Top 7 Tips for an Effective Website aka Your Website is Not an Island
http://www.socialbiznow.com/2010/08/top-7-tips-for-an-effective-website
Even if you have a strong social network and are Tweeting, Facebooking and channeling all your online social personas, your website is still your online ‘destination’ for your business.
It can be anything from a simple blog to a full-featured website with a shopping cart and sophisticated backend database, but whatever it is, it still needs to reflect you, your company, your business and your goals.
Think of your website as the central hub for your social channel network – the ultimate desitination where people can find out who you are and what you’re about.
How effective is your website today? You need to consider your brand, search engine ranking, visitors, page views, customer conversion, navigation, user experience, content…
So here are my
Top 7 Tips for an Effective Website:
- Establish a Strong Brand - your brand is more than just a logo. Think of the experience someone has when they visit your website – and how you make them feel. Your brand should be easy to identify and reflect who you are, as well as what you represent, very clearly.
- Provide Valuable Content – as much as you need to tell people where your office is located, people care a lot more about what you can tell them that is informative, meaningful or solves a problem. Consistently providing information of value over time is the best way to grow an audience and keep people coming back to your website.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – I know, SEO and those pesky keywords and metatags just seem to be everywhere – but there’s a reason. If you want to be found by people who use search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, you must consider the titles, descriptions, content, visible and hidden keywords, tags and links you put on your website – these are the keys to unlocking your website ranking – how high up your website appears in search engine results.
- Write a Blog – Yes, your English teacher was right, writing is still an essential skill. Blogging is writing about what you know, what you care about and what you want people to know – and it should be an integral component of your online marketing strategy. If you plan on having people return to your website more than once, give people a reason to come back – make your blog interesting and conversational, and encourage comments and conversations.
- Link to other Sites – your website should not be an island – it needs to be connected, to other websites, to your social network accounts, to other information. Search engines look much more favorably on websites that have inbound and outbound links. So link to other sites, articles and blogs and if it’s appropriate, ask (politely) if others will kindly link to you. And by the way, this includes your social networks – remember to add your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. accounts to your website, so people can like/follow/subscribe to your social network channels.
- Ask for Information – visitors will come to your website – and then they’ll go. If you’re measuring your website statistics, that’s great – and you may know how many visitors or page views you have. But unless you ask your visitors to fill out a form or comment on a blog or subscribe to a newsletter, statistics alone aren’t going to tell you who they really are, and you’re not converting your visitors into customers.
- And – Simplify! – make your visitor’s experience with your website pleasant by making it easy – easy on the eyes, easy to find information, easy to navigate, easy to engage, easy to share, easy to read, easy to contact you – you get the picture.
gear icon on any search results page. When you opt out, we'll save that preference on a cookie, so you'll stayed opted out until the cookie is cleared. Note that the preference will only apply to that particular computer and Internet browser, and it is not tied to your Google Account.