For your Business website to perform well and bring you the prospects, customers and sales you want, it needs to be useful, (serve a purpose), usable, (easy to use), and engaging, (enjoyable to use). To accomplish this, the most important things to focus on are: attractive and functional navigation, layout and design, search engine optimisation, good copy aimed at your target audience, and reliable hosting.

The main reasons that websites do not perform well are because they have confusing or busy navigation and page layouts; are not optimised for search engines or have poor content that does not engage with the visitor. This is often because the site owner does not have a ‘plan' for the website.

It is vital to establish and understand what the main purpose of the website is, what are your goals and objectives – is it to sell products, market your services, enhance your brand or to provide information/customer services. Without this understanding, it is unlikely the website will receive the focus to be as effective as it should be. The following are quick tips to help improve your website:

1. Domain Name: Ensure your domain name is relevant, easy to remember and not too long. If you can introduce any important keywords, (such as the name of your service/products), so much the better. For example www.smiths-cycles.com is better than www.smith-and-sons.com.
2. Think Search Engine Optimisation: Research keywords and phrases that are relevant to your company, products and services, and include the most important ones liberally in the text of your website and ensure that they appear in your web page title, description and keywords.
3. Think about your visitors: Ensure the site is usable and will allow visitors to accomplish their goals easily. Ask yourself, what do they want from your site and what do they want to accomplish? Then make it easy for them to find what they came on your site to do. Make sure the layout is clean and consistent and that important content and features are in prominent places on the pages - have the most important content above the fold, (the fold is everything you can see above the bottom of your screen.). Pay particular attention to the navigation and ensure it is easy and logical – where necessary group related items together so you have primary menu categories with secondary sub-menu items. Ensure that your contact details appear on every page and if you have a large site, add a search box, (you can use Google's Custom Search Engine which is simple and free to implement).
4. Think about each page: Each page should have a specific purpose and the content should include keywords to promote its purpose. Equally, the page title and description should be unique. Try to include "call to action" features to prevent users leaving your site, for example "Call Now on…", "Click here to receive your free catalogue" etc.
5. Deliver valuable content and keep it fresh: Updating your website regularly will keep turn visitors into repeat visitors, and possibly become evangelists spreading the word about your site. Keep your content fresh and up to date. Adding a blog to the site will help encourage visitors to return and search engines really like blog content. Try to add features such as opinion polls, events calendars, competitions, reviews etc that increase engagement and add value.
6. Don't overload your website with too much copy. Less is more as they say. Try to avoid large amounts of text on your website which will lead to a poor customer experience. If you have a lot of information to convey, break it up into small amounts, which is easy to read or provide abstracts or summaries with downloadable pdf files for the full information.
7. Socialise: if your company engages in social media or networking such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube or blogging, then integrate these channels with your website. For example it is a simple process to include news items from your blog or Twitter posts on your home page. Equally, make it easy for visitors to promote your company, products and services, by including features for them to forward a page or link to a friend/colleague or to share it on their social networks.
8. Add Visitor Tracking: To measure whether your website is being effective and working for you, it is important that you track who visits your website, where they come from and what they do once they arrive. You can do this by adding Google Analytics which is free and very comprehensive. It will allow you to run reports to see how many people visited the site, how long each person stayed on the site and how many pages they viewed, their geographic location, which search keywords they used to find you and many other variables.




9. Marketing and your website: This is a separate article altogether; however, your website should be part of your overall marketing mix so that you have an integrated marketing strategy. For example if you are running a promotion or sale throughout your shop, include it on your website. You should also use your website for capturing prospect/client data to build your marketing lists to enable you to take follow up actions. For example, if people sign up to a newsletter, or submit their details to download a brochure, not only do you send the newsletter or brochure, but you then have contact details that you can follow up at a later date, (but ensure that you have a privacy policy that explains what you do with contact information provided on your website).
10. Market your website: Not quite the same as above, but your website needs promoting so that people will find it, use it and recommend it. This includes many online and offline activities such as:
    • Include your web address on all your communications, letterheads, business cards, leaflets, compliment slips etc.
    • Manually submit your website to the main search engines, certainly Google, Bing and Yahoo, be sure to include an xml sitemap and use robots.txt files.
    • Write and publish articles to blogs, blog directories, article directories, social network sites etc. but ensure that you have your website address in your signature details.
    • Take part in social networks, relevant forums or blogs by sharing your expertise or being involved in debates, again remembering to have your website address in your signature.
    • Add Google Maps to your website, this is free and easy to do. This will often get you on the first page of a Google search results page, even if your site does not rank on the first page.
    • Consider Pay Per Click advertising such as Google Adwords. However, seek professional advice, because this can be costly for some sectors.
    • Publish online press releases. There are many free press release agencies who welcome your press releases for the launch of your new site, new products/services, awards or anything that is newsworthy. Usually you will find yourself on the first page of search results through this channel.
    • Use social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. to set up profiles and pages.

In summary, this list of tips and pointers on improving websites are intended to be a helpful D-I-Y guide for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Many of the tips above can be implemented without a great deal of technical knowledge and without employing a web design company.

Heart New Media provides a full range of Web Design and Marketing services to help our clients get the right message across to the right audience at the right time.

Our services include Web design and development; online shops/ecommerce sites; blog development; micro-sites and email templates; content management systems; website optimisation; search engine optimisation and search marketing; email marketing; affiliate marketing; social media marketing and website hosting.

For more information please visit http://www.heartnewmedia.com.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/small-business-articles/top-10-laymans-tips-to-improve-your-website-2995542.html

Jim Webster, Managing Director, Heart New Media

http://www.heartnewmedia.com | This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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