Web Site Success Comes With Goals, Not Design

It's amazing there are still business owners who just don't understand the fundamentals of owning a web site. With all the buzz about technology and social media, the primary focus always appears to be on web design. True, web design is important. Especially when it comes to branding. But good web site design and layout is not rocket science given the plethora of open source solutions and software available on the Internet.

Truth be told, the success of any web site will depend on more than just design. Besides, just having a web site isn't good enough anymore. If a business is spending money on a web site, shouldn't there be some talk about a return on investment? With no cookie cutter approach to count on, we can take a look at some guidelines for establishing goals to measure that return.

• Before you even start the design and development of your web site, ask what you want to accomplish with your web site and what type of desired result you seek not only for you but also for your visitors. 

• Describe what you want to accomplish with as much clarity and detail as possible. If your goal is to provide information to the public or generate product brand awareness, don't just state that. Write down exactly how you are going to provide information or generate product awareness. You should also state exactly how and when you will evaluate your progress.

• Break your web site goal(s) into smaller, obtainable minor goals. For example, if you sell multiple products organized in multiple categories, then establish a goal for each category or each product web page. This will help identify areas of strengths and weaknesses on your way to evaluating your overall web site goal. 

• Establish goals you know you are actually capable of obtaining. If the goal is to generate new leads but you get very little site traffic, then set your sites low. Be realistic. It's better to reach your goal regardless of how small than to not reach it at all. That will allow you to better determine what works or doesn't work. 

• Set goals by time and/or importance into specified target dates. For example, if you are trying to sell products for the holiday season or communicating the latest product or service information to customers, then make sure you note your start and completion dates.

• If your goal is to obtain new web site visitors and customers, then your site should be centered around the relevant keywords that new customers would use to search for your site. 

Whether it's increasing traffic, converting customers or just simply sharing information, having clear, established goals and objectives will prevent you from performing unnecessary analysis. It will also help you better understand your web site's successes and failures and allow you fix and improve your web site. Otherwise, you will never be satisfied with the results regardless of the design.

Effective SEO techniques for your website

Let’s get real. Getting great search engine rankings is not rocket science. Also, easy and effective SEO doesn’t cost the White House. The thumb rule: Create a real site for real people. And let inbound links come naturally, to your website. Caution: Don’t pay for links, it’s ugly and controversial too.

So how do you gain inbound links? First off, don’t be content with a website, but include a blog with tons of content, to attract more traffic. A good blog will grow content fast and always pay off in the long run.

Sometimes, you do all the things right but still don’t get the ranking right for your website. Here’s a big tip to boost your search engine rankings: Provide the search engines with sitemaps to your website. The sitemap essentially speeds up the search engines like Google and Yahoo to spider, index and rank your web pages, so that what used to take months now happens real quick. The search engines will find your site, search it, index it in their database, and most importantly, show your site high up in the search results. As you grow your blog, your new posts will be easily spidered, indexed and ranked because of your sitemap submissions. Now, you are on way to becoming an SEO specialist – and keep your White House!

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!