How to get your websites performing at the top
So you want your web site to do well. You want it to score excellent search returns and convert tons of clicks into actual sales. Well, you’re not alone – not by a country mile. You’ll be in the same boat as hundreds of millions of other businesses, who all need their web sites to do the same thing. You will be in straight races with millions of sites that sell precisely the same thing as you do. And yet the same websites inevitably seem to come up trumps. How?
Recall how successful people are thought to perform a particular number of recognisable behaviours – the actions of success? Your website ought to be doing identical things. Every successful website possesses a run of habits behind it which set it apart from the competition. If you need your site to fight it out with the best of them, you need to comprehend how they operate.
A site alone doesn’t mean money
Customers will not come after you for mousetraps merelly because you are trying to sell it.
The Internet is really very huge – and it’s full, literally splitting, with businesses and sites who vend exactly the same thing as you. If you accept it at face value, as a bet the Internet is done. It’s hopeless. There is no way you can create a website to sell a service and simply expect customers to come after you.
No – the premier and biggest attribute of profitable web sites is this: do everything it takes to get your customers through your doors. The most fashionable tactics at the moment include local marketing, which leaves the global picture and focuses on sourcing trade in your neighbourhood; and the long tail key phrase, which leaves off general searches for your service and homes in on on absolutes instead. Both, by whittling your area down to finely honed slots, guarantee that you’ll attract a regular quantity of lucrative traffic through your site.
Dress to kill
Have your web site put together to look like it delivers apprenticeships – or else search engines will leave it be.
Every website is made of bits and bytes.That code mutates often – and if it does not alter in line with present search engine “fashions” then your web site is quickly going to fall out of grace. Think of the trends in site building as mode in clothing or haircuts. A skinhead gives off one message; a clerical collar another. A search engine “sees” your website by looking at its programming first. If the code “looks” correct, i.e. looks like what it is selling, then your site performs well in results rankings.
The aspect of your web site is important too. Customers are wary of websites that don’t load or function as they think they will. Whatever you sell, you need to be certain that your web site appears and feels in the same way as all similar websites: else no-one will stay around long enough to buy anything.
Successful existing sites
Don’t simply take what we say to be true – go see these examples of the stuff we’ve been talking about and you’ll find profitable styles in the flesh.
You can see the trappings of good practice immediately. Fast design, excellent navigation and a superbly outlined niche product. Unless you are one of the very few multinational super websites, then your website has to appear and feel like this one. It needs to be clear, obvious, uncomplicated and aimed at the users who are guaranteed to buy what it sells.
The number one attribute of successfully performing sites is this: be aware of your limits. The net is not the wide open field of eager custom we all used to think it was. It’s a choked, sprawling mess of a global marketplace that can’t work at all without that you draw your limits and operate within them. Our sample web site has done precisely that – and it’s collaring considerable benefits. You could be, too.
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