Hints and Tips for Maximizing the Value of your Company Website

Although many business owners see the benefits to having a website, a number of them don't understand that a website must be promoted in order to gain rankings within the search engines. So many business owners take the attitude that they have paid to have a website constructed and now they can sit back and wait for all the additional business to roll in. The construction of your website is just the beginning! Once your website has been built, you need to do what you can to get your site ranked highly with the search engines. This can be done in several different ways. One of the cheapest and easiest is to write an article or press release about your business and submit to article directories. This will provide you with back-links to your site provided you put your site's url either within the body of the article or in the authors biography area. Another way to get back links is to ask for them. Email other businesses which are related to your own (not competitors obviously) and ask if they will link to your site. You may offer to provide a reciprocal link. The more back-links you have, the more the search engines tend to like your site provided the links are from sites which are relevant to the topic of your site.

Another way to drive traffic to your site and increase your site's popularity rankings is to purchase adwords from Google. You will notice that when you visit a site there are "sponsored site" listings which appear at the top or down the side of the site. These are companies that have purchased keywords so that they can appear in prime locations when somebody searches on the keywords that you have chosen which relate to your site.

There is a lot of misunderstanding with regards to having fancy visuals on your site. The fact is that some visuals may in fact lower your site's ranking in the search engines or detract from the message that you are trying to convey to your potential customers.

You need to give a lot of thought to your website before having it built. Ask yourself some questions such as:-

-- What do you want your website to achieve?
-- Do you want to attract more customers?
-- Do you want to educate the public as to what you are selling?
-- Are your plans for a website consistent with your brand image?
-- Are you focussing on your customer's needs rather than trying to create a site that appeals to you aesthetically.

Content is King!

Always remember that it is the content of your website that attracts visitors and encourages them to explore, connect, act and return. New content should be added on a regular basis. For example new products or services, latest news from your industry, success stories, promotions and free offers. (Free is the most frequent search word in Google!). Information such as hints and tips or newsletters that are relevant to your product or service and your customers are likely to make your site visitors stay or come back to your website. Another good reason to update your site regularly is that the search engines favour sites that are frequently updated. They will visit your site often if you update regularly and your business is more likely to appear in the top search results, which is what we're all aiming for.

Your website should invite visitors to contact you for further information such as a brochure, to subscribe to a newsletter or to request a quote. This will also give you a list of interested visitors who can be marketed to in the future if you have a new product or service that you want them to know about.

Make it easy for the visitor to become a customer by reducing the number of keystrokes that are required to make a purchase or seek further information. Your site should be simple to navigate and offer relevant and interesting information.

All these facets of optimisation should be included in quotes that you get from your web design service if you want to maximize your website's return.

Grant Taylor has build literally hundreds of websites for various clients and is well versed on how to optimize your site for search engine rankings. See http://nicheinternetmarketing.com.au/hints_and_tips.html