming links) that influence SEO, having a relevant domain name can help inform search engines what it is your site is all about. So, for example, if you provide plumbing services in Oxford, having the words “plumbing” and “Oxford” in your domain name send search engines a clear message about what they’ll find on your website.

Monetary value. This has less to do with the name itself than with how you go about registering it. For a good deal on UK domain name registration, consider registering your domain through the same company you choose for web hosting. This is usually the most affordable way to do so, and it also streamlines your process, keeping things simpler and faster.

company website · search engine optimisation · SEO · UK domain name · UK domain name registration