Business on the Internet today is worth billions of dollars a year. eBusiness has become so important that people are falling over themselves to build successful websites.
You can have the best looking website, but if it does not convey exactly what you are offering within a few seconds, realize that you are losing potential customers.
I am not going to mention names, but I have seen corporate websites where thousands of dollars have obviously been spent in development, but the website is totally unusable. This leaves potential customers totally frustrated, and in the end they go to someone else’s website instead.
Let’s begin with the basics for building a successful website:
1: Your website should look professional. It should not look as though you have spent 5 minutes developing it. By looking professional, it shows you are serious about your business. One of the ways to make your site look professional is to have a cool logo. If you cannot do this yourself, get a logo company from the Internet to do it for you. It should cost you no more than around $25.
2: Include META* tags within your HTML code. META tags allow search engines to find your pages when users enter words in their search engine. Ensure you read up on META tags and use them for each page of your website. Because there are so many websites today, it is becoming harder and harder to become highly ranked in search engines. Nevertheless, it is crucial that you make use of META tags. Maybe you will not get into the top 10 straight away, but you never know. 3: The main page of your website should load with 10 seconds of someone visiting it. Longer delays mean that you are losing potential customers. You can increase the speed of your website by decreasing the number of images. If you have to use images in your website, ensure that you include the “height” and “width” attributes for the image in the HTML, as this will ensure the page loads faster. Else, the browser receives the image and then has to work out what size the image is.
4: Your main page should be direct and immediately tell the user what you are selling. If the user cannot see what you are selling, I promise they will not hang around to find out. They are coming to your site to find something; if it is hidden on another page, users will not waste their time looking for it.
5: Banner exchanges are a good source of income for your website, but be careful about the number of banners and links you use. Ask yourself this question – do you want the user to go to another website, or your own? I usually don’t get involved with banner exchanges. I believe banners distract the user from the website. If you are going to get involved with banner exchanges ensure that you limit this to a couple per page.
6: Include a contact page with an email address where users can reach you. This is essential. If potential customers visit your site, have questions, and can’t find your contact information, they may go on to a website that can fulfill their requests.
7: Keep your website consistent and use a basic colour scheme. In terms of keeping your website consistent, make the basic structure of all the pages on the website look the same. The last thing you want is to make the user confused. Avoid using highlighter bright colours. Use simple colours and ensure they are not too bright. Also, ensure that your text is readable. You would not believe the times I have seen websites with an image in the background and white text on the top of the image, of which only 50% is readable!
8: Spelling and grammar is important in your website. Before uploading your website to your web host, run each page through a spell checker. Correct spelling on your website indicates you are offering a professional service.
9: Navigating your website should be easy. Keep links to pages on your website at the top, bottom, or left hand side of the page. As stated before, be consistent, so keep all links in the same location for each page. You do not want to make the user search around for pages they want to find, but cannot due to the location of your links.
10: Keep updating your website to get visitors to come back. Add new pages regularly and submit these pages to search engines. This will give you a higher ranking for your website, and will also give you more visitors to your website. Ensure you use META tags that match your content.
11: Include a bookmark link on your website. It never fails to surprise me how many websites do not have a bookmark link. It is simple code that does not take long to include. It allows users to mark your page so they do not forget it. Remember, you want the user to come back to your website, the very least you can do is help them remember where it is.
12: It is important that you change your website regularly so it is picked up by each search engine spider you have submitted your website to. My content remains the same, but I change the page every day. How do I do this? I simply include some JavaScript code on my website which changes every day. You can get this code from my website and use it for yourself.
13: Include ALT tags for your images. Many corporate websites do not include ALT attributes for the IMG tag. By including ALT attributes, you benefit your website in two ways. Firstly, you are giving your website a higher ranking. How? Well, simple – in the ALT tag you describe the image with keywords. These keywords are used by search engines to rank your website. The more times the search engine finds your keywords in your page, the higher it will rank it. Secondly, the ALT attribute also lets you supply some text that can be displayed to the user if an image from your website is not found. This is good because at least the user can still see what the image represents.
I hope you have found these tips useful, and I can honestly say that I have supplied these tips to many corporate companies.
Keep your website fast, simple and professional, and I promise you will have a successful website.
Good Luck!
Sukhvinder Bahra is a sucessful writer and owner of http://www.booksyoucansell.com/. Includes a FREE Ebook for download worth $45 on Starting Your Own Website.
