The Five Keys to a Highly Successful Website:

1. Comprehensive Website Design and Development:

 

How many times have you gone to a website looking for something, and have a hard time finding it? Or you are surfing websites and find one after another that are just plain dog ugly! Maybe the font is hard to read, or the layout is confusing, or the pages are set up in such a way that you get lost and never do find what it was you were looking for. Maybe there is just too much flashing bling in your face. Problems like these can drive customers away from YOUR website. A website, first and foremost, needs to be user friendly. It’s layout and design needs to be developed in such a way that your customers can come in and easily find what it is they are looking for, click right to it, and be able to easily read the content of each page. They need to be able to navigate your site without feeling lost, by having the site navigation system very user friendly. The site needs to be uniform, consistent, concise and aesthetically pleasing.

 

 

 

 

 

2. Professional Website Content Copywriting:

 

Another common complaint I’ve heard from others involves the content on websites they’ve visited. Sometimes it’s just way too technical. If they were born knowing all this stuff, they could build the thing they want to buy from you themselves! Or maybe it just doesn’t explain the product very well, leaving them with more questions than they had when they came in. Sometimes it is the exact opposite and is just plain boring to read, or the product descriptions are way too long and wordy. Professionally written content should be short and specific, while possessing enough information to educate them on available products and services. It also helps if content is interesting and has a nice flow, making the content more reader friendly and thus maintaining the interest of potential customers.

 

 

 

3. Website Search Engine Optimization:

 

I covered this pretty well in a previous blog entitled SEO, but to re-cap:

 

Once you have a website that is well designed and the content is written correctly (steps 1 and 2 above), you need to be sure that the search engines can find it and rank it towards the top of their results list. Having a great site is useless if no one knows it’s there. And optimizing a website for search engines is a specialty in it’s own right… many website designers are not specifically trained in this field. You need to be sure that the company you are investing in to handle your online business needs know how to optimize your site properly to ensure the best possible results.

 

 

 

4. Website Search Engine Submission, and Website Marketing/Promotion:

 

After your website is fully optimized, it can take time for the search engine crawlers to pick up on your brand new site and "catalog" it’s proper placement in their results databank. So what can be done to speed up this process? Simple! Search engine submission! It’s just what it sounds like… your website is submitted to all the major search engine directories with all the information they need right up front; general product/service info, categories those products or services could fall under, keywords that might be used by customers searching for similar products or services. It saves a heap of time in getting the search engine placement you desire.

 

Another aid in getting your website noticed is through website marketing and promotion. This is how to get your website more likely to be the one chosen out of the pack. There are many methods used for this purpose. Pay-Per-Click advertising is one method of getting your website to the top of the search engines quickly and promoting yourself to the world. YOU determine when and how much you want to spend on this type of marketing. Other tactics include keyword phrasing research and specific content development. Get your business out there and tell the world you are here and ready to serve them!

 

5. Website Analytics to ensure Performance/Effectiveness:

 

Okay, you’ve followed steps one through four above. But how do you know how well these things are working for you? What is the point of having a great website if it isn’t effective? How do you find out what is working and what is not? The answer is to have it professionally analyzed. Web Analytics is the study of the behavior of the traffic that navigates through your website to give you accurate and judicious information regarding the effectiveness of your website. This intelligence will serve as a catalyst to make whatever changes are necessary to increase sales, maximize the results of online marketing, and improve the overall customer satisfaction rate. The traffic will be more target specific and thereby translate into more sales for your company.

 

 

 

Patricia Montes is the co-founder of WorldWide Optimize LLC., a Berkley, Michigan based SEO firm.  Patricia is an industry leader in Business Web Design, Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.

 

This article regarding SEO practices, issues, and solutions, may be reprinted for use as content on any website or in any publication so long as the article is kept in-tact with all included links, all original text, without modification or exception, and the resource at the conclusion of the article must also remain with the article.  The article may not be sold for profit or included with a consumer product without written permission from the author.  Thank you, and enjoy!
Posted on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 at 11:47PM by Registered CommenterSEO-Blog WorldWide Optimize in | CommentsPost a Comment