Starting an online business takes a great deal of planning, and to get a high return on your investment requires a well researched strategy from the get go. You can usually hire somebody to set up your site at a reasonably low price, but most tasks are fairly easy to implement on your own and can require little time and cost on your part.
Standard Website Optimizations
When designing your website you want to have a friendly user interface and site architecture. This includes such things as:
– Links being:
- Visible to your users
- Easily located
- Properly labeled
– Content is:
- Complete and valuable
- Interesting
- Grammatically correct
You also need to employ a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to get the best return on your investment. Some common SEO strategies involve the use of relevant keywords, meta data, on-page and off-page link building. By implementing a solid, well researched SEO strategy you will get your website seen and heard about by the right people.
Web Hosting is Optimization? I Never Thought of That
Site architecture and search engine optimization strategies are a big part of creating a successful website and online business. However, one aspect of website optimization that often gets overlooked is web hosting. You can further enhance your site optimization by understanding web hosting.
There Are No Free Lunches for Professional Websites
If you don’t have a good web hosting plan for your site, then all of your efforts in site architecture and search engine optimization strategies are at risk of being for nothing. If your web hosting service keeps your site from being viewed properly then it doesn’t matter how good your optimization is. If you want to secure your internet niche it is best to find a reliable web hosting plan for your website and online business.
You may also be surprised to find out colocation pricing is very affordable for most businesses
Like most things, you get what you pay for. How much money are you willing to dish out to get a good hosting service? You can always go with a free hosting plan for a website but it is not recommended for a professional website of any kind. With free plans you will potentially have to deal with irritable advertisements placed on your site. They are sometimes required by free hosting services since these are the only way they can make money. Your readers will probably not appreciate these types of advertisements if they are reading your site.
It’s best to stay away from the free web hosting for a professional looking website. These free plans will also not provide the same high levels of bandwidth and web space as the premium paid plans do. If you’re not comfortable with these things then it’s best to look for a paid web hosting service that can provide you with everything you need and reliable service.
Premium Hosting Won’t Break Your Bank
Finding a high quality and reliable web hosting service is not very difficult of a task anyway. On top of that you usually won’t need to pay more than ten dollars a month for a solid hosting plan. Look for a plan that will provide you with ample bandwidth, web space, email accounts, and MySQL databases. Also see what kind of control panel they include such as cPanel.
So remember that to have a successful website and online business it’s important to have a well designed website layout and SEO strategies, but you also had better not discount the power that your web hosting plays into the equation. Save yourself from pulling your hair out when your site goes down by finding the right web host for your site. Spend a little bit of money to keep your site running smoothly and it will pay off in the end.
Alex Schmidt is an internet marketing contractor who enjoys writing about internet marketing, web hosting, entrepreneurship, and new technologies. For more articles on these topics you can visit Alex’s wacky internet marketing blog.