Archive for April, 2009

Obtaining a winning website involves consideration of multiple factors. With well over 150 million websites online now, trying to come up with a winning site is close in comparison to winning the lottery. Some try to see the forest through the trees, while others spend their time studying the individual atoms that make up the bark. The trick is finding a balance between the two, combining them and perhaps raise your chances of ranking close to page one.

Sometimes finding a niche that has little competition may aid in receiving a decent page ranking, and other times techniques to increase SEO can help too. With about 1.3 billion internet users to date (doubling every 5.32 years), chances are someone will find your website. Balancing pleasant design, creativity, perfect code, accessibility, and adding content often, both original and high quality, can greatly increase a website’s SEO. Combine these attributes and control the “lottery” to increase your small business website’s chances, keeping in mind that the objective is getting to Google page one.

Obtaining a winning small business website involves an immense combination of criteria for any site owner. The balance of website design techniques may aid in the traffic and page ranking a site receives. Though there is no magic formula for the perfect webpage, incorporating multiple techniques can help small business website owners turn their site visitors into customers.

After recently inviting a friend to join Twitter, she replied with an invitation to visit and join her website as a member. I did so, but upon navigating about the site, noticed some things to fix, and upon viewing the source code, realized that there was more wrong than meets the eye.

During this website review, the first thing I noticed was a title description with “.net” in it. Also a metadescription of over 400 characters displayed as three sentences. I continued viewing the code and realized there were more errors the more I looked. I then decided to run her website through Website Grader to see what it would come up with, and found that she scored a 15/100, after being online for a couple years. “Why?” I asked myself, and realized she had let it sit there without adding any content to it since the day it launched.

One thing many small business website owners do not practice, is adding content as often as possible, to give search engines what I like to call “Google Fuel”. They launch a website and think they can kick back and watch money roll in, but that’s not how it works. Regardless of what other web designers say, having a quality website that attracts traffic and repeat visitors to convert to paying customers takes hard work. Adding content often may seem like a chore, but it helps in making a static site more well known with search engines and visitors alike.

This recent website review gave me insight of small business website owners’ tendancy to leave a site sitting idle expecting traffic to come to them. Adding content can be vital for the life of a website, and should be updated regularly.