Although free to use social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook are all the rage right now and do indeed offer a range of potential unique advertising features, your own website can be a far more effective and customisable tool. For one thing it would be genuinely difficult for any consumer to take any business that didn’t have its own bespoke website seriously as its generally expected. Your website shouldn’t just be a tool through which to advertise your business though, it could potentially be so much more. Below we’ll examine just a few ingenious ways in which you could boost your business with your own website.
Search Engine Optimisation (or ‘SEO’ for short) is a very modern concept fit for a modern world. In a nut-shell, it’s a system through which your businesses website can increase its online profile in an organic manner by using keywords and links, which will help increase your sites ranking on all major search engines. Since it’s initial humble beginnings in the late 90’s as a spider program, SEO has developed into one of the fastest growing online industries with thousands of SEO Companies current operating worldwide.
SEO focuses on two main areas, namely ‘Content’ and ‘Links’. Content essentially tells the search engine what keywords and phrases are most relevant to your site. For example if you were a company who sold microwaves in Birmingham you’d build you site around the keywords ‘microwaves’ and ‘Birmingham’. The page titles, content and tags would reflect those keywords but the article itself wouldn’t need to be exclusively written about them, just around them. The most important aspect of any SEO campaign however is link building, which increases your websites ranking across all the major search engines based on the number of inbound links to your site from other sites. This tells the engine how popular your site is by the amount of ‘clicks’ you receive and in this way your site’s popularity is built organically by having the content from the SEO campaign linking back directly to your site. Eventually this will increase traffic on your site and increase your rankings on all major search engines.
An ergonomic and attractively designed website is vital in todays market and when it comes to your sites design the primary factors to take into consideration are its impact and its functionality. There are numerous design templates available but it would be advisable not to use any of these as you really want to stand out from the herd. This could be done by using flashy graphics and videos, but this might cause an issue with consumers who don’t have particularly speedy broadband connections. A good middle ground is to use a bespoke website builder. There are numerous companies available who offer a range of tools that can be used by anyone, regardless of their technical expertise. Sites such as Wix and 1&1 website builder can be used to build your businesses website from the ground up and within hours you could have a highly customizable and glorious website that will delight and glamour your potential customers.
Images and fonts might seem superficial but they will be used to form an emotional connection between your site and the consumer. Your sites primary image should be unique, bold and easily identifiable and should take up a large portion of the home page. How image or text heavy your site is depends very much on what your business offers and on your target market. Holiday companies for example will tend to use more images than text, whereas more specific markets will tend to use more text as what they are selling is more specialist and geared towards the professional market as apposed to the general public.
One of the key things that you can do to boost your business through your website is to discover your sites ‘money terms’. This effectively means how your websites traffic translates into sales. For example, if your business sold ‘luxury bath soaps’ then you could put some analytical tracking code into your order page order page. After about a month, the code should be able to collate exactly which search terms resulted in eventual sales and once you’re aware of the most successful search terms, you can alter the content and SEO options of your site accordingly.
Using popular hosting platforms like Tumblr and WordPress can be convenient and their user-friendly interfaces mean that you won’t need a dedicated computer programmer to run your site on a daily basis. However, these platforms are generally rather limited in what they can offer you graphically and their ‘identikit’ nature might make your business come across as vaguely ‘amateurish’. In terms of which server should host your site, don’t always go with the cheapest option. Cheaper servers might not be able to handle large amounts of web traffic and this could cost you potential customers.
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