I. Website Design Tips: Get Ready for Success
There are many things you can do prior to having a website built that can greatly enhance your websites chances of ‘success’. While ‘success’ will be interpreted differently depending upon your sites objectives, it suffices to say that you will likely want to drive a large amount of traffic to your website and somehow convert those users into revenue.
Website Design Tips #1: Defining Your Web Site Design Objectives
Before you have a website built, you must be clear about what the purpose of the website is. Are you looking to simply have a website to discuss your business and what it offers or are you looking to create an e commerce site that sells products? Defining your sites objectives will greatly impact the functionality, url, and content that you will place on the website.
Website Design Preparation Tips #2: Keyword Research
Researching the keywords that you believe will drive business to your website is critical. The more specific you can be, the better. This is what most internet marketers refer to as a ‘niche’. The more of a ‘niche’ you can define, the better (assuming that niche is a large enough market). To establish the size of the market, you will need to research the # of searches that occur for your specific terms per month. If the niche is too small, you can expand, assuming your business can still capitalize on the opportunities those key terms bring.
Research ‘business generating’ keywords for your website. This is critical for two main reasons: 1. Content Generation for the website so it is targeted to your prospective customers, and 2. For search engine optimization purposes. One of the best tools to do this is a tool offered by Google (go figure). You can find it here; Google Keyword Tool. You will want to look at the broad search volume, phrase volume, and exact search volume. Here are the differences.
Broad Search Term Volume: This is the number of people that search for a phrase containing your keywords.
Example:
Term: | Example Results:
How to design a website
Website Design Company to design a website
Schools for web design
Website Design
Web Design
Phrase Search Term Volume: This is the number of people who input a search containing that specific phrase. So, where ‘broad’ will return searches with changes in word order, plurals, synonyms, phrase results will only return the # of searches include your term in specific order.
Example:
Term: | Example Results:
Website Design
Website Design Website Design Oklahoma
Website Design Schools
Exact Search Term Volume: This will show you the # of times people search exactly for your search term. It will not include misspellings, plurals, or order changes.
Example:
Term: | Results:
Website Design Website Design
Once you identify the keywords that are both specific to your business and you believe will draw a good amount of traffic, you will want to begin creating relevant content. Many people make the mistake of trying to make their websites too pretty and neglect the development of high quality authority content which is the primary force in search engine indexing, having other sites like to you, and having information content to help convert your customers from visitors to leads.
Website Design Tips #3: URL Selection
Selecting your URL is critical to the future search engine optimization. While it is possible to overcome having a non relevant domain name, having a URL targeted at your primary keyword will save you a ton of time and money over the long run. I have noticed that a targeted URL has about a 30% impact on your positioning once you are on the first page of Google. For example, if we were to compete two sites with comparable quality content, back links, and domain age, we would find that a url like http://www.PrimaryKeyword.com will always outrank a url like http://www.companyname.com/primarykeyword.
Website Design Tips #4:Website Content Development
The search engines do not care if your site is pretty. They only care that your site uses proper coding and has high quality content. Content is the absolute ruler of search engine optimization. If you create high quality content on a regular basis, you will be able to get indexed in the search engines over time. Do not try to do it all by yourself. Hire a writer. I would suggest you come up with the titles of the articles and then have a professional writer knock out articles that are 500-1000 words in length. You want to make sure the quality is high and that the article is not spammy. The main focus of your content should be to provide free value. You will learn how to capitalize without trying to sell your customers every five sentences on why they should buy your product or service. The length of 500-1000 words is also important. Search engines what information that is relevant enough but not long winded content.
Website Design Tips #5: User Friendly Website Design
Many website designers do not take search engine optimization into account when they are designing a website. Unfortunately, clients do not typically value it or learn about it until they start wondering why there websites are not getting any traffic. Speaking to a website designer ahead of time about search engine optimization will save you a tremendous amount of time and get you off to the right start from the beginning.
Website Design Tips #6: Tracking Setup
Tracking where your visitors are coming from and who is ultimately buying your product or service is critical to long term success. If you can track it, you can justify spending money on it. If you know that for every $100 you spend on a particular search engine advertising network generates you $500 in revenue, you can roll more of your marketing money back into the advertising and grow your business. If you do not track, you will simply be guessing and guessing does not grow successful businesses.
