Part 2 of 4. Your IP address is like a street address, while your domain name is the name of your business as displayed on a sign. Sometimes you may own the entire building at a given street address. In this case, if a customer travels to your address then they’ll find your business in its own standalone structure. You may also share the same building with other businesses, in which case your address will specify a suite or office number.

Either way, it’s easy for the mail to get where it’s going and visitors never realize that several businesses are hosted on the server. We mention this because many businesses think they need a “dedicated server” when they would be better off on a shared server. Using the office building example, most businesses save money by renting offices rather than the entire building.

Each website consists of many distinct webpages, each written in a language called HTML. Written to be accessed via web browsers and displayed on computer screens, webpages use hypertext links to connect to other pages or content.

Regardless of your business’s type or age, your first step into online marketing should be to design your website. Many businesses place themselves at a disadvantage by selecting a domain name first, but this can be a huge mistake. Search engines use not only your page content but its domain name as well, and sites with their main keywords in the domain name tend to get priority rankings. For instance, our business of ?SEO? and ?web design? features the domain name ?AceSEOWebDesign.com.? This is a particularly useful feature of search engines, as they are smart enough to tell that a site called ?cars.com? isn’t likely to specialize in selling boats.

Positioning yourself as a specialist is another effective strategy in website marketing. Say, for instance, that you own a business called ?Harriet’s Flower Shop.? ?Flower shop? is a competitive term, and distinguishing yourself may prove challenging. If you enjoy a particular flower, however, it may be easier to position yourself as a specialist in, say, orchids. Once you’ve established success with ?Harriet’s Orchids,? a less competitive keyword, then it may be worth considering branching out.

However, you must also be careful not to be too tightly focused. In this example, focusing on “pink orchids” might be too narrow as not many people might be looking for them. When choosing your site’s theme, think of yourself like Goldilocks and look for the bed and porridge that’s “just right”.

And just to reinforce this strategy, let’s answer one question a lot of people ask: if having your keyword in the domain name is important then why do Google and eBay have their domain names? Well, eBay actually used to be “Auctions.com” when it started. And in Google’s case, as well as Twitter and Facebook, they are pioneers and their names became synonymous with what they do. If you think “online search”, Google comes to mind. Think “social network” and Facebook comes to mind.

It is also possible to point multiple domains at a single website, though there are several points to keep in mind when adopting this practice. One of our clients, an insurance agent in Jacksonville Florida named Matt Moss, wanted us to build a website reachable at ?MossInsurance.com.? We felt that there were three problems with this domain name.

– Having his last name in the domain name made it more difficult for him to sell later, should he choose to do so. After all, having ?moss? in the name might be viewed as a negative for any prospective future buyer. Be sure to check out Parts 1, 3 and 4.

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Part 3 of 4. — The term “insurance” is too broad, and is subject to fierce competition. If your business isn’t listed in the first two pages of search results then its likelihood of being noticed is quite low, and most of the top insurance companies are billion dollar businesses. As such, the chances of a small business ranking favorably with such a keyword are quite low.

– Just as with our flower shop example above, Matt could benefit by specializing. There are many types of insurance: home, car, life, etc. Unless he sells every type, it makes little sense to use such a generic term. Even if he does sell many types of insurance, it makes more sense to create a unique site customized for each type than it does to lump them all together.

Upon sharing our concerns, Matt decided to specialize in car, home and boat insurance. While this was a great first step, even these terms are quite competitive, so the next phase in Matt’s web marketing strategy was finding the right terms to help get him noticed.

Our research led us to three terms that had very little competition and, as such, would garner more notice for Matt’s business. These were “homeowners insurance,” “classic car insurance” and “yacht insurance.” While your first impulse may be to believe that businesses and terms with no competition are most desirable, unless you are a pioneer in your field, no competition also means no demand.

Matt chose to specialize in homeowners insurance, as it was a subject with which he was most familiar, while leaving the opportunity ope for future expansion into his other specializations later. Matt’s choice was sound on several levels. While representing himself as a homeowners insurance salesman online, nothing prevents him from building trust with clients and selling them classic car or yacht insurance at a later date. Had he positioned himself as a generic insurance salesman, he likely wouldn’t have gotten noticed. Similarly, had he specialized in car or boat insurance then his future expansion would be limited by the fact that those purchasing these types of insurance already owned homes.

Also, while the internet is global, most of Matt’s business will be relatively local. It would make little sense for someone in Oregon to do business with him, for instance. As such, we registered the domain named “Florida-homeowners-insurance-choices.com.” While this name is great for search engines, it is difficult to remember and even worse for printing on business cards. To that end, we also registered “MossHomeownersInsurance.com” and pointed it at his main domain name. As such, Matt has the best of both worlds for his website marketing strategy: a search engine optimized domain as well as one that is easy to remember and say.

All this is to say that you shouldn’t register a domain name first. Instead, let us do the research to find the most profitable keywords for your business.

The second biggest mistake made by many businesses is in purchasing web hosting before they know what their needs are. Hosting environments are quite different, offering a vast array of environments and features. In nine out of ten instances, the environment you choose will meet your needs. However, in the remaining instance, a wrong choice can waste your valuable time and money.

Furthermore, we have found one system that’s simply the best way to conduct business online: Site Build It (SBI). Basically, SBI is a hosting system plus much more. For the price of typical hosting, SBI provides a Website with dozens of built-in, automated tools that practically assure your success. Frankly, SBI is the right choice for about 95% of all of our clients and because SBI actually takes care of registering your domain name and setting up your hosting, it’s another reason that you should not do it yourself. Be sure to checks Parts 1, 2 and 4.

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Part 4 of 4. Once you’ve designed your website, chosen an appropriate domain name and selected a web host that meets your needs, you then put the website in place on the host. When everything is in place and linked together, customers can enter your business’s domain name into their address bar and learn all about what your business has to offer. This, broadly speaking, is how a website marketing strategy works.

When a customer does this, they view your site’s pages, images and other multimedia content in their browsers. This content, stored on the web hosting company’s computers, is delivered up via the web servers which they run and maintain on your behalf.

More often than not, the customer views your site in a commonly available browser such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera, but other ?user agents? are also becoming more common. By interconnecting pages locally and worldwide using hyperlinks, many of which include domain names, customers can ?surf the web,? easily connecting to sites across the globe.

To find a Webpage, you can always type the domain name into the address field of your browser such as “ebay.com”. But what if you don’t know the address? Or what if you want to find all Websites on a specific topic? If you don’t know the address then how can you get there?

This problem is addressed by search engines, of which Google, Yahoo! And Bing (formerly MSN Live) are the most influential. This popularity inspires many webmasters to make them key players in their website marketing campaigns, and inclusion in all of these generates a great deal of free traffic.

Additionally, consider using email to market your Website and business. Email is “a store and forward method of composing, sending, storing, and receiving messages over the internet. Email predates the Internet [and was a crucial technology in its creation.

Marketers have adopted email into their website marketing strategies because the cost to send is zero. As such, it is easy to inexpensively connect with many current or potential clients. In addition, auto responder systems can be had for only a few dollars per month, and represent a great way of conveying commonly requested information to customers without the need for human intervention. Such regular, targeted contact is a great way of maintaining customer mindshare in situations where your business might otherwise be forgotten.

And maintaining customer mindshare is crucial to your business’s success. Our free weekly newsletter (please sign up if you haven’t already) is sent out to many current and potential clients, each of whom are likely to either recommend us to anyone seeking a web design or SEM company, or to forward it on to anyone interested in same. While 40% of our traffic originates from the three major search engines listed previously, the vast majority comes from links and recommendations generated by others, often due to the regular newsletter’s role in maintaining mindshare. Be sure to check out Parts 1-3.

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