When starting a business, one of the first things to consider when setting up is your business website. Websites are useful for advertising your company profile, products, and contact information. They can reach not only their neighbors but also other countries. And when setting up a website, you might consider hiring a web design agency, but is that the only thing you need? You must first define the needs of your website.
Your business website needs a descriptive domain name.
Your website domain name is the address of your website, commonly known as Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Many people think that the name of their company is enough to register as the domain name of their website. A recent study shows that Google algorithm updates, including stuffed animals like Panda and Penguin, consider domain names to be one of the top factors in keyword search. The algorithm was designed like this: if a person is serious about your company website and its contents, he should have left at least one keyword in the URL. This means that if my business name is Affordable Furniture, my website domain name should be like www.affordable-furniture.com, Not only www.affordable.com. Also, it would be helpful if my product web page had an address like www.affordable-furniture.com/products.html rather than www.asequibles-furniture.com/gallery.html. This is part of On Page Search Engine Optimization (On Page SEO) which I will discuss later.
Most web hosts offer domain name registration along with their web hosting services. There will be more information about web hosting services later.
Your business website needs a clean and appropriate web design.
One of the basic things your business needs is a clean and proper website design. There are many web design agencies that do web design without even considering the products and services of their clients. Yes, quite surprising but true. Consider my friend Tom, who owns a pet store across the street from us. He has a website for his pet store that he paid $500 for. He asked me if he could do a redesign because he thinks his website was not a good fit for a pet store. When I saw the website, I immediately thought he was looking at a safari travel agency rather than a pet store site. I did a redesign based on what he wanted and added a few other things the website needed, and voila, I got a satisfied customer. And I only charged him half the price (well, he’s a friend).
Web design encompasses both professional graphic design of web pages and clean coding. As the owner, you need to make sure that the web designer or agency that you hire is aware of the latest developments on the web. Check out their portfolio first to see if they can really make your customers happy.
Your business website needs fast and reliable web hosting.
Web hosting is the service of providing web storage to websites. It’s like storing your website on your computer’s hard drive, the only difference is that a web server’s hard drive is available online. When choosing a web host, you need to consider not only space capacity, but also bandwidth and uptime. A good web host offers a 99.8-99.9% uptime guarantee, performs routine backups of your files, and protects data through antivirus and firewall protections.
Your company website needs a content management system.
As a website owner, you should ask the web designer or developer to allow you to edit the contents of your website should the need arise. Editing can be done through what we call a content management system (CMS). It is not wrong to ask for a CMS, in fact, your web designer or developer should provide you with a CMS even without your request. Unfortunately, many website owners do not apply for CMS and suffer from modification fees. Remember that you are the owner of the company and that you must be able to modify the contents of your website. Remember, it’s YOUR website.
Your business website needs search engine optimization.
search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of fine-tuning a website so that it appears in search engine results. As a website owner, you want high ranking results on search engines. Unfortunately, only websites with a good foundation in SEO can make it to the top. SEO involves two things: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is the actual modification and improvement of website content to emphasize the right keywords. On-page factors include, but are not limited to, wrapping keywords in appropriate tags, setting keywords as alt texts in images, and mapping keywords in URLs (as seen in an example above). Off-page SEO, on the other hand, focuses primarily on link building. The search engine algorithm is designed in such a way that if the content on your website is interesting and worth indexing in search engines, there should be other websites linking to yours on a “do-follow” basis. The higher the reputation of a website, the more search engines index its content and the higher Google sets its PageRank. The inbound links that come from these quality websites are important in link building and off-page SEO.
Website owners must be aware of Black Hat SEO. Black Hat SEO is the process of getting high rankings in search engines in an unethical way. This can be through keyword stuffing, blank text, landing page creation, comment spamming, and other methods that are considered deceptive. These methods may only be effective for a short period of time. Once Google detects that you are using unethical methods, your website may be banned for a long time and you may lose credibility and reputation. After the recent Penguin update, many websites that previously had high rankings got low rankings, and some were even perpetually banned by Google. The wise Penguin just found out that these websites were using black hat SEO. To avoid using Black Hat SEO, don’t be afraid to ask your SEO consultant about their methodologies.
As you can see, your website needs a lot of things, not just design. The next time you hire a web designer, keep this list in mind.