If you have ever wondered why some business web sites rank high in search engines, generate lots of traffic, and earn lots of sales while other sites do not, then this article is for you.
With the permission of Lynn Korff, of http://korfforiginals.com, her highly successful website will be profiled in today’s article. I recommend opening the web site in your browser to refer to as you read on.
If you go to any search engine and run a search for “ceramic piggy banks”, Lynn’s site is always near the top. As her web site promoter and search engine optimization specialist, I’d like to take full credit. However, a well designed site is more than half the battle to internet income success. There are many manuals available that tell the reader how to design a successful web site. Today, I am going to show you how to design a successful web site.
Title Line If you look at Lynn’s title, you will see that the keywords she wants to be found under are included and prominant. While she could actually put the product words first and the company name last, she has done an excellent job of having the search engines understand and rank accordingly a website offering piggy banks, dinnerware, and other ceramic items. You see that the title comes directly from her HTML code and she didn’t capitalize the entire thing or the first letter of each and every word. This is becoming a major no-no with many of the search engines. And psychologically, we read much easier words that look like sentences rather than headlines.
META TAGS The second most important part of your web site design isn’t something that a web surfer even sees. The meta tags tell the search engines what your site is about and therefore which searches it should be returned in. When you view the source code of Lynn Korff’s front page, you see that she has all her bases covered. It isn’t sufficient to include one word to describe handmade versus factory created. Lynn uses handmade, handcrafted, handpainted, and ceramic to ensure that no matter what regional vernacular a searcher might use to describe handmade pottery, they find her site. Additionally, Lynn covers all her bases by using the long form of words. Most search engines will include plural, past tense, and word extensions of a short word in the short word’s search results. But they will not return the short word in the long word’s search results. So if Lynn simply put bank and not banks, Christmas and not xmas, present and not presents, or kids and not kid’s she would not have her site returned in nearly as many search results.
Note the difference in the use of the “description meta tags” and the “keyword meta tags” in Lynn’s source code. When many of the search engines list a description of your web site, they use the description meta tags rather than the description you type in when you submit it to the search engine. If you do not have description meta tags, the search engine uses the keyword meta tags instead. Or even worse, the wrong window of a frames based page. How often have you run a search in a search engine and had results that were described as contact, about us, business, home, etc.? Those types of site descriptions do not bring very many visitors to your page.
OVERALL PAGE APPEARANCE Lynn has created a clean, crisp web site. Viewers aren’t inundated with busy graphics, scrolling icons, or even a messy background. With hand made products especially, we are tempted to be too cute in our web design. Directories, search engines, and site viewers generally frown on this. And frowns don’t make for highly trafficked web sites. The small icons for other sites, voting programs, and other pages on Lynn’s domain are kept neatly on the left-hand side of the page. They do not keep the viewer from seeing the main information and graphics. This is so important.
As with resume design, white or blank space on the page is so important. After all, you don’t have to print 500 copies of your web site. So why do we feel like we have to compile so much information in a single page or even single screen view.
Text is important because it makes up the real content of a web site. And Lynn’s text is wonderful. It tells the site viewer and potential customer what they need to know and does a very good job of utilizing keywords.
KEYWORDS Keywords on your web site are important because they make up a huge portion of the algorithm by which your site is ranked against all your competitor’s sites. Keywords have to be rich and robust. They have to occur with a maximum but not overdone frequency. They have to occur as early in the text as possible. And they have to still make sense to the reader.
Lynn’s text gets right into what she does, how she does it, and where she does it. But notice that “unique ceramics” are the fifth and sixth words in the text. This gives them more weight than if they didn’t appear until the fifth or sixth paragraph. Writing text that is sensible and e-commerce marketable is very tricky. I guarantee you Lynn’s text didn’t appear as it does now in the first writing. And yours shouldn’t either.
From a marketing stand-point, Lynn does a great job of explaining to potential customers where her ceramic pieces come from, why they do not get them in 24 hours of ordering, and why they are worth the wait.
GRAPHICS AND LINKS One of the hardest things for us to do is to put our graphics after our text. But search engines don’t rank sites based on graphics and they often don’t spider an entire page. If the beautiful graphics and links on Lynn’s site appeared at the top of the page she would have a problem. Granted, customers would find them quickly. But the search engines wouldn’t be sending Lynn any customers. So what good would it do?
Notice that each category has both a textual and graphical link to its main page. By doing this, Lynn has ensured that both customers and search engines find all the interior pages on her website. After all, while it is great to have every search engine referred surfer be looking for everything that you market, you also want the person who is looking for something very specific to be sent your way as well. In doing this, Lynn and I have gotten not only her main page well ranked by the search engines, but also product specific pages.
The final thing about graphics and how Lynn has used them on her main page is size. The place for huge, slow loading graphics, is in the shopping area – not the front page. It doesn’t matter how many people the search engines send Lynn’s way, if her page takes ten minutes to load, far too many of those people would never see the wonderful pictures.
DIVIDING UP THE LOOT Whether you sell 3 products or 3000, you need to spread the wealth around your site. Lynn hasn’t tried to incorporate every single product on every single page. By keeping items categorized together, she makes shopping easier for customers. No one wants to spend 4 hours making a single item purchase for Aunt Ruth. Don’t make them search through your site forever to find just the right thing.
EXPLANATIONS Some information is more important than others. Shipping costs. The availability of products, gift wrapping, etc. Lynn covers all the necessities right on her front page. Without taking up too much of the reader’s time. And this helps her land many more sales. How frustrating is it to go to one of the “big players'” shopping sites and have to go through the entire order process to find out that the $2.00 clearance item you want will cost $8.49 to ship? Lynn ensures that her customers know what they are getting and how they are getting it before they spend countless hours in her online catalog.
LINKS AND BANNERS There are numerous schools of thought as to where your outgoing links, banners, awards, etc. should appear on your web site. Unfortunately, if you want incoming links from other sites to have good views, then you have to offer the same for the outgoing links on your site.
Lynn has carefully placed the good ones on the lower half of her front page. And if you notice the links on the left-hand side of the page, there are plenty of other places to find links to her friends’ web sites. She doesn’t clutter up her whole front page with banners that might take visitors away before they make a purchase. But she has displayed banners for resources she finds to be of real value and webrings of which she is a member. In the final analysis of “doing unto others” how fair is it to join a webring or banner exchange and bring other people’s incoming hops to some deeply hidden page of nothing but banners and webring icons?
CONTACT INFORMATION One of the things I love the most about Lynn’s site and her business, aside from the great products, is that she is a real person. Lynn proudly displays her name, address, phone number, and contact details where site visitors can find them. If you want to do business on the internet, you have to offer people more than just an email address on a web site on a free domain server somewhere. Nobody wants to send money to a stranger. Lynn makes herself real and therefore doesn’t come off as a stranger on her website.
FINAL SCREEN SHOT Its easy to give the final screen shot of your webpage the least amount of time and planning. After all, if surfers have started shopping, they won’t even get there, right? Wrong. People still look at what is there.
Most importantly, Lynn gives links AGAIN to the main category pages of her e-store. We can’t have our customers looking in vain for our products, now can we?
Lynn gets in all the necessary copyright information to protect herself and her content. She reminds visitors that her designs are originals and not to be copied.
Finally, Lynn is kind enough to give a link and byline to both her web site maintenance company and her web site promotion company. “Thanks, Lynn”. Aside from being greatly appreciated, she is giving precious incoming links hence link popularity to other online businesses. And again following the golden rule, what goes around comes around. After all, if I’m doing a good job as a web site promoter, wouldn’t you think there would be lots of sites I could have profiled for the anatomy of a successful e-business web site? Further more, Lynn adds to her own professional reputation by showing that she is working with other reputable companies.
And last but not least, Lynn has a last updated date. Why does this matter? Have you ever attempted to place an online order from a perfectly valid looking web site only to find that the company had long since gone out of business? Lynn assures the site viewer that her web site is current so the prices, the products, and the designs should be current. This is really important and far too often overlooked.
So why is Lynn Korff so successful on the internet? Why does she get top search engine rankings? Happy customers? Repeat business? Features in articles like this one?
Korff Ceramic Originals web site is an excellent e-commerce web site supplemented by great products, great customer service, and if I do say so myself, great web site promotion. But these are all just pieces of the proverbial puzzle. Lynn has a crisp, clean, marketable website that is pleasing to BOTH the search engine and the site viewer. Without that, no one would ever know about the rest.
Look at your own business site or planned site in the perspective of this comparison and see what you could do to achieve what Lynn has achieved.
Shannan Hearne is the President and Wizard of http://www.SuccessPromotions.com Marketing Your e-Business Better through creative marketing and knowledge. Guerrilla Marketing. One-to-One Marketing. Relationship Marketing. Your Marketing.
