Tips for Great Website Design

Great website design begins with a clear understanding of how you are going to use your website - is it going to be informational only or are you going to sell products?

If your website is going to be informational only, make sure you have the following in place:

1. Professional Website Design

The website needs to be clean, easy to navigate and visually appealing

2. Relevant Original Content

Ensure your website has as much information about your products/services as possible.  When people are searching online, they want the details right there and then.  They don't want to have to wait until they can email you or speak to you on the phone

3. Website Credibility

If you can prove your credibility, it will be a lot easier for you to convert visitors into paying customers.  This can be achieved by including testimonials, before and after shots, media articles published about your business, details of awards you have won and trade associations you belong to.

4. Search Engine Friendliness

Make sure your website contains as many relevant keywords as possible.  Include them in the title of your page, in the headings, within the content and also in your images' alt tags

5. Call to Action

Ensure you tell your customers what you want them to do when they arrive on your website.  If you want them to download a report, tell them where.  If you want them to phone you, ensure you provide your phone number

If you are planning to have an e-commerce website and sell products / services online, you need to have all of the above, but also:

6. Secure Payment Gateway

People often get nervous when it comes to leaving their credit card details online, so ensure you use a reputable service, such as Paypal for processing payments.

7. Privacy & Returns Policy

Let people know you will not sell or rent their personal details and clearly outline your returns policy.

8. Guarantee

Take the risk out of doing business with you by providing a money back guarantee.  The longer the guarantee, the better.

Remember having great website design is not just about having a good looking website, it is also about what you include on the site.

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Ivana Katz of Websites 4 Small Business makes it easy for you to get your business online.  If you're looking for a professional and affordable website designer, who can also assist you with search engine optimisation, visit Websites 4 Small Business and download your copy of a free website plan.

Search Engine Optimisation - Getting Back to Basics

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a mystery for most website owners and although thousands of articles and posts have been written on the subject, there is  often conflicting information about what is an effective SEO strategy.

In an easy to understand video “How Search Works” Matt Cutts, Google Quality Engineer explains how Google indexes pages and then delivers results when someone does a search. The main point Matt makes is that Google asks over 200 questions of each page and then delivers pages that are most relevant.

When deciding which pages to show for each search term, some of the questions Google
asks include:

Do the search words words appear in the title?
Do they appear in the URL (website address)?
Does the page include synonyms for those keywords?
Is the page on a quality website or a spammy website?
What is the page’s “Page Rank”?
How many pages link to this page?

Then Google combines all the answers, gives each page a score and delivers the results, which it feels is the most appropriate to what the visitor is searching for.

Although the exact formula for delivering search results is not known, there are basic things that you should do if you wish to rank high for certain keywords.

1. Include keywords in the Title of your pages, in the headings of your pages, in the page description and in meta keywords as well as in alt tags of your images.

2. Provide quality, original content in the website

3. Update your website regularly with fresh information

4. Get as many links as possible from relevant websites back to yours

Search Engine Optimisation is not a one off exercise … you need to keep working at it. Whilst many people try to trick the search engines, it is never a good idea, as they ultimately end up being dropped from the search engines and even banned.

Your first priority should be to find keywords which have a reasonable amount of searches each month, but for which not a lot of other websites have been optimised. There are two main tools you can use for this – Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool or Wordtracker. Each works slightly differently, but both will give you an idea on the right keywords to use.

It’s never a good idea to optimise your website for generic keywords, such as “travel” or “cars” for example. You want to optimise your website for keywords that people are searching for, when they are ready to buy, not for keywords that they are searching for when they are doing research.

Ultimately, Google and other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo want to display content that is as relevant to their visitors as possible, so the more relevant content you have on your website, the better.

Remember, when one of your potential customers searches for a product/service you offer, only two outcomes are possible.

1. They find your website
2. They find your competitor’s website

So the more you do, the more chances you have of your
website ranking higher than your competitors.

You can certainly hire a Search Engine Optimisation company to do the work for you, but the truth is there is a lot you can do yourself. Just take one step at a time. Research your keywords, then add them to your website and build backlinks from other website to yours.

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Ivana Katz of Websites 4 Small business makes it easy for you to get your business on the internet. If you're looking for a professional and affordable website designer, who can also assist you with search engine optimisation, visit www.web4business.com.au and download a copy of your free website plan.

Website Business Plan

Many first time entrepreneurs’ idea of starting a business is getting a website.  And that’s it!  They have no intentions of promoting it and if they do their website business plan consists of telling their friends about the site and possibly distributing a few brochures in the neighbourhood. 

 

Some people advertise their business in the local newspaper and more often than not, they expect that as soon as they have a web site, the money will start rolling in. 

 

The truth is, it doesn’t work that way.  With millions of websites popping up on the internet every month, you are competing against a lot of businesses … not only locally, but globally.

So it is extremely important that you make a website business plan before you start designing the website yourself or getting a professional web designer to do it for you.

You need to consider what content to include on the website, what domain name to register and also what keywords and key phrases to include within the site so people can easily find you through the search engines.  And you also need to prove your credibility online, so that when you do start driving traffic to your website, the visitors will convert into customers.

If you are unsure where to start, download your copy of the free Website Business Plan.



Website Business Plan