Inbound links are links that come from other websites.
Add snippets of your content to Facebook pages, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube content and make sure they have links that point back to your website.
Inbound links are absolutely crucial, but even more valuable are links from existing websites in your own industry. Contact all your partners and customers and encourage all of them to link to your website.
Buying the right domain name is absolutely crucial.
Domain names should include the right “broad match” keyword for your business, otherwise your website may never rank well for that search result.
If you are a whiz with CSS and CSS-based grid systems then go ahead and make your own design. But for the rest of us, it’s far easier to take an existing free design and modify it.
When you look at a website you might see this:
In the customer website – below – take note of 6 things:
1) The logo and the contact details are at the top of the page. It is very important that the contact details can be seen immediately. Research shows that a very small percentage of visitors ever view below the “fold” of the page, so the most important information must be placed at the top of the page.
Let’s say you have a great website design. You’ve done all the basics well and now the customer has the impulse to place an order with you. Are your contact details right there and unmissable?
In your website design make sure you have a highly visible location for your contact details. I usually reserve the top right hand corner for this purpose. You can see a good example of this below…
This is a brand new product from Google which is not yet available in all countries. It is tremendously exciting in terms of good website design. It’s called Google Business Photos and it’s also linked to Google Maps.
Just as Google Street View shows the outside of your store, Google Business Photos shows the INSIDE of your store in 360 degree imagery.
I covered using Google Maps to show your location, but now I’m suggesting something related to that. If you are about to go somewhere that you have never seen before, it would be great to be able to have a peek at the environment before you actually spend the money to go there.
Put yourself in the shoes of a tourist. You are planning to visit a country you have never visited before. Let’s randomly pick Spain. Then you choose a city to visit, such as Barcelona. Now you need to figure out where to stay, based on the nearness to the tourist hot spots you want to visit.
Of course every website tells you they are near the tourist hotspots, but past experience tells you that some of them are lying! How do I describe convincingly that the client really is near the beach, or really is close to all the tourist attractions.
Well… a picture says more than a thousand words can. Using Google Maps you can show your location and also show the route from the airport to your location.
I enjoy hearing my client’s oohs and aaah’s when they see their finished site for the first time.
How do I make such lovely designs? I use free templates as a basic starter design. After finding a template that suits the needs of the client, I then edit the graphics and the CSS to match the corporate color scheme. Usually almost every aspect of the template gets changed (rollover images, icons, background colors and shading), but it helps having something well designed to start from.
Getting your domain indexed by Google so that you simply show up when someone searches for your exact URL/domain is easy, thhat happens almost immediately. But to get your content indexed so that you show up in search results on the keywords and phrases that you have used… that can take months.
The reason for this is that Google places more value on websites that have other existing/mature websites linking to them.
This client runs a bed and breakfast. They have several rooms and they are near to desirable tourism areas.
All of these things must be communicated rapidly to the visitors, because (on average) research shows you have only 15 seconds to get the visitors attention. A picture is worth a thousand words… therefore good graphic design is the key to communicating to visitors.
This blog is provided as a free service to encourage readers and visitors to create better and more useful websites.
