Websites don’t have to be expensive to be effective.  They just have to be set up correctly from the beginning.

Top 10 Web Design Tips for Small Business

1. Domain name: chose an obvious domain name that is either you company’s name or keywords that represent what you are selling.
2. Hosting: don’t take your hosting for granted.  Poor hosting companies can have your site crash and not have the tech support to get it back up.  I personally use GoDaddy.com Hosting Plans for everything now as I haven’t had any issues and they have good customer service.
3. HMTL vs. Flash: flash looks cool though it gets annoying once you have been on the site more than once.  Also, flash doesn’t get indexed by searched engines.  You want to make your professional website in html.
4. 8 Grade Level: You have to make it obvious to what you are selling and who your target audience is.  If your visitors have to guess you will lose most of them.
5. Warm and fuzzies: That is what I call them.  Make it easy to find your credentials and biographies of who you are.  You want to build trust with your audience.  Certifications, associations, and other outside agencies like the Better Business Bureau support your online trust factor.
6. Testimonials: showcase testimonials from clients or customers.  You can also let customers comment on their orders through automatic services.
7. Photos: don’t clutter your website.  You graphics and photos to break up the text though don’t over do it.
8. Navigation: search engines index text navigations only.  Also, as most computers are wider than taller having your navigation horizontal makes it easier to fit in every person’s monitor.
9. Keywords: you want to do research on keywords people are searching for your business.  It is important to understand your audience more than you just deciding what keywords they should be searching for.
10. Measure: put analytic software on your website so you can measure everything from traffic sources to what they do once on your website.

Clean and professional web design works no matter what business you are in

No matter what business you are in or the reason for creating your website there are common themes that all successful website abide by.  As you are creating your website you always need to remember you have 5-10 seconds to make a person stay on your web page.

5 Things that Every Website Most Have

1. Professional: when you go into a brick and mortar store to buy something, what do you think when the store is a mess?  This works the same of websites.  Clean and professional always work to matter what business, product, or service you are offering.
2. Navigation: make your navigation easy to find and use.  I have seen websites with fancy flash for a navigation which can be confusing, plus lacks good search engine optimization.  You want to make it easy for visitors to find the information you want them to and they are looking to find.
3. Colors: have you ever looked at a website and it gave you a headache?  The color scheme has to easy on the eyes.  This also works for the text.  Often websites get too artsy with the colors and text and you can’t read anything on the site.
4. Call to Action: every page of your website needs a “call to action.”  This is what you want people to do next on your website.  The best place is in the right hand navigation as people’s eyes move from left to right and diagonal across the page.
5. Test: most website owners don’t test their links and their new web pages they add.  It is so easy for a photo to not be formatted or a link to not work.  It takes just a minute more to test your new page and it is well worth it.  This also goes for periodic checks as things can just stop working for some reason.  Another way to know if something isn’t working is to see a sudden high bounce rate on a certain page.

Click on any website and your eyes go some where.  This may sound obvious though have you ever looked at where your eyes go on your website.  Does your landing page instantly let the visitor know what your site is about, the quality of your site, and where to go or what to do next.  Each of these aspects are key to getting web traffic involved and spending time on your site.

Want to give your web page a free test?

Fivesecondtest.com offers a free service that allows people to test what they see and click within 5 seconds.  You upload a photo of your website or the web page you want to test (must be less than 960 wide) then people are able to take your 5 second test to report back what they saw.  Each test is given a link that you can send to your Twitter, Facebook, or other media to help spread the word for people to take the test.

Take Authority SEO’s test at http://fivesecondtest.com/test/zZkDWMMB

First, what is bounce rate?  Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site without ever clicking on another page in your website.

Inside Your Website Factors that Affect Bounce Rate

1. Design: Think about websites that you have visited that annoyed you and you immediately left.  Do you have any of these aspects on your own site?  Lots of clutter, sharp colors, flash animations, and especially noise from music or virtual presenters can lead to high bounce rates.  You have 5 seconds to connect with your visitor, so you don’t want them instantly annoyed or not knowing what your site offers.
2. Content: As more and more websites write content for the search engines as everybody wants to be ranked, many writers have forgot that it is still people who read your content.  It doesn’t matter how much traffic you generate if people don’t find your content well written, helpful, and written in a way that enhances your brand.
3. Navigation: To stop bounce rate a person has to click another page on your site.  How hard is it for a person to determine what to do next on your site?  I call them funnels which are the paths that you want to lead people down to support their buying decision or getting involved decision for your website.  You should have an attracted and easy to understand option on every page of your website that leads people into the funnel you want.
4. Technical: If you see high bounce rate on a page you want to check to make sure everything on the page is working.  Are you going to keep reading in a website that has bugs and issues when you land on the pages?  One more key factor to technical issues has to if people have to download components to view aspects of your page.  Most people are wary of these types of programs as they don’t want spyware on their computer.  Your best bet it to find solutions where people with any browser will be able to view your media.

Optimization is so important because it represent what we are doing, optimizing.  What most business owners don’t understand is that we need something to optimize.  I want you to look at your competition which are the websites that rank for the keywords you want to in Google search results.  What you are looking for is how many pages these websites offer.  If you want to find out how many pages they have indexed by Google watch the video we made on Top Keyword Rankings which demonstrates how do this.  What you will find is that your competition has sites loaded with content.

For your search engine optimization to work your website needs a consistent strategy for updating and creating new content on a regular basis.  Similar to fitness you need to think about what you are doing on a daily basis to be success instead of a destination.  Content building never ends; as soon as you stop producing new content your websites traffic rankings will drop.

How much traffic is enough?  The answer is as much as you can produce.  Another way to look is by as mentioned earlier finding out how much your competitors have.  If you competitors have thousands of pages indexed in Google you are not going to rank for the keywords you want with a day or month’s worth of SEO work.  What you need to understand is that SEO is a competition between you and the millions of other websites who want to rank for the keywords that are important to you.  You have to have a consistent strategy to do it better than your competition if you are to succeed.

The good news is this is possible.  You just need to get used to the fact that you will be creating endless amounts of quality content to make your website successful and to continue it success.

rush hour traffic podcast

Rush Hour Traffic Podcast – Website Success Sales vs. Service

1. Are you setting your website up to generate revenue
2. Are you spending too much money on parts of your website that don’t generate sales

If you are reading this article for the latest search engine optimization tips then you are on the wrong article. The goal of this article is to take a look at your thought process and approach to your website that may be leading your astray. Your website is like fitness, the people who struggle with there weight are always reading the latest diet tip on the newsstand while the fit people understand that success is about a lifestyle more than any one technique.

We are going to approach this topic from the angle of starting a new website. This works fine for those who already have a website to take a break and start from the beginning of why you started your website to begin with.

Your website has to have a purpose. Right now if I asked you what the purpose of your website is could you answer quickly in a shot and to the point response? The following are examples of purposes for websites.

1. Informational: the website is designed to offer articles, videos, news, and more to inform people on a certain topic or topics.
2. Ecommerce: the website offers services or products for sale
3. Lead Generation: the website’s goal is to capture future customers for another purpose

Websites can obvious course have a combination of these purposes. You have to decide on the purpose of the website before you can adequately structure it. Just think how confused your visitors will be if you don’t know the purpose of the website.

Once you have a purpose you have to understand who will be interested in your products, services, information, or lead generating abilities.

Now is time to make your target audience more specific. I know you are on the web because you want to reach everyone. Well getting just anyone to your site might look great from a traffic stand point though it doesn’t mean anything if they don’t convert into your purpose.

Does your website cater to your target audience? If your website is designed to sell women’s clothes do you have a site that appeals to the wants and needs of women? Often most websites are designed not around who the audience is; they are personality of the owner or the IT guy that developed it.

Going into keywords and how to use them in your website is a longer discussion then the point of this article. I have a question though would you like 1,000 visitors that don’t convert or only 50 visitors that convert at a high percentage? You might think that the question is obvious since the 1,000 visitors didn’t get your any traffic. So, often people are count up in large words that can drive lots of traffic either organic or paid instead of clearly defined keywords that are targeted to their purpose and audience that have less traffic though more conversions.

What are digital cobwebs? What is the first thing you think of when you read the word cobwebs? If you are like me I think of a rustic old attic full of cobwebs and haven’t been visited in years. As it relates to websites it is using old techniques to achieve modern results. The most common is flash intro to a website. They look great in the beginning only to totally annoy the second time you visit. Plus, search engines hate them as they don’t have anything to index. You will not find a highly optimized websites that achieving its purpose and converting its target audience that has a flash intro or flash video as its main message on the home page.

Google takes into account your site’s structure especially broken links as it rates the importance of your site. Just think if you have two options one with tons of broken links and one with not which site would you rather visit to get your information? This is also important about links to external websites where they may have changed a page to make it no longer available.

Both of these issues and more means your site is not being updated or cared after on a current basis. The web is about current. If your site sits dormant no matter how great it once was it will be come irrelevant.

When updating and writing the content you have to keep your visitors in mind instead of yourself. Keep in mind you want your visitors to read your content and follow your path to converting into your purpose. Visitors don’t convert for your reason they convert for their reasons.

This is often the case because in many circumstances you are the expert in your field as it relates to your website’s content. What you consider to be information everyone understand I can promise you they do not. I am not saying to write the content to insult the intelligence of your visitor only when you use jargon and thoughts that people have to be in the know to understand you are going to lose your visitor.

How you organize your content is essential. This is all based on your target audience and your purpose. Yes, everything alphabetical makes it easy for you to find the information though alphabetical only supports those who already know what they are looking for. Most people think in categories of information like home or business, men’s or women’s, ect. Your visitors have a purpose too, and the greater your website is setup to match their purpose the more success yours will be too.

The last thing and probably the best part of websites for those who take advantage is the ability to change rapidly. It is ok that you may not have every answer to the items listed above though you need to start. Testing is an essential part of your website. If one item isn’t working then you need to make changes until you get your desired results. This also goes back to #1 if you don’t know your purpose how do you know it isn’t working?

]]> http://www.authorityseo.com/2009/05/28/why-my-website-isnt-working/feed/ 0 http://www.authorityseo.com/2009/05/28/authority-seo-launches-new-site/ http://www.authorityseo.com/2009/05/28/authority-seo-launches-new-site/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 14:24:41 +0000 Authority SEO http://authorityseo.com/?p=23

Authority SEO has launched a new website.  The goal of the new look and feel is to offer more user friendly ways for you to access up to date content from articles, videos, podcasts, and more on driving more targeted traffic to your website.  Authority SEO hopes you like the new look and can now get a better sense on how we can better support your marketing strategies to increase sales.