You may also need a website. A webshop may not be enough on its own to attract customers. However, what use is a website, or a webshop, if no-one can find it?! Many mail order businesses spend thousands of pounds on a beautiful-looking website and shopping cart, but they get no orders because no one can find it on a search engine via any commonly used and relevant search phrases! It is vital therefore, that your website is "optimised" for search engines. Ideally, it is best that this is done during the actual process of building your website, because it can be extremely difficult to optimise a site for search engines at a later date, if it has not been built with this in mind. Moreover, the field of search engine optimisation is full of unethical companies using 'fraudulent' tricks to get your site ranked by the search engines - your site could even be blacklisted by some search engines when a competitor finds out and reports you to the search engines for abuse! If in any doubt please do consult us for expert advice on this first. It can be one of the areas where the costliest mistakes can be made. We will be looking at this issue in considerable depth later on in the section on marketing and promoting your website.