1. Domain Name:
Your website’s domain name (.com name), should be short, easy to remember, and easy to spell.
It must be either your business name or directly related to your business name. I would also recommend purchasing additional domain names, with your name, veriations of your business name, or product name. Link these to your website. Look at buying abandoned domain names that relate to your product or business not only do you get a name that relates but you get the traffic that business created. This can be really a good move for people just starting a new business. Think of it like this: Lets say your website gets 20,000 hits per day, or $1000 in sales per day. If you started a second website which is a “mirror” of your main site. And have that site contain original content, and *appear* to be an independent website to all of your visitors. Then within the site you can place links to your main site. Now if this second website were to generate only half that, you would be getting an additional 10,000 hits, and $500 in sales per day! That’s an extra $15,000 per month in sales.
2. Simple / Text Navigation:
Keep it simple load times are important. If people have to wait too long they just leave Use simple text links. If you can skip the backgrounds. Just put a powerful sales letter and text links to the other parts of your site.
3. Meta Tags:
The Implementation of meta tags into your website. Meta tags tell search engines what your website is all about. There are two very important meta tags to use. First is the ‘description’ tag, this will be a brief description of your website. Second, the ‘keywords’ tag lists various keywords which are related to your business. Meta Tags are very crucial to the success of your website. If you create them just right, you can get dozens and dozens of extra hits. Meta tags can make or break your success. Use a keyword search to find descriptive words for your site. Take a look at the meta tags on the top listings in your field on the top search engines. You can look at these by just going to the source file.
4. Looks/Speed
If you have to choose between flash, fancy, pretty website and a fast loading one the fast loading one should win every time. Keep your website simple and professional.
5. Start with a Plan:
With a plan you can be flexible but you won’t get all of track.
Ask yourself what you want to accomplish with the website.
What are you going to sell how do you want to present it.
6. Don’t get too thrify spend the money in the beginning.
Hire the experts. You will be glad you did. Remember your budget but to have a website that is automated and will save you hours of work and looks really professional hire an expert. If you have a solid plan you will be able to tell the expert what you want. Write a contract as you would whenever you buy anything it will save a lot of misunderstandings later on. Have your web designer put in writing exactly what he/she will do for how much money.
8. Auto Responder and live help:
After a user has placed an order, request, or sent you an email. You should set up an auto-responder to let the visitor know that you received their information. In this email repeat everything the user has submitted (minus credit card info). This will help communication between you, and your customers. Put live help on your site, talk to your customers. Put a real name, address and phone number on your site where people can reach you. You will get more orders.
9. Search Engines:
Submit your site to the top ten search engines. If you have done a really good job on your meta tags then that is all you need. You will see lots of ads for 5000 search engines. If you can get toward the top of Google and Yahoo you don’t need 5000 search engines more is not better in this case.
10. Keep it Simple
The simpler you keep your site, keep simple colors, simple or no backgrounds, simple text links, a site map. Then you will be able to have the expert you want to hire and it will not cost as much. You can put more into cgi and software that will help you automate your site and save you hours of work. Powerful sales letters, clearly identifying who you are, customer support like live help will sell your site faster than a pretty site.
Judi Singleton is the webmistress of Jassmine.com, Goto http://www.gotojassminesitenow.com,
and http://www.byjassmine.com. She publishes six ezines get some targeted advertising
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