Saturday, October 24, 2009

Website Marketing: What You Might Want To Know Before Starting (Part 2)

By Ed Brancheau



Part 2 of 4. Your IP address is like a physical street address, while your domain name is like the name on your business's nameplate. You might own the entire building at a given address, or you may share it with others. Regardless of which is the case, the information associated with your address is sufficient for customers to find and transact business with you.

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.

Websites are comprised of webpages, written in a language called HTML. Readable via web browsers on computers, webpages can link to other pages or content via hypertext links.

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.

You can also assign several domains to the same website, though there are several issues worth keeping mind when adopting this process. One of our clients, a Jacksonville Florida insurance salesman named Matt Moss, wanted us to design a website reachable at the domain name ?MossInusrance.com.? We felt that there were three problems with this proposal.

-- By having his last name in it, it'd be very difficult for him to sell his Website to someone else if he ever wanted to. After all, if your last name isn't "Moss" then having "Moss" in the domain name is a negative. Be sure to check out Parts 1, 3 and 4.

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