5 Key Ingredients for Website Success

It seems these days that everyone has a website. The corner shop has a website; the school has a website; hell, even my mother has a website. With so many places to find information out there, how can you ever be sure anyone is going to find your site?

Here’s the good news.

You don’t need a) a degree in IT, b) to spend thousands on SEO or c) a magic wand to create your own perfect website that will reach the people you want it to in just the right way. Poorly thought out websites with a disastrous user interface will only be damaging for your brand, your reputation and the sanity of your users, so here are my five key ingredients for creating a successful site.

1.      It’s all about the content

“Oh she would say that – she’s a content writer”

True, I am, and also true, I would. But, even if it is in my blood to harp on about the importance of credible content, it has never been more important than it is right now to populate your site with USEFUL and UNIQUE content. Many business owners prefer to spend hours poring over pantones and templates to make their site look pretty, but then seem to sling on some half-hearted content as a bit of an afterthought.

Getting some well thought out, well written content onto your site is an essential component of any web development plan, and without this key ingredient your wonderful website is doomed to failure. If you can’t do it yourself, put your money where your mouth is and get a decent content writer to help you.

2.      Say ‘yes’ to SEO

Don’t shy away from SEO just because it seems to be incredibly complex. It’s not. Trust me, I’ve met a number of SEO managers, and not one of them would survive a round on the Weakest Link.

SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is the process by which we get Google and Co. to notice our websites exist. Not only that, but by thinking a little about the content we put on our sites, we allow Google to correctly index our sites, which in turn determines the position at which our site appears on search results for particular search terms.

You could spend thousands on SEO, getting one of these high powered agencies to submit 10,000 article directory entries for backlinks and sending out daily press releases about your business. But to be honest, unless you are trying to compete with PepsiCo for the top spot, there really is no need. Smaller businesses and start-up companies can fare very well with some basic DIY SEO, a great deal of which really comes naturally.

Think about the words people will type if they are searching for your type of business. If I was starting up a floristry business in Bath, I would hope people would search for ‘Bath florist’, ‘flower delivery Bath’ and ‘flowers in Bath’. By identifying these key search terms (known as ‘keywords’) I could then make sure these are included here and there on each page, just where they most naturally fit. You only need to mention each keyword two or three times per 500 words for Google to notice, so concentrate on building top quality text and just let the keywords form naturally within the content.

Aside of keywords, other good practices include the use of H1 and H2 tags to draw attention to certain words or phrases, making sure all the pages of the site can be reached within 2 clicks of the homepage and developing meta tags for each page to help the indexing process. Most importantly, do not copy and paste any content from other sites, or even from other places on your own site. Every word of your content must be ORIGINAL and UNIQUE, otherwise Google will slap you down and you’ll suddenly find you are on page 386. If you don’t have time to generate your own high quality content, get yourself an SEO content writer to help.

3.      Think about the user experience

Take some time to view your site from the user’s point of view. How does it look? How easy is it to navigate? What can you tell about the business from the first page or two?

Sometimes, when you are deeply involved in a project, it can be hard to see the wood for the trees. In this case consider getting a fresh pair of eyes to help, or maybe even 30 pairs. There are lots of online focus groups available to test your site, some of which cost as little as a few pence per tester, and these can provide lots of worthwhile feedback in terms of the user experience often picking up on things you would never have noticed yourself.

4.      Make some noise!

So, now you have your wonderful website, classy content, sizzling SEO and useable user interface, you’re all ready to go.

But still you have no traffic.

So… make some noise! Tweet it, Facebook it and LinkedIn about it all over the place. Get that address book out and email all your old contacts, schoolmates and relatives. Don’t stop there either; ask these people to share / retweet / forward on the news that your NEW website is live, and you’ll soon start to see the hits you want.

Consider joining some industry specific forums, or reading industry related blogs. Here you can leave (subtle) comments and links to your site, which will not only help to drive highly relevant traffic to your pages, but will also help with some powerful SEO juice from the backlinks.

5.      Keep it fresh

The hardest thing about creating a successful website it definitely the effort it takes to keep it there. Unfortunately, building a great website is not like making a cake - you can’t just dish it up and walk away. Websites need to be constantly refreshed, updated, tweaked and twiddled with to keep them at the top of their game. If Google thinks your site hasn’t been updated for a few weeks, you will plummet hundreds of ranks overnight, with the more recently updated sites overtaking you.

One of the easiest ways to keep things fresh and delicious is to start your own blog or news page. Make it a regular part of your working week to update this part of your site, ideally daily but as a minimum around 3 – 4 times per week. Use links in your blogposts or news pieces to other areas of your site, or other places in the blog, and make sure you shout it out every time you put something new on there to stimulate more traffic and hopefully a bit of social media sharing too.

If this all sounds a bit too much like hard work, get a content writer to manage your news feed and / or blog. Contact me to find out more about choosing a good content writer, and let me know your own key ingredients for creating a successful website.