by Marcia Ming

It's no secret that you need a professional website for your business to succeed. What many small business owners don't

understand is that it is not enough to just have an attractive website. There are at least 56 million websites on the Internet, according to Ken Evoy, creator of Site Build It and the SiteSell website. With that much competition, how you market your website will determine its success.

Marketing a website starts before you build your first page with the domain name you select, the niche you target, and the keywords around which you focus your pages. Planning is key. Without getting these things right, your website could remain stuck in the category of sites that few people ever see.

Sure, there are many ways to build a website, but . . .

I know some of you are saying you can find any number of options to put up a site for little or no money. You may even believe you can get rich on the Internet, while working only a few hours a week. Take my word for it, 90 percent of the people trying to make a living on the Internet are not making a fortune. If you want your business to work, you will need to take the time and spend the money necessary to succeed.

Don't think you can solve your site marketing problems by hiring a webmaster to build a site. A lot of webmasters can build beautiful sites, that get very little traffic. Some large companies hire Search Engine Optimization Consultants to help their sites rank well with search engines, but these consultants charge hefty prices. So what's a small business to do?

Fortunately, there are a couple of great options for a small investment, if you're willing to do the work. To build a high-traffic website, you need to pursue a variety of tactics carefully and in the right order. There are no shortcuts. You need to understand how people use the Internet, how they find the information they are looking for, and how search engines assist them in that process.

Trying to decide the best option for you, check out our comparison of XSitePro and SiteBuildIt.

Enhanced XSitePro2 is feature-rich software designed for Internet marketers

The revised version of XSitePro makes building ecommerce websites fast and easy. Take a look at this package before you buy anything else.

Paul Smithson and his team at Intellimon in the United King, spent considerable time learning from their product users before creating this upgrade. While it resembles the product it replaced, it is brand new in many respects, and it is an awesome product.

After building several sites with this new version, I won't use anything else. To see why XSitePro2 is so powerful,

Individuals who know quite a bit about internet marketing, but little about building websites, may want to consider XSitePro, a software package created specifically for internet marketing. For a one-time fee of $297, XSitePro includes great features that makes building an e-commerce site a breeze. (For a short time, you can get it for $100 less, so hurry if you are interested). You don't need to know HTML. But it's just software. You will need to find your own web host, monitor your own stats, and handle all of the marketing chores.

XSitePro has several tools to help  you optimize your website for search engines, but you'll need to do your own keyword research. This revised version adds comprehensive page analysis tools that include readability and accessibility ratings as well as SEO.

Site Build It is a Complete All-In-One Package That Guarantees Success!

SBI, as Site Build It owners call it, is the ideal option for the small business owner that needs a website and knows little about building a site or marketing it. For $299 a year, you get web hosting and everything you need to build a high-traffic site.

To understand SBI, you really need to visit the site, watch the videos and meet some of the people who have built successful SBI sites. You can access the SBI video tour here.

Unlike XSitePro which is just software, Site Build It is also a web host. Unlike other web hosts, Site Build It is the only all-in-one site-building, site hosting, and site-marketing product that makes it easy for anyone to build a professional, popular and profitable business.

SBI is not just for newbies, sophisticated Webmasters can increase their productivity and save time by using SBI with their favorite tools (Dreamweaver, FrontPage, GoLive, CSS, JS, Flash, you name it.

I've worked with six other web hosts and each was different. It's a little like comparing apples and oranges. Anyone picking their own web hosts needs to shop carefully, with an eye to understanding who the web host's typical customers are. My current web host, Host Gator, does a good job, but isn't as user friendly as others, for anyone lacking technical skills. A plus for Host Gator is that it lets you host multiple domains for one fee.

The point I am making with this discussion is that there are positives and negatives to almost any choice of software and web hosts. You have to do your homework to find out which one is going to work best for you. For a small business website to win the search optimization game, it needs many pages of high-quality, content. Which is why most small business owners should take a look at XSitePro and Site Build It. Both of these options give you a lot of help and do a lot of the technical stuff, freeing you to focus on your content.

You may also want to see my XSitePro2 Review.