Many people have a website. Fewer understand if their website is actually effective. Having it assessed to answer that question is an excellent idea. It is important to be prepared for the assessment with intuitive and effective questions.

Every website is a little different than the next one. They are all unique because the objective for each one is slightly different. The quality of the website must be as high as possible in order to win over the competition. With the volume being so great, yours really must stand out and be remembered by others so that they return to you over and over again. If you don’t achieve that, you won’t be able to generate the traffic that you need in order to bring more leads, customers and business. It is never enough merely to have your website built. Once it exists, you must be meticulous and consistent about having it maintained so that the quality constantly lives up to your standards.

Before you have your website assessed, there are a number of different features that will be looked at. The questions that you begin to ask should bring you valuable and accurate information so that the assessment is most effective.

• Is it easy to navigate your website?
• Is your website aesthetically pleasing to others?
• Is your website useful to other people?
• Do you have top-quality content on  your website?
• Do your web pages load very quickly?
• Is your content appropriate for your target audience?
• Can your visitors contact the administrators of your website if they wish to do so?
• Do all areas of your website function properly and effectively?
• Will  your website hold up against competition online?
• Does your website show up in the top of the search engine results page (SERP)?
• Does your website adhere to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines?
• What is the conversion rate for your website?
• Which code is being used when building the website?

You need to think about your website as a business tool. When you are building your strategy, It is just as important to massage, cultivate, and grow your website as it is to cultivate the rest of your strategy. Always remember what a tremendous asset it is and will be for your business. It is a critical part of what you are trying to accomplish professionally.

Conclusion

If any of the answers that were given to any of the questions above were not satisfactory, there is work to be done on your website. The first step is your assessment, which should be done by a person who performs website assessments for a living. The assessment should turn up problem areas before any recommendations can be made. Several tools will probably be used to make the assessment. The tools should include Google Analytics (or some other analytics tool) as well as other online assessment tools. The more effective the assessment, the stronger your website. The stronger your website, the better your chances of increasing your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let's have coffee.

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1. Establishing Your Web Presence Without a Website
2. Should You Design Your Website or Hire a Professional?
3. What to Consider in a Superior Business Website

You get a very large volume of traffic to your business’s website. Your website is exciting and interesting. People are compelled to visit. However, how do you get them to stick and to keep returning over and over?

There are many different ways to go about enticing your website visitors to stick on your website for a prolonged time period as well as to consistently return to your website over and over again.

• Every page is a landing page: Any one of your website pages can be a landing page. Not everyone who visits your “About” page arrived there from inside of your website. You should build each page with the idea that it is the first one that your website visitors will see.
   
• Content that really pops: Having dynamic content on your website that entices and excites your readers is the reason that they will keep returning over and over again. The more strongly your content touches your visitors, the more inclined they will be to continue to visit your website. 
   
• Use the truth more than link bait: There are numerous people who use link bait (information to entice people into visiting their website) to draw people. However, if your content doesn’t match the link bait, your website visitors won’t be happy. There are some websites that have lost visitors because there were too many articles that contain link bait. If you are going to use it, be careful and very discriminating. Make a point of being as sincere as possible with your visitors.
   
• Never tease your visitors: You must always take the relationships that you have with your online connections seriously. It is acceptable to pique their interest early on, however, you must deliver the real thing as quickly as possible after that. Social media is made for human interactions. Always make your visitors understand that you have the ability to solve their problems.
   
• Keep your promises: If you promised your online connections something, such as a “how to” article on a topic of their interest, any sort of publication or any other piece of useful information, you have a responsibility to give it to them. That means give and not sell. If you don’t do what you have promised you will do, people will never trust you again. Remember, your social media and website interactions are all about relationships and trust.
   
• Emphasize the WIIFM statement: An extremely important part of the content on your website is theWIIFM (What's In It For Me?) statement. This focuses on the customer and you are communicating how you are going to help them to solve their problems. It is never about you as a business owner. It is about satisfying their needs and wants.
   
• Leverage your family and friends: Before you reach out to any of your website visitors, test your online communications on your family and friends. You need to use language that is not overly sophisticated and that is sincere. Your family and friends will give you an honest evaluation of your communications. If they don’t understand something that you have written, you should consider simplifying the language and making sure that your meaning is clear.
   
• Treat your visitors as people: There is nothing more disheartening on the receiving end than excitedly visiting a website only to be treated like a number. As the business owner, you need to regard each of your website visitors as individual people with hearts and minds of their own. Returning to the basic principle of building meaningful and trusting relationships, if you treat your website visitors as a collective lump, you will never be able to build relationships with anyone.

Conclusion

The advice and tips that have been discussed here are all important and they are all simple. You need to use them on a consistent basis. One of your top priorities should be to continue to build relationships with your visitors and to get them to return to your website over and over again. The more they get to know you and what you can do for them, the greater your chance of eventually converting them from friends to clients.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team and don’t forget to “like” our Facebook page.

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You have a beautiful website with all of the features that it should have and content that is interesting and enticing. So, why don't you get website traffic? There could be many reasons, which will be explored here.

Websites that have static pages that are exactly the same over time (in some cases for many years) cease to be interesting to other people very quickly. Your ultimate goal as a business owner is to eventually get people to buy what you are selling. In order to do that, no matter what your products and/or services may be, you need to interact with the people who reach out to you and to build solid relationships with them. You also need to satisfy their needs. Your approach should always be WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?). In other words, what can you do to solve their problems?

One of the first rules of marketing is that it takes more than one contact to close a sale. The more costly the good or service, the more interaction you will need with the potential customer. With that in mind, you need to make sure that when you are designing your marketing plan, you allow for a series of action steps. If you incorporate those steps from the beginning into your marketing plan, you will start to see a good return on investment (ROI) from the time and effort that you devote to your online marketing.

There are several steps that you should follow so that your website starts to bring you business, which will, in turn, lead to sales. The acronym “AIDA” will help you to stay on track with this. It stands for attention, interest, desire and action.

• Attention: Once a visitor to your website has arrived, you have 3 seconds to grab his or her attention. After that, the visitor will get bored and move on to someone else’s website. The content on your landing page should state some sort of offer or promise, which is clearly visible immediately. You don’t want to overwhelm the visitor with too many graphics because that will distract them from reading what you want them to know about you and your business. Additionally, graphics cause the page to load more slowly.
   
• Interest: Now that you have the visitor’s attention, you need to find a way to keep him or her interested. Your immediate goal is to offer him or her information that will prevent him or her from clicking away from your website. An excellent approach is to present some problems (one of which will hopefully apply to your visitor) and offer solutions to those problems. Another possibility is to suggest an opportunity for the visitor; perhaps one that has never occurred to him or her before.
   
• Desire: You have captured his interest and now it is time to create desire. You will be enticing and motivating him to take action of some kind.
   
• Action: The first action is for the visitor to identify himself or herself, which includes some sort of contact information so that you can begin to have interactions and start to build a relationship. Your objective should be to get the visitor interested in something that you are offering free of charge.

This is your way into making money for your business through your website. To reiterate, your website must have some very important objectives: to acquire the visitor’s attention, to stir up interest, to create a desire and to get the visitor to take some action. Having the marketing aspect in mind before building the website is vitally important.

The action that the visitor will take will not cost any money. You just need a way to communicate with him and an Email address is usually the most effective an easiest way to do that.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of the visitor. If you were visiting a website, what would you want to see there? What would fulfill your needs?

Remember that if your visitor visits your website and he doesn’t leave you with any way to contact him, your website has not been successful. If you want your visitor to connect with you, tell him or her. Let your visitor know in clear and simple terms how much you want to interact with him or her and make it easy to reach out to you. There are many ways in which to successfully use your website. You just need to put those ways to work and you will start to enjoy more and more success for your business.

Conclusion

When you are about to design your business website, it is important to bear in mind how important the look and feel of it is. At the same time, it is critical that you do everything possible to make sure that it is effective at enticing visitors, once they are on your site, to want to delve more deeply and to reach out to you, which will eventually lead to their becoming your customers. Your website must be more than just an attractive online brochure. It must also be a tool that causes positive results for your business. You want to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to navigate around your website and to get a clear understanding of your offerings. You want them to want what you are offering.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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1. Should You Design Your Website or Hire a Professional?
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3. Planning Your Website Design

There are many web design platforms available nowadays that allow you to design your own website easily. Apparently, all you need is creativity and a web hosting company. It seems simple but is that really enough?

The popular expression: “You get what you pay for” truly applies in this instance. As a business owner (no matter which type of business you have) you must have the most professional and most appropriate image online for your business. Your image, which represents your branding and reputation, must not only deliver a clear message about who you are and what you offer but it must also be search-engine friendly and easy for others to navigate once they arrive at your website.

For a while now, the concept of the static website has been obsolete. Websites must constantly be offering content that is fresh and is on innovative topics. The content must be informative and interesting as well as educational. It must also offer some sort of solution to the problems of the people who have searched and landed on your website. It must answer the question: “What’s In It For Me?” (WIIFM), in other words, it doesn’t matter how wonderful you and your business offerings are. The only thing that matters is how you are able to help the other person.

The technology behind those concepts is very sophisticated and the work that goes into developing the website is just as sophisticated and should not be left to amateurs. If the website is not designed correctly and does not include all of the elements that will guarantee the advancement of the business, whatever the investment is that you put into it will be worthless. It is never a smart idea to be penny wise and pound foolish.

In order to be able to build a website properly, you need a good understanding of information architecture, the aesthetics of web design, search engine optimization (SEO), the ability to develop web forms and a great deal of other technical abilities. Attempting to do it yourself (DIY) is good in theory, however, considering that web design is most likely not your area of expertise, the only way that you will be able to really accomplish the task correctly is if you take a great deal of time to study and sharpen your web-designing skills, which will take a great deal of time. In all likelihood, you don’t have the time for that in your life.

Creative control

If you start to build your own website, you are given choices regarding font styles, colors, backgrounds, etc. Your next thought, of course, would be that this is a breeze and as long as you are able to make decisions regarding your website, you will be able to create an effective and pretty website for the entire world to see. That is, unfortunately, not necessarily the case. One thing that many people who go the DIY route forget about is company branding. You need to ask yourself if your website conveys a professional and familiar brand that differentiates you from your competition. Does it clearly convey WIIFM and make your unique selling proposition (USP) obvious.

People who scour the Internet can usually tell quite easily if your website was designed by a professional or by an amateur. That determination will drive their decision to look more deeply at your website or to move onto another website that appears professional to them. People will be much more inclined to deem a website that has been designed by a professional web designer as credible and trustworthy than the non-professional one.

HTML skills

Basic HTML is not difficult to learn, especially if you have a great deal of time on your hands and the energy available that you will need to devote to your study of HTML. If you learn only the basic codes, what do you think your website will look like to others? The chances are great that your website will still look amateurish compared with websites that have been designed by professional web designers. Your objective is to have your website seen by as many people and for it to leave a lasting impression that is professional.

There are many reasons to hire a professional web designer, including the avoidance of security loopholes in your HTML code, the assurance that users on all platforms will be able to view your site with any and all browsers that they use and the probability that the search engines will be able to read your code and index your website.

Time and money savings

If you decide to buy a DIY web design kit, it will seem, at initial evaluation, that you are saving a great deal of time and money. One of the important questions that you need to ask yourself is: how much is your time worth? If you happen to have a great deal of extra time on your hands, you may be ok with the DIY route. However, if you are not sure about how much available free time you have you may want to go the professional route. What happens if you get halfway into the project and find that it is taking a lot more out of you than you had anticipated? You will then be left with a web design project that is halfway done and won’t do you and your business any good at all. In that case, you will probably end up hiring a professional to complete the web design. So, in the end, you will have spent a lot of money and wasted a lot of time.

Conclusion

The comparison of DIY vs professional web site design is very important. Your money and time should always be spent as wisely as possible. It is very interesting that things often do not appear as they seem. That is definitely the case with web design. It is a known fact that the DIY approach of web design takes several hours to several weeks to build. Many people who build their own websites contact professional web designers 12 to 14 months after they have built the original website because they are not achieving the search engine rankings that they want and business is just not increasing. They begin to realize after that that their website is just not effective and people are not paying any attention to them. It is vitally important that you get a return on investment that satisfies you and helps you and your business to become more and more successful over time.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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When visitors go to your website and/or social media profiles, the first place they go is your landing page. If they have an interest past your landing page, they will probably go to your “About Us” page to learn more.

There are numerous websites with all kinds of information and all kinds of looks and feels. When a website visitor decides to go to the “About Us” page, he or she is on a fact-finding mission, as well as looking for the “story” of your business. If your website merely speaks about your products and/or services, you are selling it short. People are interested in learning a great deal more than just that about you and your business.

Of course, different visitors are interested in different types of information. One of the first and most elementary pieces of information that your visitors are looking for is who you are and how you came to be where you are at this point. Your “About Us” page is an excellent way to communicate to your visitors who you are and to give them the confidence to understand that you and your business possess the skills and experience that they need to be able to solve their particular problems. Your “About Us” page should answer the following questions:

• Who are we?
• Why should you choose us over someone else (WIIFM – What's In It For Me)?
• What do we do?
• When did we start?
• How do we do it?

When you are speaking about who you are, it is a good idea to include photos of you and your key staff members as well as biographical sketches for each of you. The sketches should highlight educational background and work experience. That information is of great comfort to someone who might be on the fence regarding whether to buy your products and/or services.

When faced with the concept of why someone should choose to work with you instead of choosing someone else, you need to state a flawless case of what’s in it for them. How wonderful your products and services are and how nice everything that you offer looks is of little importance. All your readers are concerned about is what they will get out of a business relationship with you. They need to understand what you can do to help them solve their problems.

The page should have a description of your business, which answers the “What do we do?” question. It should also have a mission statement, which will explain they you do what you do. Of equal importance is to explain your business team, so that people can relate to you and your staff on a humanistic level.

If they see that you have serious training and work experience in the area about which they are interested, they will feel comfortable. Another good thing to communicate is how you came to where you are now, particularly if you have a unique and compelling story to tell.

The content on your “About Us” page must address all of the important points regarding your business; however, it is a great idea to throw in some tidbits that are not necessarily connected to what you are doing now but which add another dimension to your presence. Your content on that page needs to really communicate what is different about your business and should have a clear message as to why people should buy from you instead of from someone else.

You should communicate in a clear and concise manner. The information on that page says a great deal in terms of how it represents your business and what it stands for. You can’t separate what you are as a business from how you are represented online.

Your information should give the right amount and type of information and you shouldn’t worry so much about giving too much away. If your visitors are truly interested in going further in your relationship together, they will. Always remember to include a call to action, which enables your visitors to get a hold of you, either by phone or by Email.

Your online presence is all about relationships and interactions with people. The more you interact on a personal level, the easier it will be to build relationships with your readers and eventually, they will become your customers.

Conclusion

There are many different types of visitor who check out your “About Us” page. There are first-time visitors, regular visitors, people who want to share a relationship with you and work with you and potential customers. With every type of visitor to your website, you want to be able to offer enough informative and useful information to persuade them to establish a much stronger connection with you and your business (such as becoming a fan, user, or customer).

Although not everyone who visits your website will end up visiting your “About Us” page, you need to make sure to entice those people who do click on the page. You will accomplish this by having content that is insightful, interesting and eventually makes your visitors believe that they can’t live without what you are offering.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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Before you build your business website, there are many things to consider, including laying out the plans ahead of time. You must have a clear plan so that your website will be successful at drawing traffic to you.

The following questions are important for you to incorporate into your website plans and if you can answer those questions, your website will be effective and will generate a high volume of traffic and bring in more business.

• What is your website all about? When visitors come to your website, the first thing that they will be asking is what the purpose of your website is. Your homepage must explain the benefits, the purpose of your website, and the products and/or services that you are offering very clearly.
   
• What are you hoping to achieve with your business? It is not enough of a motivation to say that the goal of your business is to get rich. It has to be about more than that. A more effective way to answer that question is to say that you want to achieve enough financial freedom so that you can improve the quality of your life otherwise.
   
• Do you have a marketing plan? If you are serious about your online business being successful and profitable, you will need a business plan. The best way to promote your website is by generating a great deal of content on a frequent and regular basis and syndicating the content to social media channels and business directories.
   
• Who is your competition? During the course of your market research, you should also make it a point of finding out against whom you are competing. Find out what types of things they are offering on their website and figure out how you can make your website stand out.
   
• Who is your target customer? This is very important because if you have the right target customers, you will become successful in your business. If you don’t choose your customers wisely, you will not succeed. The customers should believe in your offerings as much as you do and you want them not only to buy once from you but to keep coming back for more.
   
• Which kinds of products and/or services are you selling? Before you design your website, you should do extensive research on how marketable your products and/or services are. You can use Google Keyword Tool (which won’t cost you any money) to learn how many searches your main keywords receive each month. If you don’t find any searches, it means that there is not a great deal of demand and probably not worth marketing. However, if you are in a very competitive market, it might be hard to distinguish yourself from your competition.
   
• How many products will you sell from your website? The number of products that you plan to sell on your website will determine how many pages your website has. If you are selling a small number of products or services, you will probably only need a handful of pages. On the other hand, if you are selling a large number of products and/or services, you will need a website that that has a database so that you can store and manage all of the items and services.
   
• What types of payments will you accept? If you intend to accept credit card payments online, you will need a shopping cart, payment gateway, merchant account and SSL (secure socket layer) to make sure that the transactions are secure. That means that you will also have monthly fees and processing fees each time a customer buys anything from your website.

  Another option, which is less expensive, is the Paypal shopping cart. With Paypal, all you will need to do is pay a minimal processing fee, which will take care of everything at once.
   

• Webhosting Plan: You will need to have your website hosted on a server so that it will be available online. Choose a hosting plan that has enough space for all of your files and a bandwidth that can receive a high volume of visitors every month. When you start with the hosting plan, make sure that there is flexibility for you to upgrade when you need to in the future.
   
• Maintenance of your website: If you know the answer to this before you design your website, you will know which software to use to build the website. If your website is small and simple, you can use a software product like Dreamweaver. If, on the other hand, your website has many pages, you might want to seriously consider a content management system (CMS) like WordPress. It will allow numerous items to be stored in a database. You will be able to manage the website (edit, add and delete items) if you log into the administration area.
   
• Website statistics: You should find out if your web host has website statistics. If it doesn’t, you need to create a Google Analytics account and add the code to your website pages. This will allow you to track how many daily, monthly, and yearly visitors you get, where they come from, and what keywords are being used to find your websites in the search engines.

Conclusion

All of the tips that have been discussed here should be under serious consideration before you have your website designed and built. If you follow the advice given here, you will avoid problems and you will have a much greater chance of growing your business and becoming more and more successful.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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Many people have websites (for their businesses as well as for personal use) and many people have blogs. The issue is whether people truly understand the difference between a website and a blog. They certainly are not the same thing.

The following explains the basic differences between a blog and a website:

Blog

• Content is regularly updated.
• Not formal.
• Interactive.
• Informative and educational.
• Interactivity about industry/customer issues.
• Some people have a blog.

Website

• Content is static.
• Formal/professional.
• Interactivity does not exist. There is only one-way communication.
• Transactional.
• Communication about products and/or services.
• Almost everyone has a website. In fact, it is almost a requirement in business today.

A good way to think about a website is in terms of it being a virtual store that sells products and/or services. A website is the perfect forum to self-promote and advertise. Promotion and buying and selling are exactly what people expect when they visit a website. When they are at the point of making a purchase of some kind, they go to a website that will satisfy their needs.

They can either purchase something online directly from your website or they can use your website to find out exactly where your bricks and mortar store is located so that they can come and purchase products and/or services from you in person. Once a customer has bought something from you, there is a very high likelihood that they will not return to your store again.

It is also basically impossible to build relationships with your potential customers and existing customers on your website because the website is static. Once a person has purchased something from you, there is no potential for interactivity so the relationship will never have a chance to develop and grow.

Blog

A blog; however, is constantly supplying potential customers and existing customers with interesting and useful content and the blog enables them to interact with the blogger and the discussions that they have together can be potentially unending. Not only can you and your customers have discussions but they can also ask questions that you can answer.

Also, a blog provides a dimension to the content that you can’t get from your website content. Through your consistent and regular blog content, you will eventually be regarded as a subject matter expert in your niche and people will turn to you for answers. This will promote more and more discussions.

What is really being done in this case is that relationships are being developed and strengthened. Some of the people with whom you interact on your blog will never become your customers. That is perfectly acceptable. They can interact with you as much as they like and do not have to worry about any pressure to buy anything. A very important fact is that the people with whom you interact are getting to know you as a person, which includes your level of integrity, your passion for what you are doing and offering and your knowledge, knowledge that you impart to them.

Blogs have a lot of useful features that are very helpful in promoting interactivity. Blogs enable visitors to subscribe to them so they can receive updates on a very regular basis. They will always be informed when new content is added or there has been some update to the social media profiles of the people with whom they interact.

In order to really be effective, blogs should have new postings at least once or twice a week. Fresh, original content is very important. The content is exactly what attracts and retains people and many of those people will eventually become customers.

The true purpose of a blog is to provide helpful, valuable, informative and interesting content that helps other people and that they find interesting. A blog’s purpose is definitely not to advertise or to do a hard sell on anyone. If you try to use your blog in that way, you will be very disappointed with the results. You will not be able to build relationships with anyone and you most likely won’t sell very much. People don’t buy from people whom they don’t trust. The only way that they will trust you is if they get to know you.

All in one

One approach that has proven very effective is building your website with blog software, such as WordPress. Blog software has the capability of providing you with both static web pages (pages) and blog pages (posts). Since both are necessary for the success of your online exposure, this allows you to design a web presence that contains a traditional website and a blog using one tool. Among the other benefits are:

• One homogenous look and feel.
• Ease of optimization for SEO.
• Sharing of add-on plugins between the pages and posts.
• Ease and speed of designing and developing the web presence.
• Ease of maintenance and updating of content since the entire web infrastructure is based on a content management system (CMS).

Conclusion

Blogs and websites work in very different ways, serve very different purposes and produce different short-term results. However, they are both necessary to increase your online exposure and to strengthen your online business reputation. It is important to have both as part of your online presence. They function well together and undeniably, you will see positive results over the long term if they are a part of your business online.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

You might also like:

1. The Purpose of Your Business Website
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You have heard the term “bounce rate.” It is the percentage that represents how many visitors leave your website directly from the page on which they entered the website. A high bounce rate usually means a low conversion rate.

There are several reasons why you might be experiencing a high bounce rate, such as

• It takes too much time to load your web page
• Your landing page is too complicated to navigate. It is not user friendly
• The wrong sorts of visitors are being drawn to your website

With that said, there are several ways in which you can lower your bounce rate significantly, which will be good for your business.

Website and layout design

Your website design is one of the most important factors when it comes to bounce rate. Your website should have colors that are pleasing to the eye and you should try to avoid graphics that “pop out” in the middle of the page because those are very distracting. Your website content should be arranged in a manner that is logical and there should not be an over-abundance of words. You absolutely should have your website designed by a professional. Also, you need to make sure that the HTML of your website is valid so that similar results show up in all of the search engines.

Strong headline

Of course, the headline is the first thing that people are going to read when they land on your website. If the headline doesn’t entice the visitors, it will be all over. Your headline must communicate what the visitor will gain from visiting your website (What’s In It For Me [WIIFM]). In other words, the visitor needs to know that you have the solution to his or her problem.

Well-written text

You need to make sure that your title, headers and meta-tags of each of your web pages are relevant to the rest of the content. You might want to have an abstract in the first paragraph of your text or try to answer questions in your opening paragraph that your readers have asked. Optimizing your content is, of course, extremely important so that the search engines will give you high rankings.

Friendly language

The language in which your content is written should be friendly and human. You should never have content that sounds like you are a corporation instead of a person, no matter which business you are in. Short sentences are definitely recommended. You must speak to your target audience in their language.

The size of your web pages

It is very important to make sure that the sizes of your graphics are appropriate. You also need to make sure that the text/HTML code ratio is as low as possible. Try to keep the loading time of the pages as short as possible. This is important because the users will be more inclined to visit your website again and again if it is easy and quick for them.

Easy navigation

Your website must have a menu that is easy for users to navigate. When people visit a website, everything has to be simple for them. If possible, your website menu should not be on the bottom of the screen. You should have the content arranged in categories and keep important pages a click away and no more, if you can. Another sensible thing to do is to suggest relevant products and/or services on your web pages and to put links in logical and strategic places so that they can benefit your visitors.

Optimize your website for the best keywords and key phrases

When considering search engine optimization (SEO), always remember to optimize your web pages for the most relevant keywords. You should have 1 to 2 terms on each page. Your keywords should appear in important parts of your website, such as your titles, headers and opening paragraphs.

High-quality links

We all know that links are extremely important when it comes to increasing your exposure online. You need to make sure that the links that are pointing to your website contain anchor text. The links should always be relevant to your offerings and they should lead to content that is interesting and informative.

Conclusion

When it comes to your website, you need to successfully lead people to what you have to say and what you have to offer. You must consider many different things. Not only are traffic generation and website views important but bounce rate, the average amount that a visitor spends on your site and conversion rates are also extremely important and are strong contributors to the success of your online marketing campaign.

Remember that when the visitor comes to your site, they must always find what they are looking for. If they don’t find what they are looking for within 8 seconds, they will move on. That is all the time that you have to make a really strong first impression. Your content must always be clear and concise, you should never have distractions on your web pages and you should always allow your visitors to have the option to search and you should make suggestions for other pages that they might find interesting and helpful.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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Link building is the process of building links back to your website. Back links are links that go from other websites back to your website. More back links mean higher search engine rankings.

There are several ways in which to build links and some methods are more effective than others. The following are tips for effective link-building.

• Anchor text that is targeted: Once you start focusing on links on other sites, you must have anchor text that is targeted. Bear in mind that you should not have the same text everywhere. The search engines will take notice of that (not in a good way). You should have a few phrases that you use interchangeably and you should also use the proper name of your website. If it is only possible for you to get an image link, be sure that the website owner places your anchor text or the proper name of your website in the ALT tag of the image.
• Keep your eye on links in and out: The search engines pay attention to where your links appear and they decide how much benefit is returned to your site. If your site has a great deal of inbound links, it will add to your credibility. At the same time, if you are linked to a website that has poor-quality, outbound links, your credibility will not be enhanced.
• The relevance of the website: It is extremely important for your links to have great relevance to what your website is all about. You need to be sure to pursue links in places that are relevant and it is important to focus on how those websites are optimized. The relevance of the links will add more and more to your credibility and to the credibility of your business. Valuable links are links that come from pages with relevant and useful content.
• The importance of page rankings: Page rankings are extremely important; however, they are not the only important thing to consider. It is very possible for a website that has high page rankings to have low value. This situation applies to websites that sell links. It is a good idea to avoid websites that use phrases such as “sponsored by” and “paid for by.” It is possible that those types of websites may not be ranked at all by the search engines.
• Don’t be generous when it comes to link building: As is the case with volume of content, it is the same when it comes to volume of links. More is not necessarily better. It is not a large number of links that will earn you higher rankings on the search engines. It is the quality of your links. It is not always a simple thing to figure out which links are higher quality. If you pay attention to online marketing consultants and take their advice when it comes to link suggestions, you will probably end up with better-quality links. The more valuable your links, the higher your website will rise in the search engines.
• The value of social networking: Getting links into places where there are opportunities to do social networking is of the utmost importance and an extremely effective approach. The search engines pay attention to websites that are very active with continually adding fresh content and you will have higher search engine rankings because of it. Social networking is also very valuable because you are establishing and building valuable relationships with people who will eventually want to do business with you.
• Clean links: You need to make sure that the links that you have on your website are clean. If your links have any extra codes that shouldn’t be there, they are of no use to your website.

The reason that you have links on your website is to increase your search engine rankings. Even though it is sometimes difficult to determine good quality from bad, over time, it will get easier and you will see that it will become second nature to you.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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You have a beautiful-looking website. You originally invested a great deal of money to have a reputable firm design and build it yet you see almost no return on investment (ROI).

When you start to look into why your website is ineffective, you start to discover that not only are you not increasing website traffic but you are actually losing traffic, losing potential customers, and losing the opportunities of establishing new relationships. In fact, your website may be failing to attract visitors at all.

How to get your website to become effective and remain effective

You should have a balance between graphics and text on your website. The website should definitely be aesthetically pleasing but should have valuable content that is easy to download at the same time.

You should always test your website on more than one browser. What looks fantastic on one browser make look terrible on another browser. Many people still use text-only browsers at this point in time.

You should always remember to be meticulous with your website; keep it clean and up to date. You should look for ways to update your site at least once a month. If you let your visitors know that you are doing this on a regular basis, it will be an incentive for them to return to your website often. Even if they visit your website only because they are curious, they are still visiting.

You also need to make sure that you are reviewing your website analysis on a regular basis. Otherwise, you have no way of knowing for sure if your website is totally doing what it is supposed to do.

Issues with your positioning and branding

Website conversion rates: Differentiating and clearly articulated value propositions have a profound effect on website conversion rates. The conversion rate is a measurement of visitors who fulfill your intended outcomes. Those outcomes could include contacting you directly, buying a product from your site, signing up for a blog feed or newsletter, etc.

Your value proposition, which should be the centerpiece of your homepage, should answer the question “Why should I choose to do business with you instead of your competition?”

That is the most important question in business. People struggle with it all of the time. If you are missing an opening message that really grabs your visitors, it can seriously have a negative effect on the ultimate success of your business.

If your website visitors go to your home page and leave quickly, something isn’t right. Your content is not enticing them enough and it is not answering the fundamental questions “Can this company fulfill my needs” and “Should I explore this website further?”

An area of your website that can prove to be problematic is your landing page. The landing page is the first page that a visitor sees. The reason for this is that you generally have some well-indexed content that your visitors have found in a search engine.

It is key to understand how the visitor thinks here. Visitors come to your website to find something specific. It is irrelevant how they may have found you (on purpose or by accident). Initially, they may have absolutely no interest in you and possibly no idea of who you are at all.

It is critical that the first page that they come upon on your website engages your visitors instantly and communicates a solution to their unfulfilled needs. Additionally, your content must be compelling enough to attract them to other areas of your website. You need to make them want to learn more about you. It is not sufficient to merely give them a lot of good information. Otherwise, they will take all of that in and then they will leave.

Hopefully, your traffic reports are detailed enough to communicate to you which keywords are effective at bringing visitors to each page of your website. This helps you to understand where your visitors are coming from, mentally.

If your website visitors are reading the page and leaving, you have succeeded at giving them what they want but you have failed at drawing them to the rest of your website. This can be fixed. You need to improve your navigation and make it more compelling and you need to have calls to action on your website pages.

There are many websites that offer great information and compelling content and that’s the end of it. It is so important to guide visitors to the next step that you wish them to take. If you count on your website visitors to do this by themselves, there is a great chance that they will either make a different choice than the one that you want them to make or they will just leave your website altogether, which can impact how much business you do.

Issues with building your credibility

Testimonials that are authoritative, powerful and specific can have a serious impact on your website’s conversion rates. You must ask yourself the question “Am I potentially losing business because my website does not adequately establish my credibility and value?”

A great way to get in touch with this is to review your website for credibility by building content, for example, testimonials, case studies and client lists. You should distribute your testimonials throughout your website, using one- or two-line excerpts that are appropriate for the content on each page. The testimonials can be about a product, a service or the value of subscribing to your blog or newsletter.

Be sure that all of the content is linked to and from other pages so that your visitors can find it very easily. If, after that, you start getting more phone calls or Emails, you will know that you have done something positive to make your website more effective.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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