As a business owner, you know it’s a good idea to have a website. Perhaps you’ve looked through domain names, read about web hosting, and maybe even gone through the domain name registration process and hired a UK hosting company. You may have picked out a template, put some information up, and got your site to go ‘live’.

But it’s important to take a step back and make sure you are doing things for the right reasons and going about it in a way that will actually benefit your business. Don’t buy a domain name and set up a site just because you think you’re supposed to have one. Websites aren’t valuable for the sake of being websites – they’re valuable because of the function they fulfill, for the role they play, and for the value they offer to your customers.

Think of it this way: your website is your business’ online presence. It needs to give customers a sense of what your business is like and provide useful information to them, even if it’s just as basic as a list of service you provide along with business hours and contact information.

There are plenty of ways to go about building the website itself: you can buy domain names directly, or receive free domain names from a company who provides your web hosting. But before you get too involved in the building process, step back and make sure that your goals for the website match your goals for the business, and that you stay true to who you are throughout each step of the process.

Domain Names · web hosting · websites

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