13 Ways to Add Muscle to Your Website
Often it is your website that introduces you to potential customers. Every aspect of brand development should be reflected here—the look, the feel, the text, the photos.
Users visit websites with expectations about what they hope to find—engaging, informative, intuitive, and useful. Search engines “want” the same things and deliver sites that meet these expectations. The following principles are essential to Web success:
- Power of Branding. Presentation is everything. Statistics show that users form an impression of a website within the first few seconds of their visit. A good first impression increases your perceived credibility and positions you as a leader. Design should communicate trust.
- Don’t Make Me Think. Provide a good user experience. Make it intuitive. Users want to find what they are looking for quickly and easily, or they may just go elsewhere.
- Be Specific. What is the purpose of your site? To sell? Showcase products? Inform? Get them to call? Be clear, then focus the message.
- Target Market. Define your target market to strengthen sales. Are they male? Female? How old are they? Where do they live? Why do they buy? Why would they choose you?
- Scream Value. What are the problems or issues that drive a user to search for your product or service, and how will you solve them? What sets you apart? Write it from their point of view. What’s in it for them? Be persuasive.
- Killer Content. Good web writing is hard to do. Write relevant content. Put conclusions at the beginning. Use action words. Use lists, not paragraphs. Write short sentences.
- Get Sticky. Update regularly. This builds user trust, increases your relevance, and Search Engines reward it. Sticky content means higher search placement.
- Dialogue with Users. Get a blog. Add a personal voice to your business. Turn users into participants. Get comments, feedback, ideas, concerns. Enhance credibility. Search Engines love them.
- Position Yourself as an Expert. Publish articles and whitepapers in your area of expertise. Articles get picked up by Search Engines.
- Optimize. If Google cannot find you, neither can we. Organic search results are based on content, title tags, keyword relevancy, and links from third party sites. Page positioning is achieved organically versus who paid the most money to appear at the top. People trust organic search results more than sponsored results.
- Stop Guessing. Review your site’s analytics for better conversion of visitors to customers. Analyze what users click on to further refine your site’s effectiveness and also to strengthen other marketing initiatives.
- Email Marketing. It’s inexpensive. It’s effective. It’s immediate. It’s targeted. It’s easy.
- Embrace Social Media. Social media is any form of communications technology that allows you to interact with others on a one-to-many basis. Includes LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace.
Tags: Get Listed on Google, Google Maps, public profile page, ree business listing
This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 10:38 am and is filed under Web Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Fran Sampson Says:
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