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Making Your Website WORK For You We are now living in the Internet age. It’s essential for every business to have its own website. But a website that actually gets clients is not a simple as it seems.
A bad website is worse than no website at all. Not only will a bad website waste time and money on things like design and hosting, it will scare possible clients away from your business. To create a website that gets clients it is necessary to know what goes into a professional website.
Your website needs a purpose or goal. That purpose may be an actual sale, getting names on a mailing list, or getting visitors to fill out a form for more information. Once you decide what your website’s purpose is, get your visitors to take action. Every page on your website must call your visitors to action, to place that order, or fill out that form, or sign onto the mailing list. Remember, people are browsing your website because they are interested in having their problem solved.
In addition to your primary website goal (or purpose) your website should make it super easy to contact you. Have you ever struggled to find a phone number of a store, restaurant or service provider on the web? You don’t want to be THAT site! It is essential that every page contain your contact information, making it easy for visitors to contact you. The last thing people want to do is search around for a phone number or email address.
Then it’s time to be honest about your website. How easy is it to navigate through the site? It’s amazing how many sites are out there today that are cluttered and hard to navigate through. Even some big name corporations have unfriendly sites.
When visitors get frustrated with a website, they leave. Make your site welcoming by making it easy to get around. To help you get started, think about sites you have visited that are easy to navigate and sites that you have struggled through. You can also ask friends and associates to click around your site. Take notes and be honest about what you find.
If you are looking into website design, chances are you have heard of SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is all about getting search engines to place your site high in their organic search results. When you search for something through Google, Bing or Yahoo, you type a phrase into the browser and click. Up comes a long list, sometimes pages upon pages long, showing the results of your search. Most searchers don’t go past the first two pages before they either quit or find what they want. The goal is to have your website up at the top of the list.
Search Engine Optimization is a gigantic subject that we can’t possibly cover here. There are books and resources available everywhere. However, we can cover some basics. Every web page has a title bar at the top. The title bar needs to contain the keyword rich title of the page the visitor is on. You also want to make sure your QUALITY content is rich with keywords that your visitors are SEARCHING FOR. Sites that look fancy and have a ton of graphics are not always the best for SEO. Keep your focus on good content. Don’t cram keywords into the content just to be keyword rich. Good quality content will help your search engine rankings.
Before building or redesigning a website, sit down and take the time to figure out WHO the site is for (target market), what you want those visitors to DO on your website and what words those potential clients use to describe their problems.
