Creating a Great Website and making it successful

Creating a Great Website and making it successful

Do you know how many websites are there on web? According topingdomthere were 634 million websites as of December 2012 and more than 50 million websites are being added every year.

Only few thousand websites have good traffic and where there is traffic there will be conversions and this will surely reflect on the companys ROI.

What about the other websites? They will just be present on the web without much impact, with very few visitors, high bounce rate, and zero enquiries.

Hence, it is very important to carefully plan the launch of a website even before registering its domain name.

Care must be taken in both technical and business aspects to make a website successful. I have listed few tips on creating a website and making it a success.

Domain Name for your websiteDomain name is a one of the crucial factor which you need to carefully decide while planning for a website.

Domain names should be short, simple, and easy to type and remember.

Domain name should preferably be a .com because many people still type brandname.com by default.

We cannot blame them as they are used to it; therefore, it is better to choose a .com domain.

And most importantly domain name should not include a word which is present in big brands like yahoowebdesigning.com etc.

If you choose a big brand name in your domain then your domain will always be below them as their brand name and online presence will be very large.

It is always better to Google and check if any big company has similar domain segment in their domain name before you finalize on name.

If you do find something similar it is advisable to choose a different name.

And most importantly do not buy a exact match domain, for example, you have a hotel based in London.

You should not choose domains like hotelinlondon.com because it is similar to keyword associated with your domain.

It is always better to choose something unique like The Majestic .

Google doesnt like exact match domain and there are cases where it has penalized websites for this .

There was a algorithmic update last year on this in google called EMD update .

For details information on how to purchase a domain go through this articleclick here.

I have listed some websites which can help you find good domain name .

http://www.domjax.com/

http://www.namestation.com/

http://www.domainsbot.com/

Website DesignDesign is what attracts your visitors to stay on your website, and hence it is very important.

Based on the nature of your business, you should plan out a web strategy which pleases most of your customers.

Some of the factors you should list down include:

The goal of your website

Analyse what a ideal customer would expect from your website

Can a visitor locate what he looking for on your website

Do not compromise on design quality

Plan out the latest market standards [ web 2.0 enterprise ]

f you have a good budget then contact the best agencies available in your locality.

If you have a limitation on your budget.

Dont worry, now-a-days you get predesigned templates at affordable prices.

You can checkWoothemes,Elegant themes, etc

Hire a web designer from portals likeodesk,freelancer.cometc .

There are some disadvantages of using freelancers for designing your website but if you get a good designer who is skilled and punctual then what more is required.

After the website is ready check with w3 validator to see if there are any coding errors;

If there are then ask your developer to take care of it.

Also take care of all the on-page, and SEO while designing the website itself because it is easy and more effective to optimize a website at the time of development.

Fresh quality content is very importantAfter your website design is ready, the next step is towards planning good quality content for you website.

Content on the website should be easy to understand, descriptive and should be written in simple English.

It is always better to get all the pages written by a single person because it maintains the quality.

If youre a good content writer then you can take care of this by yourself or else you might have to get a content writer do this work for you.

Also it is important to inform them to include 3 to 4% of keywords related to your business. Content should be relevant to your nature of business.

Do not use too many ideas in a paragraph, use one in each paragraph. Use links wherever it is necessary.

I would suggest you to use a readable and sharable content; only then your content strategy would be successful. You can also find a good writer at HARO [http://www.helpareporter.com/]

Problem free hosting is mandatoryOnce your website and content is ready you need to look out for good quality hosting. Hosting is a very crucial part of your website performance.

Your servers should have good uptimes and IPs address provided by the company should not be spammed i.e.

while purchasing hosting space look out for companies who have strict spam rules like hostgator, godaddy etc .

These will help you from being penalized or spammed. Look out for companies who will support you to scale up over a period of time. My advice to you would be, never to choose low cost or free hosting.

In-fact free hosting is very dangerous for your brand reputation because they will display ads next to your web page.

Go for shared hosting to start with use companies like hostgator , godaddy , network solutions etc .

Once your website scales up move to a powerful server like a VPS, or dedicated based on your requirement.

Once the website is launched get reviews from your friends and well wishers.

For few days, based on their input, implement the changes and spend time on making it perfect.

Your website with good design, content and hosting is now ready, but is this enough?.

No, you need to start thinking about getting more visitors to your website. Audience related to your niche should visit your website .

For that you need to plan out Search Engine Optimization strategy, social media activities, etc.

I am giving you a brief outline of these next slides :

Search Engine OptimizationSearch Engine Optimization is a mixture of art and technical aspects.

You have probably taken care of on-page optimization while creating a website; but, that will not be sufficient.

You need to dig deep into your website using tools likepingdomto check each pages load time as Google loves speed.

If you find web pages to be heavy ask your developer to remove unwanted CSS and reduce the size of each webpage as much as possible.

Once your speed stats are okay look into your links and check for broken links, use tools likeScreaming frog to see how your websites is seen by spiders. If you find any broken links ask your developer to fix them.

Take care of all aspects of website optimization like 301 redirection, 404 error page optimization, anchor text optimization, image optimization, alt tag optimization, Title tag, Meta tag, keywords optimization.

You should have a close look at internal link structure, sitemap updation and update the same in Google webmasters tool regularly.

There are more than 200 factors on which Google decides the position of website for a search query.

So it is important to hire a good SEO consultant or a digital marketing agency to take care of your requirements.

You can also try but using experienced consultants will gain good results and save your time.

My suggestion for you: Do Not go for cheap SEO packages or black / grey hat SEO.

You may get results initially but if Google comes to know you are using black/ grey hat methods to rank well then probably their algorithm will penalise you .

After the release of Google penguin update last year many sites that were using these unethical methods have been penalized.

Some good results oriented SEO consultants can be found in popular SEO blogs like SEOmoz,Search engine landetc.

Social media Shouting

Social Media is a place from where you can get lot of online branding for your website, because you find lot of people under single platform and it is easy to connect with them online than offline.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter and many more social media sites can be used for promoting your website.

If you havent signed in yet for any these sites, register your website/business today.

Basic strategy here is the louder you shout, chances of people hearing you is more.

Social media strategies may differ from business to business, below I have generalized some tips which can be used for social media marketing:

Use pictures related to your business and share them on popular social media sites because A picture is worth a thousand words .

Plan for contests and discount coupons for people who get connected with you on these social media sites.

Connect your blog with all these social media sites so that every blog post gets coverage on these sites and it can easily be shared with many people using social plug-in.

Plan your social media road mapFind the right audience and set your objectivesMeasure your goals and results.28

Paid AdsYou might have seen on many websites there will be a layout called Ads by google .

This is a banner ad program that google provides .

Similarly when you do a google search for anything that your looking out for then you can see ads sections right to your search results , thats also a google ad program .

So if you have budget you can plan a paid ad campaign on google , yahoo , bing , youtube etc . You can also get ads related to your business on popular social media sites like facebook , linkedin ,etc .

There are two popular strategies in paid ads one is CPC [ cost per click ] , second is CPM [ cost per impression ] .

Paid ad campaign strategy differ based on business niche , if you want to know about paid ads on google visithere.

ConclusionI hope you now have a brief idea on how to plan and execute a good website and get more visitors for it.

Though all the above mentioned steps are correct, for a website to be successful it needs to be based on a unique idea.

It needs to solve problems which common people face. Examples would be Google which provided a search bar to search all kind of information and Facebook which helped people connect with their friends.

If we create a website which is beneficial to others then we can be a next big thing after Facebook.

For more detailed and more posts visit : http://www.udisystem.com/blogContact : UDI System Jayanagar 9th Block, Bangalore-560069. +9180 65717100 info@udisystem.com