Your web site has never been more important. Web sites are the virtual store front to your business. You must have a presence online and not just in one place. The Internet is the place where you and everyone else find information. Business web sites must be easily found by search engines and have either clear calls-to-action or a value proposition as soon as you land on the home page or any other landing page.

Consistency is a critical element to all web sites. Flow and ease of navigation are also very important. When creating a web site, or optimizing one, you must determine the keywords you're going to target. These keywords are extremely important to the overall effectiveness of your web site through search engines. You must determine how people are currently searching for your product or service, and how they might find you through other things they're trying to solve or need. Keyword research can’t be overlooked and must be done with patience and trial and error. Google Analytics and Google Wonder Wheel are two great free tools you can use to help to determine what keywords you should try to optimize in your web site.

Once you have created your web site design, you must correctly code the HTML so web crawlers can find and index its text content. If web sites have a lot of Abode Flash elements or some other form of animation, its critical to code the meta-data and other text content, so people can find you in search engines. There are several easy and quick things you can do to optimize a web site with less than 50 pages. You can apply the same things to larger web sites, but you might want to use search engine optimization software or a content management system (CMS) to organize all of your keywords and content. A web developer needs to get involved if you currently don’t have a CMS that can change meta-data or you can’t change the HTML. My next post will include ten things you can do to optimize your web site.

Mark K.