Your business needs more than just a website. You need a web presence designed to draw customers to you like a magnet. You need the right words and the right design. The internet has made doing business today quite different, if customers aren't actually purchasing online they are still visiting the product online before buying. Your website has the opportunity to close the deal. You need an online business presence that shows your best but is also user friendly for your customers. You need a dynamic site with clips and tips and video, using not only the right words and the right design, but connecting to all the relevant avenues that will draw in your sales.
The steps to designing your business online.
1. In a website what you say is most important! The words you use must be correct and carefully thought out. Not just for marketing purposes, but for search engine optimization or SEO. The most important words to pick out first are the words in your domain name. Unless your name is already popularized your domain name is best if it describes your business with the top key words for your service or product. With your target audience in mind, using as few words as possible, keeping in mind the key words chosen to best represent your service or product in the search engines you need a marketing statement to compliment your website. Ideally it says what you do, who you serve and how they benefit. 2. Exposure is an important key when you have a website, now that you have the correct words in place it is time to place the words into directories so that consumers or businesses will see your business when they search. Directories also provide the next step for your successful website, Backlink's.
3. Link building is important for several reasons; each backlink is a business card for your website just like in the real world you need to pass out as many business cards as you can. Advertising firms and serious webmasters know that this is the most time consuming part in building a successful website. It will increase your page rank (where your page comes up with relevant searches) in the search engines. A higher page rank is determined by the number of incoming links to that webpage. So if you are targeting to broader searches that leave out city and state the page rank building process is essential. This is also true for high concentrations of competitor sites in specific cities and states, as well as national and international listings.
4. Site Structure and Navigation are another of The Most Important parts of your website. With more and more high speed internet users, flash sites are now very common, Web 2.0 applications such as wikis, blogs, podcasts, and social networking sites are also embedded into many websites. Webmasters must be sure to keep the site relatively flat using as few layers as possible because consumers hate to wait for pages to load. Search Engines must also be considered when building a web page. There should be no need to click more than two or three times to get to the deep content of a web site, the shorter the path to an internal page, the more credit is given by the search engines. Keeping the structure of your URL clean and neat will also help with your ranking in the search engines. The content of your site and how it makes sense to the consumer are important to consider, users want to see what they want with the least amount of clicks.
5. Promoting your site with Web 2.0 applications is now very common and is almost a must for your website traffic to be at its peak. Funneling in consumers from relevant links is the key to more sales for your business. If a person visits a blog about your product and finds information you have provided which links to a page on your website, this is likely to result in a sale for your business. Some of the various applications you can use are Videos, Blogs, E-Zine articles, Press Releases, Wikis, Podcasts, Twitter, Facebook and even MySpace. All of these are generally free ways to promote your website drawing in interested consumers.
6. Analytics are used to track the visitor information of a website. This software can be added to your site for your marketing informational purposes. However your website needs to be set up correctly to run the software. The information you can gather consists of how the visitor came to your website, did they type in your domain, come from the search engine or from a directory or an ad sense ad. You will also be able to see what city, state, and country the visitor came from. Most importantly you will see how many and which pages the visitor looked at and how long they stayed on each page. All of this information can be available for tracking purposes with flow charts for your marketing analysis.
7. Creating and using an authentic stamp on each new media is important, this is where a logo and some specific colors, fonts, pictures etc...comes in. However this is hyped up by advertisers as Branding, and can cost as much as you are willing to pay for it.
8. Adwords, Adsense, and Pay Per Click, while these avenues of promotion should not be ignored many web designers and advertising companies try to escape building a solid, well designed, high page rank site, by putting you on an Ad words campaign. This might bring some quick results but will keep you on the "Throw Cash at it Stage" in website ownership. It's more like renting a website then owning one. Successful websites are built like any other business. If the foundation is not strong you will be feeding the Advertising firms pockets instead of reaching the point independence and a good ROI (return on investment). Regardless of the amount of clicks your campaign gets the customer will eventually end up at your website and if it is not at its best your campaign can fail completely.
When you build a website it becomes a representation of your storefront, a cyber manifestation of your business. Take the necessary steps to portray your image correctly and be certain your website reaches to the consumer from various avenues. This will insure that your website will generate traffic and thus sales while building an online relationship with your customers.
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