Setting up a new business - #7 Setting up your website

Broadband

The benefits of broadband are understood - the connection is 'always on', access to the Internet can be 10 times or more faster than the old dial-up connections of 'yesteryear', and you should be able to get a package for around £25 per month - not a great deal more than the old dial-up anytime services, which were unreliable in many cases. If you are running a web business, you simply must have broadband.

• What is Broadband?
• Broadband links and resources

Since our site is aimed primarily at small web-based businesses, chances are you'll be looking to setup a company website (if you don't have one already). Once the administrative company set-up tasks are completely (as detailed previously in this guide), now you can look forward to getting on with your business. Nothing could be more important than getting your website right.

The first steps are to buy a domain name, and hosting for your new company website - related articles are listed below.

• Domain Name Types
• Your first web hosting account

The Bytestart team has worked in the site promotion field for many years now, and as far as we're concerned, nothing could be more important. For a successful web business to make money (and most don't), you need to ensure you get quality, targeted visitors to your website.

Once they're there, you need good information and an easy to navigate site to ensure they keep on coming back, and spread the word.

For many small business site owners, the goal of reaching the Top 10 search results for your favoured keyword phrases usually starts and ends with meta tag optimisation, and reciprocal link building.

Of course, the more competitive your business area is on the web, the harder it will be to conquer the first page of Google.

There are some simple things you can do with this primary area of web marketing - going for keyword phrases rather than single words, providing good "anchor" text for those links back to your site, and also exchanging links with sites in a similar business area to you.

You can read more about web marketing basics here.

However, optimising your web site code is just one part of the battle to gaining (and keeping) visitors. There are a number of onsite and offsite activities we'd highly recommend looking at if you want to increase your website traffic.

• Dedicated Web Marketing & Promotion Guides