1. Keep in mind that appearance of the website is important to attract visitors and possible clients. However, it is no good for your website to be designed by the greatest professional out there if no one will see it.  For this reason, it is important to register your site with major search engines. Although eventually the primary search engine bots or spiders should crawl your site and index it, it will be a lot faster if you personally tell Google, Yahoo, and Bing that your site is up and running.

Give it a few weeks  and then check to see that your site has been indexed. I find that the best way to perform this is to download and install the Google toolbar, visit your page, and select the Cached Snaphost of Page option in the PageRank menu. Once you see your page left click on “text only version” to see how the spiders see your site.  The more text you see displayed on the cached text only version the better.

2. Install Google Webmaster tools and Google Analytics. Both of these services give you website feedback and errors.  Furthermore, Google Webmaster tools allows you to submit a sitemap of your website letting Google know where all the pages for yours site may be found.

3. Keep in mind that content that you put in your website can attract visitors to your site. So, keep the content interesting, informative and more importantly, original. Do not copy the content or articles from other sites. This will be unhealthy for the online business industry. And besides, some people may have already read the article and will not be attracted to do business with you.

4. It is important to use the Google keyword tool. This tool is part of Google AdWords (not to worry, no AdWords account is actually needed to use the tool). The keyword tool allows any user to see what other people are searching for in Google and how popular the search is.

5.  If you are choosing a new domain always include the keywords that your site is targeting. This will be easier for visitors to know what your business is all about. Instead of letting others know what your business name is, let them know what you are really offering through the keywords that you use in your site. It is more important to get possible clients than to let others know your business name.  In addition, this is also Search Engine Friendly and should help you rank better for the keywords you are targeting.

BONUS: Here is a bonus tip for local business; use tools like Google Places, Yahoo! Local and Bing Local. These will help you reach a wider range of possible clients by easily getting on the 1^st page of search engine results for local searches. More and more people are turning to the internet to find local business vs. the Yellow Pages.

SEO and other online skills are needed to make a business prosper through the website that you create for your online business. Do not just focus on the products or the services that you are offering. Also do an effort to make your business website as efficient and interesting as possible for you to generate the income that you want from it.

Here’s the Hot Tip!

Do you own domain names that are just sitting and not being hosted? Have you been wondering what to do with them? Maybe you’re currently building out a site for them? Maybe you’re waiting to build them out?  These domains are the perfect opportunity to utilize a blog!

By putting a blog on your domain while you are in the process of building out your site, you will cut down on the time you spend in the ‘Google Sandbox’. Then when your site goes live, you will be ready for ranking.

It is also a good idea to put up a splash page on your main domain, www.domain.com. You can say ‘Coming Soon’ or ‘About Us’ and add a link to your blog. (Don’t forget, be sure to place your blog in a subfolder with a keyword like: /keyword-blog/).

Remember, you must use the blog and post to it regularly. At first, the content does not matter so much as you are really using it to escape the dreaded ‘Sandbox’. This is a great way to use those domains that you have thought about but haven’t decided what to do with yet.

It’s Simple but Effective.

This tip is simple but it can make the difference between launching a successful site that starts to rank in organic searches or one that waits months for FREE traffic.

Where to go now?

In Conclusion, If you have a domain not being hosted it is not benefiting you in any way. Hosting the domain and putting up a blog adds value to the domain and gets it ready for when you want to use it. You can also monetize off this domain immediately. By implementing something like Google Adsense on your blog.  By building traffic, this also makes it much more desirable if you are thinking about selling the domain down the road as you can show revenue and traffic. We will take about buying/selling domains and monetizing your blog in future articles.

So what are you waiting for? Dust of those domains that are just sitting dormant and get them hosted! For the small investment in a shared hosting account will give you big returns in the future. Best of all your shared hosting account probably includes support for multiple domains already.