At the core of any Internet presence is a website

Your website is key. It is the core of your Internet presence. Everything else; email marketing, social media marketing, local listing SEO and organic SEO is about bringing traffic to your website.

And this is where people go cheap. I cringe at some of the do-it-yourself websites. It may look good, and often it doesn’t; but people don’t realize what goes on under the hood.

WordPress is not that complicated. It is usually the best solution for local businesses. Google and other search engines generally like WordPress.

There are other good platforms. I worked on a GoDaddy website builder and was impressed. E Commerce sites like Magento and Shopify are good. But for most occasions, WordPress is the way to go.

A few things to keep in mind.

Better to register a domain yourself, that way you own it. I’ve been asked to work on several websites where the owner didn’t know where it was registered or hosted. Then they weren’t the owner and couldn’t access their own website!

Protect your website from hackers. Keep the plug ins and themes updated.

Use the Google Search Console to check on the health of your site. For instance, one of my sites received thousands of hits from Japan. Not good – I was hacked!  Look for things that are out of the ordinary.