Does your website work?

Spunky Jones, Web PR for the Credit Crunch series - 3 of 5

Every website needs to work for the search engines, the users, and for you. These last two are often forgotten in the mad rush to search engine optimize a site for specific keywords.

Webmaster tools allow you to check a multitude of results from the search engines, such as your listing, your ranking, error pages, number of visits, and much more. If there are any of these areas where you know or discover that you could be doing better, then these tools will assist you to resolve the problems.

Not listing on your keywords? Then brainstorm your keywords (Clue: use Google trends and the keywords tool), look at your keyword density, assess whether you have keywords in the most important areas of your site, and include them in those you may have forgotten.

Unsurprisingly, those areas in which the search engines are looking for keywords are also those where your potential  customers also need to be convinced. Do your words sell to visitors to your site? Or have you concentrated too much on the search engine results and omitted to create text that does its sales job? This is all to frequently a problem on websites.

Make sure you focus on the visitors that the search engines bring to your website. It is the individuals who will buy – not the search engine robots. Repeat this phrase to yourself – it is vital.

Check that every area of your site is achieving what you had planned for it to do. Try to buy something from your website. Are your product listings clear? Is it an easy process to purchase through your shopping cart? Can people contact you easily if they need to?

Stand back from your site. Try it as a customer. Does it work?

Now be brutal from a business point of view: is your website making you money? Or is it a black hole that you are throwing money in to?

Solving these issues will put you ahead of the competition.

Hope this blog post was helpful to you, - - Does your website work? - -

Spunky Jones.

1. Assess the Visitors to Your Site
2. Website Promotion, an ongoing Marketing process for your Website
3. Are you driving web traffic away from your website?
4. Which Techniques are the Most Effective?
5. Are You Using, Website Marketing Strategy Effectively?
6. Clarifying the purpose and information architecture process
7. Creating Content with Your Keyword List
8. Your Keyword List and its Importance
9. Surviving in an Economic Downturn
10. Three Essential Building Blocks – Plan, Design, Promote