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10 Tips for Planning an Outstanding Website

When faced with the daunting task of planning what to include on your website and how to write the copy, here are a few tips that will make the task easier for you.

1. Visitor Friendly

The main thing to keep in mind is that your website needs to be visitor friendly. What this means is that your customer must be able to find what they are looking for easily and quickly. And that means great navigational system. Most websites either display their navigation bar on the left or at the top. And since most people are used to this type of navigation, it's best to stick with it. It also helps to include your navigation bar at the bottom of each page to save your visitors from having to scroll back to the top.

2. Search Engine Friendly

Search engines try to list sites that contain good content, so you need keywords and phrases on your pages that best describe your service and products. For example, if you are a florist, use the words such as florist, online florist, virtual florist, wedding florist, florist in Sydney, florist on line, flowers, floral, bouquets, floral arrangements etc as many times as possible to ensure high search engine ranking. To find out what keywords your customers may be searching on ask your family and friends or go to: - http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ - http://www.wordtracker.com Once you decide on the keywords, use them in:

(a) Your website's domain name
(b) The title of your page - This is displayed in the top bar
of your browser window
(c) The heading of your home page
(d) The first paragraph of your home page
(e) Meta tags - Keywords, page title, description
(f) Titles of your graphics

Whilst it is important to use keywords as much as possible, it is also important you use them only if they are relevant and do not sound awkward. If you spam your keywords you may be penalized or even banned by some search engines.

3. Informational vs On-line Store

One of the first decisions you need to make is what type of website to have. Will it be informational only or will it be an on-line store or a combination of both? An informational website is like having an on-line brochure. It does not sell products directly to customers, but rather provides details of your business, its products and services and occasionally features a printable order form. The other type of website is an on-line store. It is a virtual salesperson who potentially never stops providing presales information to your prospects - and then making sales to them.

4. Create a Plan

Before you start thinking about what to write on each page of your website, it is important that you create a plan, which lists all the pages you wish to include. Below is a list of the most commonly used pages:

(a) Home Page (First Page)
(b) Products / Services
(c) Contact Us
(d) Pricing
(e) Testimonials / Product Reviews / Before & After
(f) Frequently Asked Questions
(g) Response form such as "Subscribe" or "Enquiry" form
(h) On-line Magazine or Newsletter
(i) Resources/Articles
(j) About Us
(k) Guarantee
(l) Survey
(m) Events Calendar
(n) Search My Website Feature
(o) Return/Refund Policy
(p) Privacy Policy
(q) Site Map
(r) Copyright Information
(s) Links
(t) Media Information
(u) News
(v) On-line store

5. Cross-sell / Up-sell as part of your content

If a customer is looking for a particular product, offer them details of related products. By recommending other products, your customers will learn what else is available and in many cases it will translate to additional sales for you. A company that does this exceptionally well is Amazon - http://www.amazon.com. Search for a particular book and you will find information on what other people who ordered this book also bought. Make it as easy as possible for customers to complete an order by providing clear instructions. Ensure delivery costs are outlined before a customer begins the ordering process.

6. Focus on the customer and their needs

Rather than trying to "sell your business", let your prospects know how your product/service is going to benefit them. Emphasize the benefits and solve problems. Make this the focus of everything you write on every page of your site. Don't try to sell visitors your products or service, help them.

7. Remind your visitors

Remind your visitors they can print out your content. They may browse around your website while it's printing.

8. Use headlines and sub-headlines to grab visitor's attention

9. Offer value

Offer bonuses, free trials, discounts and prizes. List the dollar value beside each bonus. People will feel they're getting a good deal and it will increase the value of your product.

10. Spell check and grammar check your website

Ensure there are no spelling or grammatical errors. Check that all links are working and graphics displaying correctly. If you are still struggling with where to start, visit your supplier's or competitor's websites. Be careful that if you use copy from their site that you do not infringe copyright laws. If in doubt, contact the author or copyright owner and ask for permission. Your ultimate goal is to turn a visitor into a customer. On your website, this is done by providing premium content. Each page should be its own mini site. As you have no control over how a visitor enters your website, it is important they are able to easily work out what your business offers and navigate to other pages within your site.

http://www.web4business.com.au

Does a question mark in the URL affect ranking?

Long ago, it was the consensus in the search engine industry that dynamic URLs (those with a question mark in them) weren`t indexed by the major search engines. Later, consensus was that Google indexed some URLs with question marks, but ranked them lower.

Currently it seems that the search engine industry consensus is that Google indexes dynamic URLs just fine and ranks them right along with other URLs, unless there is a long number after the question mark or an "id=" in it which might indicate a session ID.

Methodology

That`s a lot of theories. It`s probably time to get the facts. The methodology used to find this answer is very simple. I gathered the results of the queries naturally performed last month by myself and four associates using Yahoo! and Google. I then tallied the URLs that contained a question mark for each ranking.

Those results were further refined by converting them into a percentage of the total pages found. Here is the graph showing Google and Yahoo results:

The X-axis shows the rankings from 1 through 8. The Y-axis shows the percentage of URLs found that contained a question mark.

Results

Online poll

Having to register before buying
Hidden charges at the checkout
Lengthy checkout process
No clear delivery details
Phone number not provided on website

(Submit your answer and we`ll show you the results so far)

The first thing I note is that both Yahoo! and Google do contain URLs that contain a question mark. Those major search engines do include some URLs with question marks.

The second thing to notice is the small percentages for both Google and Yahoo!. The average percentage of URLs with question marks is only about 5% on Google and 3% on Yahoo!. It isn`t known what percentage of total URLs have question marks, but it seems very likely that it is a much higher percentage. The difference between Yahoo! and Google further shows that Yahoo! doesn`t include as many dynamic URLs as Google.

It is clear from the data that Google ranks dynamic URLs (those containing a question mark) lower on average than other URLs. The ranking correlation is a -42 on a scale of -100 to +100. That same bias doesn`t seem to occur on Yahoo! where the ranking correlation is a -7 on the same scale. If dynamic URLs make it into the Yahoo! index, they rank as well as other URLs.

Conclusion

Don`t use dynamic URLs ( URLs with question marks in them). If you have dynamic URLs on your website read this Webmaster World post about how to redirect them to static URLs.

This article was written by Jon Ricerca. Jon is one of the leading researchers and authors of the Search Engine Ranking Factor (SERF) reports at SearchEngineGeek.com.

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