How To Make Your Website More Successful? (Part I)

Building a website and getting it online is easy. Driving visitors to it is the more difficult part. Most people are not patient enough when it comes to build up traffic. They expect thousands of visitors a week after they go live with their website. But that is not how it works. We share some secrets of how to make your website more successful.

A) Provide content: Search engines love content. As more content you can provide as better off you are. Don't put all the content on one page. Build many pages with content. The reason for this is that every page gets spidered separately by Google and other search engines. Each page of yours in their index is an additional chance that your link gets mentioned in somebody else search results. Quality content is more valuable to search engines as they want to provide real information to visitors. Search engines do not want to refer to link farms or redirects. If they can refer a customer directly to the most valuable content the better for the search engine. Search engines live of providing good results.

B) Domain Name: Do not use a domain name like www.freewebpages.com/~yourname - search engines don't like those. It also prevents you from building a brand name (your ultimate goal should be building a brand). Spend the $9.00 per year for your own domain name. It's money spend well worth.

C) Your website design: The simpler the better. Here is a rule of thumb: text content should outweigh the html content. The pages should be W3 validated and work in Internet Explorer as well as Mozilla's Firefox. If you go too fancy with stuff some search engine spiders might not be able to read your pages. Look at Google, eBay or Yahoo themselves - simple design, easy to navigate and people are flocking to it. If you use sub-directories the directory names should be descriptive (i.e. "steel-products" or "paper-clips"). The same is true for you pages. If you are able to give pages a descriptive name as better you are off in the long run.

Website performance is critical. If your pages load too slow you will punished. Make sure the website sits on a fast web server and that the page sizes are 20K or less. If you can keep page sizes to 15K or less you are ahead of the curve.

D) Build one content page per day or at least 3-4 per week. You may think you do not have that many products. But establish yourself as a source of product or industry related information. If customers can learn from the content you provide they respect you and your business and this will lead them to use your services and products, too. Pages with 300-600 words should be more than sufficient.

E) Keywords: Make sure you use important keywords in the title of each topic and through-out the text without looking like a SPAMMER (meaning: do not go overboard using the keywords). Find out what important keywords for your business are.

This article can be published by anyone as long as a live back link to http://www.smallbusinessland.com is provided. (this note can then be removed)

Christoph Puetz is a successful small business owner (Net Services USA LLC) and international author.

Guides, Tutorials, and Articles for small businesses - http://www.smallbusinessland.com

More Web Development Articles

Selecting a Web Content Management Product
So you want to take a look at a real Web Content Management (WCM) product. How do you go about evaluating all the different products and vendors? What should you be looking for in a WCM package? Is it better to build your own, buy or use Open Source?The best way to answer this question is to compare the products on an apples to apples basis.

Web Design for the Professional Magician Part I - Selecting the Perfect Domain Name
Selecting the Perfect Domain NameThe first issue I have with magician web sites is the improper use of domain names. Examine the following list of URLs and select the most professional one: www.

Building a Great Intranet Taxonomy
While it may seem like a "quick and easy" task, defining the navigation structure and organization of your intranet site will be one of the most challenging tasks you will face in the course of your project. It is also one of the most critical success factors.

Web Accessibility: The Basics
What is web accessibility & why is it important?Web accessibility is about making your website accessible to all Internet users (both disabled and non-disabled), regardless of what browsing technology they're using. In addition to complying with the law, an accessible website can reap huge benefits on to your website and your business.

Benefits Of An Accessible Website: Part 2 - The Business Case
The DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) states that service providers must not discriminate against disabled people. A website is regarded as a service and therefore falls under this law, and as such must be made accessible to everyone.

Benefits Of An Accessible Website: Part 1 - Increase In Reach
The DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) states that service providers must not discriminate against disabled people. A website is regarded as a service and therefore falls under this law, and as such must be made accessible to everyone.

Planning A Usable Website: A Three-step Guide
A website is like an information flow, with you as the provider and your site visitors as the receivers of the information. If you don't plan your website with this in mind right from the start, you could find yourself with a brand new website that solves all your immediate needs.

Why a CSS Website Layout Will Make You Money
Although CSS layouts have been around for years, they haven't become so commonplace until recently. This was basically due to limited browser support (especially from Netscape 4) - nowadays though, CSS 2.

The Secret Benefit Of Accessibility: Part 2 - A Higher Search Engine Ranking
An additional benefit of website accessibility is an improved performance in search engines. The more accessible it is to search engines, the more accurately they can predict what the site's about, and the higher your site will appear in the rankings.

The Secret Benefit Of Accessibility: Part 1 - Increased Usability
Web accessibility has so many benefits that I really do wonder why such a large number of websites have such diabolically bad accessibility. One of the main benefits is increased usability, which according to usability guru, Jakob Nielson, can increase the sales/conversion rate of a website by 100% and traffic by 150%.