25/02/2013
Does My Website Suck? Time to Understand Website Marketing
How do you know if your website sucks? It's often hard to have a clear, unbiased perspective when you're so close to your own site. Effective website marketing is essential if your website is going to be successful in doing its job, which is attracting your target audience and search engines, increasing lead generation, educating/informing and promoting your product/service. Is your site attention-grabbing, or does it give your visitor a feeling they've been transported back into the 90's?
Here are a few key website marketing tips that will take you to a whole new level of success:
1.Use keywords - the right way. Keywords are essential for search engines to find and rank your site, but you don't want to overdo it. Put the most essential key terms and phrases your target market is using to find you in meta description tags, titles and H1 tags. A couple of times in your main body text is plenty.
2. Strong visual elements. They say content is king, but the way your website looks does make a difference - so good website design is important. An attractive color scheme, graphics that flow with the design, plenty of white space, easy navigation, content that is well organized and easy to scan. Simplicity is key; a site that looks jumbled, confusing and thrown together is a definite turn-off.
3. Avoid too many bells and whistles. Tons of images and flash not only makes your website slower to load (which sends visitors straight to your competition), Google can't easily read it - which means your site likely won't rank as highly as it could. Google's little "bots" crawl websites on a regular basis, so make sure yours is easy to read and index.
4. Build strong links. Internal linking is important, as is strong inbound and outbound links to and from relevant sites. Think quality, not quantity.
5. Promote, promote, promote. Did we mention promote? Use social media, blogging, articles, press releases and other strategies to promote your website. Don't forget that you can promote it offline as well, through business letterhead, signage, business cards, etc.
6. Keep it fresh. Search engines (particularly Google) prefer original, fresh content so make sure to update yours on a regular basis. Besides, you want to give your visitor a reason to come back for more!
These website marketing tips will help ensure your website doesn't "suck," and that you have the best possible chance of reaching your ultimate level of success.
