Website Marketing: What You Should Know Before Getting Started (Part 1)

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Marketing Online Is Affordable

Ten years ago, it cost thousands of dollars per year to host a website. Now, hosting a website costs just a few dollars per month. Today, businesses of any size can benefit from the growing spectrum of opportunities online.

Before going further, we need to define terms. First, website marketing deals with webpages and websites, email, search engines and the Internet as the foundation of the World Wide Web. Businesses can sell services and goods via website marketing by using these methods.

Simple Website Marketing Definitions

According to Wikipedia, here are the definitions of phrases that you need to know about when studying website marketing:

World Wide Web: A system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser, one can view webpages that contain text, images, videos, and multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks.

Web Server: A computer program that's responsible for accepting HTTP requests from clients (user agents such as Web browsers), and serving them HTTP responses along with optional data, which usually are webpages such as HTML documents and linked objects (images, etc.).

Each Web server has its unique global address to find it over the Internet. This address is called an "IP address and its role is like this: "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how to get there." For example, 63.146.123.0 is the address of the server where google.com is situated.

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A server can host one or numerous websites which "are a collection of related webpages, images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed with a common domain name or IP address." In fact, it's very common for hosting companies to have dozens or even hundreds of websites on a server. This is one reason that the prices in Web hosting have fallen.

A domain name is translated into the IP address by the "global DNS" or "domain name system". The Domain Name System (DNS) is a naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participants. Most importantly, it translates domain names meaningful to humans into the numerical identifiers associated with networking equipment for the purpose of locating and addressing these devices worldwide.

It's Not As Complicated As It Sounds

In case that all sounds like a lot of "Blah, blah, blah," when it comes to website marketing, think of domain names and IP addresses this way...

The IP address is like the street address of a business and the domain name would be the nameplate. The business can own the entire street address and have their name on the whole building (their domain name being the only name on the server). In this case, if you were to send mail to this business, the mailman (in this case your Web browser) would simply go to the business address. Or the business can share the address with several other businesses like in an office building (their domain name being hosted with several other websites.) In this case, the mailman (your browser) would simply go to the building and then check the building's directory for the business.

Either way, it's easy for the mail to get where it's going and visitors never realize that several businesses are hosted on the server. We mention this because many businesses think they need a "dedicated server" when they would be better off on a shared server. Using the office building example, most businesses save money by renting offices rather than the entire building. Continued...

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