So you have a great idea for an online business but you’re not sure where to start! This quick guide will show you how to avoid a few of the main pitfalls a business has when setting up online.

1) BUY AN OLD DOMAIN NAME

Many businesses buy a new domain name and then have to wait 6 months or more for your website to begin getting a reasonable number of visitors from Search Engines. However, if you can get your hands on an old domain name your business will be at a great starting point. Why? Because Google and other search engines place greater emphasis on listing an old domain name in their results. This is helped by the fact that generally older domain names will have more back links to it. Back links act like ‘votes’ for your site and the more ‘votes’ you have, the further up the search engines you will move. Therefore it is worth spending that extra little bit at the beginning, before setting up a website to give you a head start to your competitors and save you time and money later on.

When picking an old domain name to buy, try looking for a memorable name related to your product/service, good page rank and a reasonable number of back links. Sitepoint is a good place to start when looking for second hand domain names.

2) WEB DESIGN WITH CLASS – SHOP STORE

Your website is like a shop front, you need to have it looking amazing for the user to continue to view it. The first 3 seconds on a website is when the user makes up their opinion of the site. Impressing the user at this stage is crucial if you want them to continue looking at the site. A simple, but effective design will encourage users to re-visit the site and improve the chance of converting visitors into sales.

Websites that are poorly designed or slow to load will put users off, losing that potential customer. Your site is like a high street shop, to entice people in you need the shop to look nice from the outside. Beware though when you create your homepage avoid pure graphics and no text, firstly because the page will be slow to load and secondly because search engine spiders won’t rate your site highly in their rankings as they will have no text (ie keywords) to read.

3) QUALITY OVER COST

Generally if you pay cheap you get cheap with web design. If you want your business to really stand out from the crowd then you need to pay that extra little bit! Also beware that with cheap web design you are unlikely to get that extra knowledge of usability, accessibility and search engine optimization which are key to a sites success.

Lots of businesses have to re-build their sites sometimes from scratch because it isn’t built in an SEO friendly or user friendly fashion and therefore isn’t performing well.

To avoid this extra expense make sure that it is done properly in the first place. Due to approximately 80% of traffic coming into a site being from search engines it is important to get as high up the search engines as possible.

Although, in general cheap isn’t the best way forward for a businesses website, this doesn’t mean that you should go for the most expensive either. Go around as many web designers as possible and get a feel of what you would expect to be paying for the type of site you require. If possible also get a company that have experience and are able to manage a business project like yours. Many websites take ages to be created due to poor management of the project. This will cost you time and money whilst you are waiting for them to finish so always try and find a web design company that someone recommends.

4) IT IS HARD WORK!!

Unfortunately the hard bit of starting a successful online business isn’t setting it up but actually driving traffic to it once it is up. Many businesses fail because they may have a great website but no one knows it exists. To drive traffic to your site you need to use a mixture of online marketing techniques. The online techniques you can use to drive traffic to your site can be divided up into on-site optimisation and off-site optimisation. Both these terms should be researched thoroughly before creating a marketing plan as they will give you a host of ideas which you can utilize when promoting your site.

Don’t believe that it will be easy creating a website you will have to work hard getting people on to the site to purchase the products or services your business offers.

5) WHERE IS YOUR CONTENT

Content is King!! The more content you have on your site the more searches you will be able to target. Why? Because there are more pages for the search engines to crawl and index and hence more ways for you to be found by internet users. If you regularly submit content to a website, people will come back to the site as they will see it as a useful information resource and well worth a visit.

6) BACK LINKS

Back links are links that are found on other websites which link to yours. Search engines see them as votes for your website. Hence the more ‘votes’ that you have to your site the higher up Google you will be. The result will be more visitors and more traffic resulting in more sales. It is crucial to get as many good links as possible when promoting a website as without them the rest of your efforts may well be in vain.

Next post