Imagine if instead of putting hours of your time every week into advertising with yellow page books, online ads, networking groups and cold calling (not that any of these are bad), if you just had customers calling you that already want your services. This is the power of a successful website. A good web site will inform potential customers about any questions or interests they have and direct them either to an online shopping cart or contact page where they will hopefully contact you and make a purchase.
All of this is very much within reach for the average business owner, but is to often not achieved by many businesses due to the lack of understanding of the entire process of obtaining a successful website. What happens in so many cases is we have part of the puzzle put together but are missing the other crucial pieces that are necessary to reach our goal. What some people don't understand is that there are several factors that contribute to the success of our site and the fact that we have done some of those things right will not get us there without the other parts being in place. I will try to break down the factors that are neccesary for us to reach our goal.
The first part is pretty simple, we need to have a site that is well designed, meaning that it looks good and is easy to navigate. Although this sounds pretty simple it is so often overlooked because we think that what we have is good enough, but what some of us are calling good enough is turning away customers. Many business owners either try to design their site themselves or have a family member or friend that "knows what they're doing" do it. Being a small business owner myself I know the hardships of living from job to job, but I strongly believe the benefits are well worth the efforts to make sure you end up with an effective website. Many people are simply scared of the price tag, but you can find a good web designer at a decent price if you d your research and ask around. Finding someone that a friend or acquaintance has used in the past will be a valuable asset in your search but try to avoid having a student or someone that has very little experience doing it because their inexperience may steer you wrong.
Now many people have accomplished the first step but not many business owners have a proper understanding of what it takes for people to find your site. This step requires SEO or (Search Engine Optimization). This consists of keywords, meta tags, headings, titles, external links and a bunch of other factors that contribute to being found by the algorithms that are used by the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Most of the details about SEO are not important to you but it is important that you find someone that specializes in this area that can make sure that your pretty new site can actually be found, and having at least a basic understanding of what it is doesn't hurt either. You want to make sure that your site has high enough rankings in a particular search that you will be on the front page. If you go to http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports/ you can check how your site ranks on the four largest search engines with particular searches, for example a flower shop may rank #45 for roses in Chicago, but rank #10 on flowers in Chicago.
The last part of making your site successful is using PPC or (Pay Per Click) if you have already achieved great results with SEO than this may not be necessary but in some cases it can be hard to be placed as high as you want in the search rankings and so you can use PPC. PPC is the advertising you see on the side of the page when you are searching on the web. The up-side of this is that you can usually get your ad on the first page of any given search but the down-side is that you are paying every time someone clicks on the link to your site on your ad. Many times this is an acceptable loss considering that the people going to your site very well may purchase your services or products. You can do your own PPC Google advertising at https://adwords.google.com and you will find all of the other search engine company's PPC advertising if you do an online search. There are also a number of company's that can help you with this service if you prefer.
All of this is very much within reach for the average business owner, but is to often not achieved by many businesses due to the lack of understanding of the entire process of obtaining a successful website. What happens in so many cases is we have part of the puzzle put together but are missing the other crucial pieces that are necessary to reach our goal. What some people don't understand is that there are several factors that contribute to the success of our site and the fact that we have done some of those things right will not get us there without the other parts being in place. I will try to break down the factors that are neccesary for us to reach our goal.
The first part is pretty simple, we need to have a site that is well designed, meaning that it looks good and is easy to navigate. Although this sounds pretty simple it is so often overlooked because we think that what we have is good enough, but what some of us are calling good enough is turning away customers. Many business owners either try to design their site themselves or have a family member or friend that "knows what they're doing" do it. Being a small business owner myself I know the hardships of living from job to job, but I strongly believe the benefits are well worth the efforts to make sure you end up with an effective website. Many people are simply scared of the price tag, but you can find a good web designer at a decent price if you d your research and ask around. Finding someone that a friend or acquaintance has used in the past will be a valuable asset in your search but try to avoid having a student or someone that has very little experience doing it because their inexperience may steer you wrong.
Now many people have accomplished the first step but not many business owners have a proper understanding of what it takes for people to find your site. This step requires SEO or (Search Engine Optimization). This consists of keywords, meta tags, headings, titles, external links and a bunch of other factors that contribute to being found by the algorithms that are used by the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Most of the details about SEO are not important to you but it is important that you find someone that specializes in this area that can make sure that your pretty new site can actually be found, and having at least a basic understanding of what it is doesn't hurt either. You want to make sure that your site has high enough rankings in a particular search that you will be on the front page. If you go to http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports/ you can check how your site ranks on the four largest search engines with particular searches, for example a flower shop may rank #45 for roses in Chicago, but rank #10 on flowers in Chicago.
The last part of making your site successful is using PPC or (Pay Per Click) if you have already achieved great results with SEO than this may not be necessary but in some cases it can be hard to be placed as high as you want in the search rankings and so you can use PPC. PPC is the advertising you see on the side of the page when you are searching on the web. The up-side of this is that you can usually get your ad on the first page of any given search but the down-side is that you are paying every time someone clicks on the link to your site on your ad. Many times this is an acceptable loss considering that the people going to your site very well may purchase your services or products. You can do your own PPC Google advertising at https://adwords.google.com and you will find all of the other search engine company's PPC advertising if you do an online search. There are also a number of company's that can help you with this service if you prefer.
This concludes this article, I know I did cover every detail involved with web design, if you have interests in this subject you will want to continue to research the subject. Since the web is an ever- changing arena there are endless possibilities of what can be done. I hope this article has been helpful to you and this article and other info can be found at my website http://oneeightydesign.com. Thank you for reading this and have fun exploring the uses of the world wide web.
Written By Nathan Flajole
Written By Nathan Flajole
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