Local Business  » Setting Up a Business Website

Setting Up a Business Website

There are very few businesses these days that don't have

websites, and as a home business your website is one of the most

powerful tools you have at your disposal. A good website can

really work for you, but you need to know what you're doing.

Hire Foreign Designers

Web design really is something that you shouldn't try to do

yourself, unless you really know what you're doing -- I'm sure

you've seen what happens when people try this. Hiring a web

designer, though, can be prohibitively expensive. Luckily for

you, the Internet puts you in touch with designers all over the

world, and it's easy to hire one of them very cheaply to design

your website. They don't do any worse of a job than someone in

your country would, it just happens that your few hundred

dollars is worth as much to someone in India as a few thousand

would be to you or I.

Use Search Engine Optimisation

There are a heck of a lot of websites out there, and search

engines will return everything relevant to a user's search. How

can you possibly get your site above the thousands of others

that the search engine thinks are relevant to your keywords?

The answer is to use basic search engine optimisation

techniques. For example, make sure you often use phrases that

you think your target market will be searching for (your

'keywords'), and make your web addresses contain them too. For

this article, for example, www.website.com/home-business-website

write your website makes it easy to post new articles without...

would be a much better web address than

www.website.com/articles/205. That's just a brief introduction

-- there's a whole SEO industry out there, if you go looking for

it.

Have Lots of Useful Content

When you have a website, you're not just trying to reach people

who were searching for you -- you're trying to get people to

check your website, read your latest news and offers, and the

rest. The best way of doing this is to have fresh and useful

content on there. Write short articles about the kind of things

your customers might be interested in. If your home business is

computer repair, for example, you could keep track of the latest

virus threats on your site and offer help to anyone affected.

Make It Easy to Update

You should make sure that whatever software you're using to

write your website makes it easy to post new articles without

too many problems. If you have go to around putting HTML tags

into your articles before you can upload them, then you should

think about changing the way your website works.

Keep a Weblog

One of the simplest ways to have fresh, useful content on your

site is to keep a weblog (or 'blog'). A blog is a series of

entries, like entries in a diary, that are displayed on your

site starting with the most recent first. It is easy to log in

and quickly write a new entry, and it can be as short or as long

as you like.

For your home business' blog, the only rule to stick to is not

to post anything there that isn't related to your industry and

your work. It might be great that you've got a new baby or sad

that your cat Mr Tibbles died, but you should start a personal

blog on another website if you want to post about that kind of

thing.

Let People E-Mail You with No Hassle

One of the worst mistakes people often make when they're

starting a website is to think that it would be a good idea to

give their customers a 'contact form' to fill in. People really,

really don't like filling in forms, and you'll lose a lot of

interested customers if you require them to tell you all sorts

of things before you'll even talk to them over the Internet.

The best thing to do is to simply list your email address on

your site, as a clickable link, and advise customers near the

link of the kind of information it would be useful for them to

include in an email. It might sound strange, but people are far

more willing to go to the trouble of typing things in when it's

on their own terms, and not into an annoying web form.

About the author:

Original Source: Articles-Galore.com

Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of The Home Income Portal

Home of Serious Online Business Options.