If you’re new to ‘Internet Business’ – that is, having a website that functions to display your services or products, you might be wondering when you should register your domain name and when you should even start the overall process like web hosting and getting a website for your business.
The short answer is yesterday. You are probably already aware of social media and if you are new to internet marketing it can be your first introduction to promoting your website through your friends and acquaintances, but if you want to get serious about marketing your wares, you need to be found by search engines, in Australia this is mostly Google and Bing.
A term you will become very familiar with is Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. SEO is making a website rank in search engines. Your aim is to be on the first page of your market so that users will click on your website. While there are many factors in determining a websites SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page) . Search engines take domain age into account when trying to determine your website’s page rank. Often search engines won’t even crawl your website until it is a few months old, this is due to the nature of the web. Many websites come and go, the longer the domain has been registered, the more likely it is to continue.
Another sound reason to register your domain straight away is to secure the name you want. Often people will register business names without taking into consideration whether their domain is available. This can turn into a costly exercise if the domain is taken by another company or by a domain squatter. (A domain squatter registers domains to resell, generic business names start around $1500USD)
Building a website takes time. There is almost no way to avoid this. It has to become another part of any business model, if not the core part of it.
Let’s say you have a great idea for mince pies. Mince pies are traditionally a Christmas type food, so you decide to register www.christmasmincepies.com It’s a great domain, but the website won’t be finished for at least 3 months. You go about your business and wait for the 3 months to finish to have your website delivered by your developer. You have missed three months of telling the world about your upcoming project. You haven’t been able to mention the progress. The people you have met in the street have searched your keyword domain name and have been taken to www.xmasmincepies.com which has been registered at the same time. But they installed a blog!
A blog can be anything, but it’s most common use is as a journal. The sooner you get your website online, the sooner it will be indexed by search engines. This means search engines will know you exist, they monitor how often you update your website and crawl it, as needed.
With Media Fortress web hosting, you can install a wordpress blog with only a few clicks. Even if you already have a website, you can install a blog by setting up another page like yourdomain.com/blog. It’s a great way of driving traffic to your site through search engines and other methods like social media.
