When starting out with your SEO strategies, the first thing that you should do is ensure that your company website has a user friendly interface. This, in theory, means that your links are visible, easily located and correctly labeled. It is also important that the content that is provided in the website is complete, interesting, effective and grammatically correct.

One very important factor is search engine optimization (SEO). This requires you to employ a number of different strategies to ensure that your company website is heard and seen by the right audience. Common SEO strategies would be keyword listing, site code optimization and top search engine placement.

Your plan should be optimized by understanding web hosting. Regardless of how fantastic your website looks or how effective your SEO (search engine optimization) strategies are, if you do not acquire the right web hosting deal that meets your needs, then none of these would be beneficial because your web hosting plan would prevent them from being uploaded and viewed correctly.

It is extremely important to add web hosting to your plans if you wish your website to have its own niche on the Internet. Therefore, it is imperative that you carefully read what we are about to teach you.

There are two available choices when it comes to web hosting. It is available free of charge, or you can pay for it. Of course it would be great if web hosting were free for all; however, it is important to understand that all of the needs of your company website must be met by the free web hosting plan if you require your future to be rosy.

Listed below are the key issues that need to be addressed.

Would you be prepared to deal with advertisements that may well take up too much of you space? Or deal with those advertisements that may well irritate your readers?

It is very often a case that these advertisements are required by free web hosting plans. This is the only reason why they continue to allow people to enjoy free web hosting.

Would you be content with the low bandwidth access and minimal web space that comes with free web hosting?

If you answer is yes to the questions above, then it is greatly advised that you go to a web consultant and allow them to deal with all of your work.

The internet offers some great deals when it comes to web space and web hosting. However, you do need to search for the best available offers. You should also take into consideration the length of time that a provider has been in business.

In recent days, more and more web host providers have decided to offer free web hosting packages in an attempt to lure more clients to their business. Competition within hosting companies and the decline cost associated to running and maintaining a web host company have all contributed in making hosting services to be more viable and affordable to the common man in the street than it used to be.

It is simple to find free web space on the Internet. All that is necessary is that you undertake a simple Web search such as Google, AltaVista, or Yahoo and the result should bring back options for free web space. Many individuals or businesses search for a place to put their website without paying for the service. Anything from 5MB to 100MB of online web space for the purposes of hosting your web site can be provided by these free services.

There are also gifts such as blogs, copy and paste scripts that are generally Java code scripts, counters, guest books, tracking logs, virtual domain names and more with these free sites. All of these extras are great for those people that have no or little knowledge of how to build a website.

Free services provide benefits that may sound very tempting. However, it is vital that you undertake some research to ensure that the benefits are in actual fact viable. Free services can also bring other unwanted things that need to be dealt with when you sign up for the service. It is general practice that you will be asked to submit to advertising and surveys by completing a form before you are entitled to the free service. Ensure that you carefully read all user agreements that come with the free service.

You can opt for the cheap option but not wish to have advertisements running on your site. You can seek a service that is similar to free hosting, but you would need to pay a small fee to keep your web page ad-free. A service with a monthly fee of $2.95 will be offered by some of these providers with 100MB of web space if that is all that you require, and you can easily upgrade your packages.

Is it better to renew your domain name for a long period of time? If so, how long is long enough? Well let’s face it, most of us wish to stay ahead of the game. Therefore one of the first steps that you’d want to do is to check for how long your competitors have registered their personal or business names.

If you notice that your competitors have registered their domains for one or two years, then you can go that one step ahead and register your domain name for 5 or 10 years. Your search engine ranking may be assisted if you stall the expiration date of your domain name. However, it is important to bear in mind that this may only be a small victory when it comes to search engine rankings.

Registering a domain for a minimum of 10 years is good business sense. Many of us have too many things on our minds or more important things that thinking about our domain names. For this reason, the process of renewing your names every year is a task that you could really do without. It is greatly advised to obtain a domain name that you wish to keep for a sufficient amount of time and renew them on a 5 to 10 year plan.

There is a possibility that if your name expires, someone will immediately register your domain at the first opportunity. It is important to remember that there are domain names ‘watch lists’ that people can view in order to grab an available domain as soon as it becomes available. Therefore, if you do not renew your name, for whatever reason, someone that is watching that list may attempt to capitalize on the online business that you have built up over the years. These people will be aware of the fact that there is potential website traffic simply by renewing your old domain. For this reason it is better to renew your domain name for several years so that it will not be opened up to expired domain name buyers.

To stay ahead of the game, you may wish to consider registering or renewing your choosen name for 100 years. At this present time, the only available option for this is with Network Solutions at www.netsol.com at the cost of $999.00. You can also visit GoDaddy at www.godaddy.com in order to renew or register a domain name for 10 years at a discount price of $6.95 per year. When you do not register your name in time, you can lose critical positioning in the search engines. This may result in you having to begin the SEO process all over again!

To succeed on line, we all need targeted website traffic. Without traffic it is going to be near impossible to earn or make any money from your site. Following is a “must-do” list of 13 tips for site owners who want to attract targeted website traffic and higher search engine rankings.

1.) Create a site with valuable content and useful products or services.

2.) Use your primary and secondary keywords in the first 25 words of your site’s content and try to use them throughout your site.

3.) Research the right keywords to reach your target market and then use them in your content.

4.) Use your keywords in the right places on your page; title, meta tags, headers and of course in the body of your pages.

5.) Keep your site design user-friendly so that your visitors can find what they are looking for on your site.

6.) Submit every page on your site to the major search engines and directories, not just your home page. If you don’t have time to do this, hire someone to do it for you. Make sure this is done manually because you must not use automated submission services.

7.) Keep up with the changes in the algorithms used by search engines and fine tune your web pages accordingly to keep your search engine rankings high. Use available online tools to track the performance of your website.

8.) Keep an eye on your competition to see what they are doing with their site design, content, functionality and use of keywords.

9.) Make use of the log files and reports provided by your web hosting company. You can analyze this data to find out where your visitors are coming from and the links and keywords they used to find you.

10.) Give your visitors something to remember you by, for instance you can offer newsletters, reports, coupons and the like.

11.) Show off your expertise and become known as an expert in your field by writing articles and submitting them to directories as well as posting them on your own site.

12.) If you are selling products on your website, make payment and shipping easy for your customers.

13.) When in doubt, hire a professional. It’s a lot cheaper than having a site which goes unvisited.

In conclusion, don’t think of your website as a static thing; make it a dynamic, ever changing place. Think if it like you would a physical retail outlet and do the same things you would do in a bricks and mortar establishment to attract and retain customers.

We all want to attract targeted website traffic to our sites. It’s a fact that without traffic, your website is as good as dead and there is no way you are going to make any money out of it. Today let us look at nine tips that you can use to attract repeat traffic to your sites.

1. Quite often inactive sites get dropped by some of the search engines so it is important that you update the pages on your site on a regular basis. You even have the option to put a date counter on your site in order to show when the last update took place.

2. Try to supply additional value on your website. Place links to the sites of affiliates and partners and ask them to return the favor. As long as their products are related to your business and are not in competition with what you are offering, there is nothing wrong with advertising their videos or books if you want to.

3. Allow your customers to take advantage of special offers and discounts by placing an opt in link for a monthly newsletter on your site.

4. Add a link taking your potential customers to your primary page with a script, Book Mark or Add this Site to Your Favorites.

5. Add another link inviting your visitors to “Recommend This Site to a Friend”. Your visitor will then be able to send an email to someone they know and it will be headed up with a prewritten title suggesting they thought your site may be of interest to them. Upon receipt of the email the recipient simply clicks on the link to be taken to your website.

6. Use a consistent color scheme, easily identifiable slogans and logos to help the customer know he is on your page and always provide adequate contact us information on as many pages as possible of your website.

7. An “Our Policies” page clearly showing your principles and philosophies for dealing with clients is very important. You should also include your privacy policy so that clients know exactly where they stand when visiting your site.

8. A FAQ (frequently asked questions) page is a must as this will cut down the number of email enquiries you are likely to receive of a general nature and answer many questions visitors may have when looking at your site for the first few times.

8. Each page of your website should contain appropriate titles and keywords to enable the visitor to find their way back to your site at some point in the future if they have lost the book mark.

9. Never ever spam a customer with unsolicited emails who has opted in for newsletters and at any time they decide to opt out of your mailing list, make sure you see to this immediately. There is a good chance they may come back later but if you continue to flood their inbox with your emails you are likely to lose them altogether.