Getting the most of your website

You have heard the term "website optimized for the search engines" and how "blogs" always make it to the top of the searches and all other statements like "tableless design with css" by fans of design and web marketing.

While some of the above terms do contribute to achieving a professional online presence there are irrelevant if what you have to offer does not get in front of people that look for it

If you have an established service in the real world and you want to take it to cyberspace or improve your online presence here are the milestones of building a highly optimized website.

Planning

The most important phase in my opinion.  If you do this right or hire the right person, everything else would flow smooth and some months down the road your website will be rockin!

The SEO Pyramid

SEO Pyramid does not apply only to Search Engine Optimization - this video explains how you should go about building your website and perform all the actions for making your brand and services popular online. Just listen and read between the lines.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - The SEO Fundamentals Pyramid from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Choosing the Right Website URL

Search Engines and users alike love keywords describing your primary service in the url. I fix websites so I chose websitefixes.com for my URL although I do SEO and other services. You can imagine that websites like www.seo.com are long taken  so use a service like www.nameboy.com to find a good url for your website. 

NOTE: If you like your old website name and its old enough ( 3+ years or more) keep it or if you find a new good one you can redirect the traffic and the authority it has acquired with a Redirect /we'll take about those some other time/.

Findability and Usability

Presentation these days seem to be everything. There is so much competition nowadays that you have only a second span to catch the eye of your visitor before the flip to the next website deemed #1 in providing the service they are looking for. I personally believe that a clean, user friendly design which is right to the point beats the Flashy graphics you have to go through to get what you need. Following standards set by professionals like Aarron Walter combined with latest trends on resources like Smashing Magazine guarantee your design concept is up to date.

Using the right platform

Now that you know what it takes to plan for a winning website and have a design concept its time to choose the platform to build it on. You would listen to a lot of programmers that whatever they will build will be "the best" and will cost only  "a few thousant" and will do "everything". While that may be true, nothing beats FREE and developed by an army of maniac programmers. I am talking about award winning platforms like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal. Using CMS like this would mean greater flexibility, ease of use high level of code. Not to mention thousands of add-ons premade for your convenience.

And if people tell you that it does not matter how your website is programmed, I will prove them wrong in upcoming case studies.

The website is ready - now what?

If you have made it up to here following the previous points you have set yourself up for success. From now on there only one step: Produce valuable content promoting your company and your services. While its only one step left to dominating your niche it is also the hardest. Different ways to create and promote valuable content will be discussed further so stick around.

Of course - you need to host the website online and here is a good suggestion

Driving Traffic to your Website

Last paragraph it said one last step so what is this for? Ideally if your content is valuable and unique, people will give to others, post it on their websites  and a flood of traffic will follow. But thats only in the ideal world. In reality you have to go out and actually promote your content.  Driving the traffic that will convert is never easy and always requires dedication and analysis. One of the purposes of this website is to discuss link building techniques that work. Until then if you are unsure what to do with your website just contact me.