Don’t be fooled… Web design is less about design

Your website is an extension of your brand and is the online face of your company. Sure, it has to look aesthetically pleasing with coordinated colors, branding, organized well for easy navigation, and follow usability guidelines. But equally as important is insuring that it’s achieving your business goals. Whether your call to action is lead generation, online sales, further your brand, or newsletter sign-ups, your website mission is to attract visitors, convert them into customers, and customers into evangelists.

As part of your company’s marketing strategy your website is the hub for all things digital. Here are some important steps to follow in creating a website that performs:

1. Identify your business goals – This might include simple brand recognition, lead generation, online sales, or newsletter sign ups. Whatever it is will influence the style of the website and marketing strategy. And most importantly, determine how you will measure your success against your goals. No sense in setting goals if you don’t know how to determine if they’re achieved or not.
2. Competitive research – Review other websites in your industry. Why reinvent the wheel. Look for any techniques that can be adapted and ways to differentiate your products or services. Are there any special techniques like social media elements (share, Facebook Like and retweet) being used? Pay careful attention to keywords that are being used in page titles, page descriptions and page headings.
3. Create a solid site architecture – One of the most important things a small business can do is logically organize their website for easy navigation. Visitors should easily be able to find the information for which they came looking, especially if it leads to a conversion.  In addition to being easily read by humans, websites need to be traverse-able by search engine spiders. Serving up an XML site map will give specific navigation instructions to all your website pages.
4. Write keyword rich content – Write page copy with keyword rich content that’s meant to be read by humans. Use targeted keywords and phrases as close to the top of the page as possible. This will help search engines index your page in search results for keywords that are important to you.
5. Call to action – Include your compelling call to action statements to entice visitors to take the next step with your product or service. This hook will convert your visitor to a customer and hopefully into a raging evangelist.
6. Employ on-page SEO techniques – Use on-page SEO (search engine optimization) techniques to enhance your search visibility.
7. Employ on-page SMO - Use on-page SMO (social media optimization) techniques such as follow me, share, retweet, RSS, email, and Facebook Like buttons. This will help you to drive traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.
8. Include a Blog – Including a blog section to your website will establish authority and accessibility which allows you to gain an insight into your customers and help establish and build relationships. It’s a good way to build brand awareness as well.
9. Search/local search submission – Once your site is finished, tested, and launched, it’s time to let search engine know. Establish webmaster accounts at Google Webmaster Central, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Yahoo! Site Explorer. Each of these search engines provides tools for website submission and verifies that your site is being crawled successfully. Also, visit GetListed.org to claim your local online search listing, a separate step from submitting you website using the webmaster tools. It’s free and one of the best ways for local business to show up on the map, literally.
10. Link building – Often forgotten, link building is one of the most important steps to increasing your rankings in search results. Taking the time to establish high quality links to your website will be a key to your success.

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