How to put a Company on the Internet
Optimize the site
From Meta Tags in the head section to files required on your websites servers optimization means building a site that looks good to a search engine. All the time I have clients ask me to create sites with those flashy animated opening pages and I decline. Its great if you are Coke or Pepsi and everyone knows who you are already, but if you are like the rest of us and need to get the eyes of people who are looking for refreshing drinks, or beverages, that flashy animation isn't going to do anything for you but lower your chances of being #1 in the search engine results. Computers, which are what do all the indexing of just about every search engine on the planet, don't yet know what that animation is, what it is conveying or what company is conveying it. All the search engnines see is a home page that doesn't have the proper content on it according to the guidelines they have been programmed to follow.
Its a Web Presence not a Web Site
If you have one site, under one domain name, and you have all your keywords and pertinent phrases on it and are trying to truly dominate the Search Engine Listings that is like dropping a BB into a Boxcar. To succeed and to dominate, not only over the search engines, but the competition, you must build one good website, then duplicate that site (mirror) under other matching keyword to domain name phrases. We know throughout history that Strength in Numbers means something, and it means something in terms of your companies performance on the web. A key factor in getting listed with a search engine is link popularity, which means how many other website are linking to yours. By simply creating 5 or ten inexpensive mirrors you can submit your site to search engines and already have 4 to nine other sites that link to yours. Once upon a time you could submit your site to thousands of cheesy free for all links pages and trick search engines into believing that hundreds of sites were linking to yours, but now the search engines either disregards those links, or penalize you for being listed.
Keyword (Phrase) Domain name research and matching.
As I have said elsewhere on this site, you might think it clever that your business name is Greatest Company Ever, and if you can get the .com name to go with it even better right? WRONG! What does www.thegreatestcompanyever.com telling consumers about you? Nothing. Each and every company that truly wants to succeed on the web needs a domain name that not only relates exactly to what their company does, but matches the most common, least competitive keywords for their industry. Research must be done to identify what people are typing into search engines in regards to what your company provides, then keywords and phrases are developed. The next step, and one that most people never do, is to match those keywords and phrases to domain names and secure those domain names. For Example, my own site www.timsokol.com, although it tells you who I am really doesn't say a thing about what I do. www.keywordinternetwebdesignbusinessspecialist.com would be much better. I would of course still keep my name, but I would put up a mirrored site at the other name because that is a name that speaks volumes to search engines.
Make it Scalable
Today you may have a site that features your company, its location(s) some bio information and some product pictures and information. Tomorrow you may want to have live ordering capabilities delivery scheduling services, customer polls and forms and who knows what else. A professional begins every web presence with those capabilities in mind so that when that time comes your site is ready and able to meet the demands of your growing business without costing you an arm and a leg to implement.
Make E-Commerce inexpensive and Secure
When it comes to online ordering and other options you want things to be simple and secure for both the customer and yourself. I have fast effective e-commerce solutions that cost little to nothing client side to establish and use with minimum programming or operation fees. In comparison to merchant services I can save you thousands a year, especially in set up and programming fees. Also I ensure all my clients reside on servers that offer secure connections and encryption technologies when called for. Nothing puts a customer at ease more than knowing they are doing business with a company that is verified and that their site is secure.
There is a little more to it of course, but that is the basic plain old how to on how to properly put your company on the web. Again in life you most always get what you pay for so if you can afford to trust your company to the kid down the street that says they can build you a great site for a couple hundred bucks well, good luck with that. If you want to shine like a star and insure you are getting the hundreds or thousands, or hundreds of thousands of visitors you should be getting you need to hire a professional.