What Should You Include on your Website?

In the previous post, I told you your website is your most important business asset. When considering the design of your site, look at your competition. Your site will probably look a lot like theirs. Ultimately, you want to answer the following question: “What do I want my visitors to do or know about me?” To answer this, you must know your audience. What kind of people will be interested in my site? For example, I am a freelance writer. The kind of people I want visiting my site are business owners or people in decision making positions that need good writing to promote their products or services. It wouldn’t make much sense for people who are looking for widgets to visit my site.

Once you’ve identified your audience, how are you going to meet their needs? Most websites have a series of tabs that link to another page serving a specific purpose. The most common are:

• Home: Most landing pages go to the home page. It tells visitors what you do and what you do. It’s the starting point of the sales process.

• About: This is your biography. Be sure to include a picture (head shot just above the shoulders). It’s the most visited page on your website.

• Contact: Tells visitors how they can reach you. I suggest using a contact form that includes your email, phone numbers, and address. It’s also good for collecting e-mail addresses for future use

• Product Page: If you are selling a physical product, show an image and give the specifications. You will also need a shopping cart which provides methods of payment and shipping instructions

• Services Page: If you provide a service, list them here and give some samples

• Testimonials: Ask your customers to provide a quote about how pleasant it was to work with you. Even better, try to get them to agree to a feature story. What your produce/service has done is more effective than what it can do..

A term you may or may not be familiar with is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This means GOOGLE or Bing, or any of the other search engines are picking up your content. The best way to do this is to use keywords, which are words/phrases that describe your content. Search engines scan the web using “spiders”. The more hits you get, the higher your ranking. If you’re on page 35 on the GOOGLE rankings, no one is seeing your content, thus they are not visiting your site. In reality, most people don’t look past page two.

Use keywords in page titles, descriptions, domain names, and most importantly, content. Do not overuse. Overloading your content with keywords won’t help your score. The spiders are hip to that trick. In fact, it will hurt you by labeling you as a spammer. Use 1-2 unique keywords per page. Begin your titles with keywords, if possible. The first sentence of first paragraph should include the keyword.

You may now be asking yourself “what is content?”

I will answer this in the next post…