What most website owners don’t understand is that visitors don’t always enter your site via the home page.  If your website is properly optimized for search engines, any of your pages is a potential landing page for visitors.  Your job is to make sure that no matter what page your visitor lands on, they don’t feel like they’ve entered a conversation already in progress.

Set up every page of your website to be an effective landing page, or entry point for your website.  Make sure that your navigation scheme is consistent throughout the website so that no matter which page visitors enter the site from, they can easily identify where they are at on the site and can easily get around.

Unfortunately, very few websites are properly optimized for search engines.  Yours can and should be!  But that’s for another post.  One of the benefits of having a properly optimized website is that you get visitors directly to what they’re looking for on your website which helps them stick around longer.  Use a good format on each of your pages talking mostly about the benefits to the visitor of being there.

Have your main “calls to action” visible and easily accessible from every page so that a visitor entering your site through a different page than the home page knows exactly what you want him to do while on your site.

Also, if you set up pay per click campaigns at Overture, Google AdWords, or any of the others, make sure to not send all that traffic just to your home page.  But rather, set up specific landing pages that relate directly to the specific groups of keyword phrases you are bidding on.

Landing pages are so important!  Every page of your website is a potential landing page, so remember to try and keep visitors interested not just on your home page, but on every page of your site.  That’s it for today!  Thanks a lot for reading.  Bye for now!

Lots of web designers out there can build good looking websites, but few have the marketing and branding experience necessary to really create an effective look and feel for your business.

It has been our experience that web visitors will make an immediate judgement on the quality of your products, your services, and your business based on the look and feel of your website.  Your credibility is at stake here! Now don’t get me wrong, the information on your website is way more important than how the website looks.  But, imagine if the design of your website could instantly impress visitors enough to stay long enough to actually read the information your site offers!

A good business website will:

1. Look professional
2. Effectively portray your company’s brand and main message
3. Impress your target market
4. Load quickly
5. Be very easy to navigate
6. Have a clear benefits rich message
7. Be consistent with other marketing and advertising pieces your company uses

The best advice I could give to a business owner wanting a new website would be to not take this step of your marketing lightly.  Don’t pay your partners kid a couple hundred bucks to build you a website with some new software he has.  This is your company’s credibility we’re talking about so take it seriously!  If you want a professional website, hire a professional website designer.  And make sure that designer can explain to you the results your new design will produce, not just how great it will look.

That’s all for now.  Part 4 of this series will be a great one, so don’t miss it!

You see, buying patterns on the Internet are different from buying patterns off the Internet.  For example:

Let’s say you need to find some sort of stain remover to get the embarassing under arm stains out of your favorite work shirt.  And let’s also say you have loaded the kids up in the van and headed over to the local Wal-Mart to try and find a stain remover equal to the task.  What happens when you walk through the front door of Wal-Mart and have no idea where the stain removers are located?

You don’t walk right back out, load the kids back up and drive over to Target right?  You walk around a little, and if necessary ask an associate for help.

If you’re searching for a stain remover online from the comfort of your living room, still in your pajamas and bunny slippers… it’s different.  When you type “stain remover” into a search engine and get to a specific website, you expect to see what you searched for immediately.  And if you don’t see it right away, you don’t spend too much time looking at what else the site has to offer.  Instead you go right back to that search engine and see what the next site on the list has to offer.

So, to keep people from getting to your website and then immediately leaving there are a few things you need to do.

1. Make sure your website loads quickly. Nothing frustrates visitors more than having to wait longer than about 15-20 seconds for your website to even load.  Ask your web designer what you can do to keep your load times down, especially on your home page.  Having lots of images on a page really slows down load times, as does having flash or other animations.  It’s definitely good to have images, but use them sparingly and place them strategically.  Also, make sure your web designer helps you optimize your images for faster loading.
2. Have a good headline.  I could (and will) write a whole other series on composing effective headlines!  For now, to create a good headline make sure the headline of the page clearly identifies the benefit to reading the rest of the text on the page.  Site visitors are selfish!  They all want to know “What’s in it for me”.  So create a headline that clearly tells the visitor why they should read on.  The biggest suggestion I could make here would be to look at other people’s effective headlines, figure out why they work so well, and model yours after the same principles.
3. Break up long blocks of text into short, easy to read paragraphs.  Use bold text and even additional headlines to draw the reader’s eyes to main points throughout the content of the page.
4. Having a numbered or bulleted list of benefits on the page tends to keep a visitor’s interest longer than just sentences of text.  Be clear and to the point with your text.  People generally don’t like to wade through lots of fluff on a website.  Think like your potential site visitor and identify what does he or she really want to learn on your website? What questions does he or she have that need to be answered?
5. Make sure your web designer uses as little code as possible.  If your web designer really knows what he’s doing, he can accomplish what your website needs without tons of extra code and/or comment tags that significantly slow down how quickly your website loads.

The Elvtech.com home page currently takes about 11 seconds to load on a 56k modem.  How long does yours take? As of this writing, you can do a free check of how long it takes your website to load by going here: http://www.netmechanic.com.

That about does it for part 2 of this series.  Part 3 will be posted soon and will deal with the look and feel of your website.  Best of success to you!

I think the reason for this was that most of the people at these conferences were in the process of building or re-building their sites and weren’t really ready to market yet.  As I answered these questions throughout the week, I realized there are some very important priciples that when applied to any website, can significantly increase the chances of success.

So, over the next few days I’m going to address what things to consider when trying to plan and create a successful business website. I titled this series “Secrets to a Successful Website” because indeed, very few website owners seem to understand the principles I’m going to share with you.  Following these principles can lead to insanely impressive results for your website, so let’s dig in with secret #1.

Secret number 1 is probably the most important, and yet overlooked of all the secrets I’ll share in this series.  The secret is this:

Your website has to have way more information on it than you think it does!

People are on your website searching for information!  Don’t just list your products or your services.  Set your website up to be a resource within your market!  Offer free informational articles you think your target visitors might be interested in.  Or launch a blog that you can post information in regularly. Do whatever you can to increase your credibility and give visitors a reason to come back to your site.

The more valuable, market specific information your site visitors find on your website, the more your credibility within your market soars.  Also, think about this: Every visitor to your website potentially has a different question about your products, services, or company.  If your website doesn’t answer each and every one of those questions you are losing visitors and potential clients because they’re leaving your site and going to whatever site does have the answers.

In order to answer all your visitors’ potential questions, your website must contain a good amount of information.  And, your website will have to be set up so it can continually grow as you regularly add new information to answer new questions that come up in your business.  Spend some time planning how you can offer your target site visitors valuable information on your website.

As you write content for the individual pages of your website, remember to think like your target customers who will be reading your content.  The reader does want to read about the different features of your products or services, but what they’re really interested in is ”what will your products or services do for me”.  Be sure to explain the benefits of your products or services to the customer. Tell them why they care about the specific features you’re listing for them.

One other benefit to having a lot of quality information on your website is that search engines will love you!  If search engines see that you’re constantly adding new information to your website, they consider that your website must be a very up to date resource within your market.  And those are the kinds of sites search engines like to place at the top of search listings.

If you aren’t sure what kinds of information you should include on your website, a quick review of some of your competitors’ websites can provide you with some great ideas. Just step into the shoes of your target customers.  What information would they be interested in seeing on your website?

In the next post, I’ll be explaining a concept that is costing many website owners thousands of dollars each week.  The concept deals with something I call “the 15 second rule”.  Expect that post within the next 48 hours!

Thanks for reading, and happy marketing!

Our new success blog will be updated regularly with tidbits of info, case studies, stories and the general opinion of our team here at Elvtech Web Solutions.  With years of experience doing business online ourselves, we know what it takes to have a successful website.  Check back often for tips and strategies aimed at helping you make sure your website is profitable.

We welcome your comments and/or questions to posts on this blog and look forward to helping you be successful.  So let’s get started!