Free Website, Printing and Graphic Design Tips

Whether you’re just sitting down to begin designing your website or if you already have a website, you may want to include the following information in your site.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s): Adding a “Frequently Asked Questions” page to your website enhances both user-friendliness and search-engine friendliness. Visitors go to this page looking for quick answers to common questions regarding your services.

“Make it Sticky”: A “Sticky” website keeps its visitors coming back by providing information they want. You site should be informative and interactive. Downloadable documents are a very effective way to inform, engage and boost search engine results. These documents could include service or product related “How-To” and Resource Information, Coupons, Gift Certificates, product instructions, etc.

Links: Help your visitors by providing links to service or product related informational sites. These links will add to your site’s interactivity and will enhance your search engine placement. You could use links to industry associations, organizations, and anything else you think your visitors may be interested in. Please be sure to include only those sites which are relevant to yours! Too many links or links to unrelated sites may result in lower search engine rankings.

Add A Guarantee: A guarantee is a great way to increase consumer confidence. Visitors will choose to do business with a company that provides a guarantee over a company which does not offer one.

Customer Testimonials: Be sure to collect and save positive feedback from your previous customers! Providing potential clients with positive feedback from existing clients is another great way to help build confidence in your company and its services.

Terms and Conditions: Your company’s terms and conditions of sale should be included on your website.

Contact Form: Forms allow you to request specific information from your visitors. This method helps to ensure that you obtain the type of contact information you want, the visitor’s email address and any other information you may need. This information can be returned to you in an email.

Although there are hundreds of items you can select to include inyour website, the above mentioned ones are among my favorites. They are simple, yet effective tools in creating a successful website.

When searching for a product or service online the first thing I do is enter a word or phase to describe what I’m looking for. If I’m looking for toys for my puppy I might enter “puppy toys” into the search box. Well, if you sell puppy toys and you do not have “puppy toys” listed in your site’s keywords, your website will not be returned as a possible resource for “puppy toys” and I’ll never know that you had exactly what I was looking for. So, how do you find out what keywords people will use when searching for your services or products? A simple but slightly labor intensive way would be to research your competitor’s sites. Go to the search engine of your choice. In the search box type a word or phrase that you think your customers would use to find businesses like yours. When the list comes up, select a competitor and click on their link. When the page comes up right click on the page and select “view source” from the menu that appears. A file with a mesmerizing amount of what looks like gibberish will open up in notepad. Look for a line that begins “<meta name=”keywords” content=” and take note of the words. Copying and pasting them into another document would be a good way to keep track. After visiting several of the top sites (the more the better), you will find that certain keywords appear more frequently than others. Try adding the top 5 or ten to the keyword section of your website.  If you don’t know where to find the keywords on your site or how to add to or change them, please send me an email or submit a comment and I’ll help you to locate them as “painlessly” as possible. (It’s a free service!) There are several other ways to determine the right keywords for your website. I’ll address additional methods in future posts. “Stay tuned!”