Search Engine Over Friends and Family

These days it is more important than ever to market your business online. A recent survey showed that an amazing 80% of shoppers now choose to visit a store's website before heading to the actual store, and 58% of people claim to do all their product research online before buying instead of consulting with friends and family. Combining this information with the fact that increased fuel prices and other costs are convincing more and more people to stay at home and shop, and you can easily see that online marketing and a strong website is vital for your company's success.

Website Content
One of the key aspects of online success in e-commerce is to ensure the customers value your website. Having incomplete product descriptions or none at all will result in customers quickly going elsewhere to find out more information about the product they are considering. You should also consider paying for some form of search engine optimisation (SEO) which customises your website and content to gain a better rank in the search engines.

A large part of SEO involves getting other sites to link with yours so submitting your site to web directories will be another important part of this area of your online marketing strategy. Some search engines will penalise you for things like having too heavy keyword saturation or other more subtle "cheats", so it really pays to hire a professional to handle your search engine optimisation needs.

Search Engine Marketing
One of the very best ways to raise awareness of your company and increase traffic to your website is with a structured search engine marketing (SEM) campaign. One of the simplest forms of SEM involves paying a search engine to put your website in a prominent position on the search results page, often as a "featured" link, this is known as paid placement.

Another great service offered by the search engines is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. As the name implies, this means that the search engine distributes your advert across its network of websites and you pay for the referrals this generates. With PPC, everyone's a winner; you get large coverage with your advert and only pay for the increased traffic (the clicks to your site) and the person who ends up with your advert on their website earns a cut of what you pay.

While pay-per-click schemes can seem a little expensive, there are some keywords that can still get you traffic but might be cheaper, so it pays to invest a little time researching search terms. You can also consider some of the smaller search engines that will have lower priced keywords. Whichever you choose, the costs of marketing when offset against your increased traffic (and hence revenue) will make it worthwhile.

Disadvantage of Free Domain Name

Everyone likes a bargain. It's even wise to keep one's costs down. On the other hand, you can be so cheap that you cut your own throat.
Here are two ways to register a domain name for free and some reasons why you might not want to.

• You Must Have Your Own Top Level Domain (TLD) Name
  Your business website should definitely have its own top level domain (TLD) name. This means a name like yourcompany.com. It doesn't mean a subdomain of someone else's domain name, such as yourcompany.someisp.net. Sometimes persons hesitate to register a proper domain name because of cost, lack of knowledge, or indecision. However, paying the nominal fee charged by the domain registrar for your own domain name can reap rich dividends. A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or Internet address like (ignoring the http part) someisp.net/hosting-accounts/yourco/, or yourcompany.someisp.net, just doesn't look as professional as yourcompany.com. It might be free (as in included with your web space) but it just doesn't cut it. Consider: If you put your URL on your letterheads, business cards, signs, et cetera, which Internet address looks more professional?
  If you mention your URL on your radio advertising or to a customer over the phone, which one will be easier to remember? As well, what if your web host goes out of business or you decide that you want to change to another provider. Now, you need to notify everyone that you have now changed to yourcompany.someotherisp.net. You will also need to change all your stationery, signs, and advertising to reflect the change. On the other hand, the domain name yourcompany.com, could be transferred from one web host to another simply by informing your domain name registrar of the change. So, to avoid losing business and incurring unnecessary additional costs, be sure you have your own top level domain name.
• Should You Get a Free Top Level Domain?
  It is possible to get a free top level domain from Dot TK (@www.dot.tk). (You may also get paid dot tk (.tk) domains from them.) However, there can be disadvantages to using a free top level domain name. Here are some of the restrictions noted on the Dot TK website. You may register no more than three free domain names. The ownership of the free domain remains with Dot TK. This means that you can't sell it. (Of course, if you pay for the domain you do own it and can transfer it to a new owner.)  Also, if you don't have 25 visitors come to your home page within a ninety day period, your free domain name registration is cancelled. You need to have existing web content somewhere so that your dot tk name can be forwarded to it.

 

There may well be other disadvantages.

Apparently, Dot TK uses frames to show your website. This being the case, you may have issues with navigation (bookmarking or finding specific pages) and search engine friendliness.
Therefore, for serious business use, consider carefully the true cost of free domain names