Tips to Owning a Successful Web Site

There are some things that don’t need an expert. Like creating your own web site, making a success of it, adding to its popularity and to your bottom line. Here are four lessons to be learned in achieving your web site goals.

1. Don’t let your programmer design your web site! You know best what you want your web site to do, be, say, show and find. Or do you? That’s the homework for you, before you dream of having your own dot com. Hint for your homework: The Internet’s thumb rule: Keep it simple.

2. Learn, re-learn and learn a little more – about the latest web tools, editors, blogs, platforms, payment windows, shopping carts, search engines, keywords, search engine optimization, and stuff. Learn what they do and not necessarily how they work.

3. What’s your product or service? Find out that first. It need not be tangible even. Also, your web site can be a touch point for other products, services, etc. available in other web sites.

4. Know your customer! Why should people visit your web site? For what? When, or whenever? How are you going to woo them – 24/7/365? Why would they come to you again and again? Not an easy exercise, but don’t go looking for shortcuts that don’t exist anyway!

Google Secrets to Webmasters

OK, Google-ians, so how are the links to your website ranked? How do you link out? How to construct internal links to your site? And get more inbound links? How many links to a page is okay?

The revelation came recently, not from the sage saints of the web, but verily from the Oracle, Google Inc., at its recent Links Week event. And that is: Quality content and relevant, inbound links. That’s what draws in the crowds to your website and pushes up its b/o (box office) ratings.

Creating valuable, unique and relevant useful content (videos, original research, interesting tidbits, insights, entertaining and engaging copy, value-adds, useful product or service) is one of the best ways to get your site and pages highly ranked in Google. Do this, and other sites will want to link to you naturally.

Useful hints:

• For interior linking, use descriptive anchor text links to explain the content to your visitors.
• Anchor text should be rich in your keywords.
• Outbound links to other sites are about adding value to the visitor’s experience.
• Don’t post too many links on a page as this overloads the search engine robots that regularly crawl the web, indexing pages.
• Make sure your important pages are no more than a few clicks away from your homepage.

Will this unraveling of Google’s secret-that-isn’t help your website win higher Page Ranks and better web links? It’s difficult to say. Which means, the game is all about providing relevant, unique, valuable and quality content.