Website’s address (URL)
URL is an individual address of your website in the world wide web. This is actually a location of your online business where customers will find you. No doubt, you may want this address to reflect your brand/business name or at least to contain words (keywords) which reflect your activity or theme of your website. However it is advisable to limit your URL to only keywords to make it as short as possible and easy for your website visitors to remember. Presence of keywords in your web address may boost your website’s chances to get ranked higher in the search engines for these keywords.

Some SEO experts even recommend purchasing URL containing misspelled words if these words are commonly misspelled.

It is advisable to thoroughly think over the desired name of the website and make a list of possible name variations. When you are ready, you can proceed to verifying the domain name availability. If the desired domain name is available, try to purchase it as soon as possible before someone else does it. If your first choice domain name is not available, try other options from your list.

Choosing web hosting
Your website is actually a group of files which you have to put on a server to get live on the Internet. That’s why you need a web host to make sure your website is accessible via World Wide Web.

If you are just a beginner and have a small website or a not complicated static website you may choose a shared hosting. But if your business has grown big and popular or you are running an application based website then your choice will most likely be a VPS (VPS stands for “Virtual Private Server”) or a dedicated server.

Whatever host plan or hosting type you may choose you should make sure your hosting provider offers 24-hours support.

Planning
Before proceeding to designing and developing your website it is important to make market and target audience analysis. Take time to visit your competitors’ website, research you niche to determine your prospective customers preferences.

Writing good content
Content is one of the most important parts of a website. Good quality content must fulfill two functions: bringing your message to your customers (describing/advertising your products and persuading to buy them), being search engine friendly and containing enough of your business related keywords to bring targeted traffic to your website from major search engines. Quality content is a great help in surpassing your competitors and if you are not a good writer, you are recommended to hire a professional content writer which is able to combine both communicative and traffic attracting function of content.