Three Tips for Making Your Web Site a Success.

By Phil Winter
Posted Thursday, June 9, 2005

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You can judge how effective your site is by how often visitors take the action you want them to take.

Your Web Tip of the Month from Web Design Partners.

Suppose you plan to sell the World’s Best Ice Cream Sandwiches. You open an unappealing storefront in a part of town where nobody goes. You don’t put up a sign and you don’t advertise. You’re thinking, “That’s crazy, I’d never do that!”

Maybe, but it happens every day with web sites! There are millions of web sites, like the storefront above, that are not generating traffic and failing to acquire customers. Sad, isn’t it?

Here are some ideas to help ensure your site does not become lost in the “trash heap of useless web sites.”

1. Make your site attractive to visitors.
KISS applies here. Your site needs to load quickly and convey your message effectively in less than 10 seconds. Except for portal sites like MSN, most business and commercial sites now are lean, simple and avoid animation and audio. Keep these points in mind:

Your site’s navigation must be intuitive to the visitor.
Your text must be clear, concise, and keyword rich.
The text should focus on solving the visitor’s problem, not on the features of your product, not your business history, nor your family.
Your site should make it clear what action you want the visitor to take.

You can judge how effective your site is by how often visitors take the action you want them to take. If you have an e-commerce site, that action is purchasing. If your site is informational, it’s getting the visitor to call or to visit your brick and mortar store. If you’re getting visitors but no sales, there are some changes you need to make in the site itself.

2. Make your site attractive to search engines.
There are hundreds, probably thousands of search engines. But the big three are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Together, they represent about 90% of all web searches.

Optimization is like shooting at a moving target in the dark. While youcan do it yourself, it is very time consuming, has a steep learning curve, and is fraught with trial and error. Your time is better spent running your business. There are a lot of companies that will optimize your site for you, for a fee, of course. Some are good, some are bad. Beware the ones that:

“Guarantee” a page one ranking on Google, MSN, or Yahoo.
Will submit your site to “10,000 search engines” for a fee.
“Guarantee” (pick a number) “qualified” visitors per day.

3. Market your site.
Marketing your site comes down to getting traffic. “Build it and they will come” might apply to ball fields, but not to web sites. Getting high rankings through optimization (called organic ranking) is obviously part of the solution. But here are some additional marketing ideas.

You can set up pay-per-click accounts on the major search engines where you pay every time a visitor clicks your listing. How much you pay is determined by how high you want to be ranked for a given keyword. The good news: You can appear on page one immediately. The bad news: It can be expensive, and takes time and money to “dial it in.”
Opt-in email marketing. This is not spam. Rather, you are emailing potential customers who have indicated an interest in receiving information about your product or service.
Offer specials, give-aways or other enticements on your web site to capture email addresses.
Do a newsletter and send to your subscription list.
Submit your site to the search engines. You can do this yourself, for free.
Submit your site to free directories. But be careful to follow the submission rules exactly.
Exchange links with other related sites. Search engines rank sites higher that have a large number of related sites linking to them. Google, for example, reportedly looks at the number of incoming links, their relevancy (to your site), and the other site’s ranking. A fewer number of relevant, highly ranked sites linking to you is better than lots of low ranked, less relevant linking sites.

Like most web site activities, exchanging links is time consuming, but there are sites that can help you with link trading. Beware of “link farms.” The search engines are on to this gimmick, and consider it spamming. Make sure you exchange links with real sites that are relevant and well ranked.
Try paid inclusion directories. This is like submitting to the free directories, but a fee is involved. In most cases, the fee is $50 or less, but Yahoo charges about $300, and that doesn’t guarantee inclusion in their directory.

Build the best site you can, optimize it for search engines, and market! None of these are one-time events. They are related, on-going processes. Now, go sell the World’s Best Ice Cream Sandwiches!

Phil Winter
Web Design Partners
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