With this being the case you as an online business owner has to ask the most important question “how fast can your website sell?” Designing and writing the content for a website to be sticky is only part of making a website sell. Stickiness does not always mean effectiveness.

So the question of how much face time does your website needs is extremely crucial when deciding what to portray to the public who are potential customers. In sales they always teach to put your best foot forward and get to the point of how you can help the customer. If a salesman beats around the bush and waste a customer’s time then they will struggle.

The same is true for your website. Providing the most important information is what brings in the money. So what type of information should you give to the consumer. Having a consumer on your website for a long time is really good, but if there is no commercial purpose you will not make any money.

The goal to writing for a website that sells is to offer engaging content that is memorable enough for the consumer to remember what they are seeing and giving them the opportunity to give you the money. In sales you have to ask for the money, if you are afraid to ask for the money then it will be harder to have the customer voluntarily give you their money. There must be some type of Call To Action given to the customer so they will take action.

Inviting a customer to your website is just like inviting a customer to your store. You have to impress them right from the start as first impressions are just as critical online as offline. You as the website owner must provide an unforgettable first time impression which will help in the providing a memorable experience.

Remember that building a website is all about psychology as you have to be in constant thought that people are busy and have plenty of other things to do or other places to shop, or in this case websites to visit. So you must get to the point in offering what a customer would want from someone like your business.

Most customers want the obvious quickly asked: who are you?, what do you do?, what do you offer?, why are you so special?, what do other people say about you?. These are all subconcious thoughts that every customer has and you as a business owner must answer them every single time in the most effective manner possible.

This is what it means in “How Fast Can Your Website Sell?“. Although there are several questions in which they ask, they are all around the theme of “Why Should I Give You My Money?”. People give other people money to solve their problems and for a better experience.

Your website must do this as well as your best salesman and then 100 times better as your website does not have the personality that your salesman has. Making your website a memorable and enjoyable experience is the top goal especially for those websites that are asking customer’s to hand over their money.

It is because of this high stakes game that webmasters have come up with several different ideas in how to build a website that will engage its users to the fullest potential. Different people are engaged in various ways. Some like text, some like pictures, some like video, and some like audio so incorporating all of these together to create an excellent user experience is crucial.

At the end of the day people remember things for various reasons, so when you are building and marketing your website you must know your customers psychie so they will remember you in a good way and have a memorable experience when they visit your company against all of the others competing against you.

This is common sense to most consumers that if a company does not get their name out into the mainstream public as much as they at one point used to then that is a good indicator that they are struggling or have retreated into survival mode.

In order for a company to have TOMA (top of mind awareness) they must continually be advertising and marketing especially in times of recession. During a recession is one of the best times to advertise as a company due to the competition going into retreat and losing some of the market share.

Those company’s that decrease their advertising will lose confidence in the mind of the consumers and lose market share to their competitors. This is true for any size of company and any type of company. No matter how established a company is they can always lose market share.

There have been studies that have shown that when major companies back off in the marketing arena that they lose millions of dollars and can lose so much market share that it will take years to recover all due to the lack of advertising.

Branding, reputation, and credibility are always in question in business and even more so during a recession when the general public can view what a company is doing to get through it. As a consumer there are several things to think about when buying from a company like:

1. Is this a reputable company?
2. Is this company going to be around for awhile?
3. What about warranties?
4. Should I buy a product that will be discontinued soon?

These are just some of the questions that a consumer will be asking when they are looking at companies especially to those that are struggling. Consumers can tell when a company is struggling through several signs and one of the most obvious is lack of advertising and retreat mode.

If you are a business owner and want to not only be able to survive the recession but thrive through it then you need to advertise and get your company into the mainstream in order to gobble up the market share. As a business owner you should look at a recession as a perfect time to reap the benefits of your competitors going into hibernation and decreasing their advertising budgets.

The same is true for online companies. Expanding your reach in order to get your company in front of the consumers during a recession is critical as they do more and more research on companies, products, and services using the internet.

Internet marketing is one of the fastest forms of marketing mediums available as a company can broaden their target market in a much more expedited manner. SEO is among one of the top ways of doing internet marketing as people are using the search engines to determine how reputable and credible a company is.

As I speak to many companies I am shocked at the way they treat their online presence. They spend a ton of time, energy, and money on the offline side of things in tools, offices, employees, etc and then when it comes to their website they say “the boss’s son is going to build our website”. The boss’s son is in high school and they think that he will do a great job at building this million dollar companies website.

You might be laughing to yourself as you are reading this or be thinking that you have done this exact same thing, but this is a sad case of business owners not knowing what they need to do and how professional web design firms can help them.

The first item of business to tackle is the idea of freelancers. I have spoken to several companies who had someone build their website a while ago and now they have finished school or something and have moved or work another full time job not doing web design.

Professional web design firms are the only way to go if you want to have a website that is built by professionals. Sure there are great freelancers out there doing great work, but that is very rare in any industry.

It is best to have a company that solely specializes in one field of interest and knows what they are doing along with staying up on the news and improvements with that particular industry. Web design is definitely one of those industries that you will want to have someone who is continually educating themselves on the news and improvements in the industry.

Having a professional looking website is very important to making a company look professional, credible, and reputable. One of the biggest problems in the web design industry is the lack of communication that clients receive from their web designer and/or programmer.

As you look for a web design firm to build your companies website make sure you review what others are saying about them, their work, and most importantly their customer service.

If you are a company that puts your website in the advertising and marketing budget then think again. Having a website is not about just marketing it to make money from, it is as vital as having a business name and a logo.

There are several web design firms across the United States who specialize in various aspects of web design and marketing. Innovation Simple is one of the premier web design companies in St. George Utah and services all of Utah and Las Vegas.

Bottom line is if you want to have a professional website you need to have a professional build it.

As you are filling out your titles, description, and keyword tags you are telling the search engines what you think about the page and what words best describe it. However when you have inbound links to a page with anchor text then that is what other people think the page is about.

It is this principle that Google, originally called Backrub, uses intensely in their algorithm. This is the basis of what PageRank was created after. Determining what one hypertext document says about another hypertext document.

The theory was that in order to determine how important a hypertext document was they would determine the importance by links that pointed into the document and how reputable those other documents were who were doing the linking.

Hence the name Backrub, because the algorithm was highly conditioned to determining the importance of a hypertext document by analyzing the backlinks (the links that point back to a document).

It is due to this philosophy that inbound links are highly important to search engines and their algorithms and how they rank pages in the search engine results pages. Inbound links have a huge impact on how a webpage ranks.

In todays world of SEO link building is one of the most talked about topics and how to do it the most effectively. There are a variety of ways to build links to a page and that must happen in order to look natural. If there are a whole bunch of links pointing to a page from one source then that does not look natural.

In order to get high rankings a webpage must have a variety of inbound links and have high reputation. The more reputation a site has that is linking to you the more link reputation they send with that link. Link reputation is what builds trust and authority for a webpage and website as a whole.

So remember that if you want to have high rankings in the search engines you have to remember the importance of backlinks that look natural and have high reputation and authority. The more highly qualified inbound links the better.

In order for this to happen it will take time. Gaining a vast amount of links all at once is not good, so make sure you understand that it will take time to reach the top of the search engine results page especially for highly competitive terms.

Here are some tips when writing:

1) Use Catchy Headlines: headlines are the only sure thing that readers will read when they read your article. The headline must grab someone’s attention and make them stop in their tracks. Remember that most readers are what we call scan readers which means they skim over words and look for things that stand out or are different. Do not always give the full detail in the headline as well by allowing some mystery to be there in order to pique the readers interest to read more.

2) Use Conversational Writing: humans by nature are social creatures and like to converse one with another in various forms such as speech, writing, video, and other forms. When writing you will want a person to think and feel as though they can be involved in the conversation of what the topic is about. People always like to learn new things and give their own feedback and opinions.

3) Do Not Talk Down To Readers: in conjunction with conversational writing is the point that it is not polite to speak down to people as if you are better than they are. The same goes for writing in a way that does not sound degrading to those who would potentially read your material.

4) Include Great Information: this goes without saying but people like to read things because they want to learn and educate themselves either for entertainment or research. When writing articles you must have some great information that has some substance and not full of fluff. Readers can tell if you are just making stuff up.

5) Get To The Meat Fast: one of the most important things in writing is telling your readers what you are going to talk about in your headline or your starter paragraph. After you have done that efficiently then you do not want to stall with a bunch of fluff and not reveal the meat of what you are talking about. Give it to them so they will quickly be engaged with what you are reading.

6) Use Proper Language: depending on who your readers are will depend on how you speak to them. This will depend on culture, ages, demograpchics, geographics, etc. Everyone is different and every group of people are different. Know who you are writing for and use the proper language for that group like jargon, stories, and more.

1) No Traffic: if your website is up and receiving no traffic then that is a sign that what you have is not being used. If something is not being used then what is the point in having it. Even if you do not do SEO you should be getting some traffic just from telling your current customers about your website and other forms of marketing like newspaper, radio, t.v., etc. Doing SEO for any website is by far the best forms of advertising a website as more and more people are using search engines to find things. Local Search is continually climbing as well where people are using search engines to find local businesses.

2) No Call To Action: having a website and having no call to action (cta) is a huge mistake. A call to action is anything that gives a visitor something to do. There are many forms of call to action like call phone number, email me, fill out form, buy now, etc. Your website must tell a person what to do. If you do not tell them what to do then what do you expect them to do. Not having a call to action on a website is a fatal mistake.

3) Have Traffic, No Sales: if you are receiving traffic to your website and not receiving any sales or conversions then this is an obvious sign that your website sucks. No conversions means no money and that is always not a good sign. There are many factors that could make a website not receive conversions so you just have to go through all of them through your analytics.

4) Crappy Content: visiting a website that has crappy content is never a fun thing to do. Users want to visit a website to see what types of things they could research, view, or do for entertainment. No matter how good a website looks, if it has content that is not good then it does not matter how well the design is. The design and content go hand in hand and must compliment each other.

These are just a few signs that will tell you as a website owner that your website sucks and needs an overhaul or some adjustments. When building and maintaining a website the number one goal is to provide users something that is of value. If your website provides value to consumers it will always do well even if it does not have the best design.

It has been interesting to me to talk to business owners who know quite a bit about business, but know nothing about the internet and websites.

Today I am going to explain the difference between Websites and Webpages:

Websites

A website is a collection of webpages that are under 1 domain. For example if there is a company that owns abccompany.com then this website will have several Webpages like Home, About Us, Contact Us, Testimonials, Products, Services, FAQ’s, and others. All of these pages together make up a Website.

Webpages

A webpage is an independent page of a Website. For example a webpage would be testimonials. This testimonials page can be optimized for whatever keyword phrase you would like it to.

That is a quick synopsis of the difference between Websites vs. Webpages. Another important thing to note is that search engines index Webpages not Websites. As a search engine crawler crawls a website it will crawl each individual webpage and index it.

This is how on some keyword phrases some of the listings are subpages of a website. To find out how many Webpages of your Website have been indexed by a search engine you can do a operation command.

In the search engine type site:www.yourdomain.com. This will show you how many Webpages of your Website are in that particular search engines index. The more you have the better. You also want to make sure your webpages are getting properly indexed.

For example if you know you have 20 Webpages on your Website and you do this command and only 13 show up in the results that lets you know that you have 7 Webpages that are not getting properly indexed.

Now you should know the difference between a Website and a Webpage.

This means that the user comes in to the home page and is generally given a few options to try to filter them to the correct portion of the website for their needs. After the user finds themselves in that place, they then get more options related to that topic. After they click another link, then it gets deeper into that topic, thereby creating a tree-like structure as briefly shown below (image by Wikipedia):

After the entrance (encyclopedia), the user finds science and culture. After finding culture, they find arts and crafts etc.. This is the basic idea in creating a tree like structure.

In some instances, this structure can be difficult to achieve. In these cases, Innovation Simple recommends that you simply try your best so that your users do not get overwhelmed by your content. This is something that we are typically always thinking about and trying to improve with each of our clients.

The benefits to creating this tree like structure in your website, is so that users can navigate your enormous amounts of content (content is king) and easily find what they are looking for. In addition, if users can navigate easily you can be assured that Google will like this move as well. Implement this inasmuch as it is possible, without compromising your user functionality. It is all about your users.

There are some companies that close shop whenever they want and there is no consistency in when they are open, when they close, or when they step out. I have gone to several companies here and there where there has been a sign on the window that says stepped out for a while and then you as a customer have to make a decision if you are going to come back.

The same goes for when a business puts up a website. Posting the hours of operation on your website is a very important piece of information that customers want to know about. The good part of having a website is it can be up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year.

The next thing to consider is what are reasonable hours of operation. Some may say staying open all of the time is a good thing, but in the offline world this is not the case. Keeping a store open 24/7 offline takes a lot of work to be up and running all of the time.

It is important to look at the hours that are most profitable and is in accordance with what type of business you run. For example running a hardware store at night is not going to be as profitable as running it at night. Running a nice restaurant in the morning is not going to be as profitable as at night.

Making a company be as profitable as possible does mean that you have to look at the hours of operation. When a company puts a website online even though the website will be up and running 24/7 does not mean that the people at the company will be able to take calls and answer customers questions 24/7.

The bottom line is that it is very important to put the hours of operation on a website so that customers know more about your company and know when they can call you or stop in to see you. A website should be the most valuable employee and customers do a lot of research online about companies to get a better feel about the company.

This will be highly more critical as customers do research online looking for local businesses. Local search will continue to rise and more and more companies will have to have a website that gives the consumers what they are looking for.

Businesses who do not have a website and consistently post their hours of operation may lose business as the consumers do more research online. Make sure to be consistent in your hours of operation so that consumers do not get confused.

This will be particularly important to those businesses who change their hours according to their busy season or around holidays as most companies change their hours around the seasons and holidays. Overall be consistent in what you show consumers and do not close shop whenever you feel like it, because if you do you will lose sales.

Google indicates bounce rates as “The percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.”

One of the most important thing to realize in this description of bounce rates is that in marketing it is vital that when you show an advertisement to people that the message behind the advertisement fulfills or backs up what the advertisement says.

This is a huge factor because many times people will advertise something just to get people interested and then completely blow it by not fulfilling what they have advertised. This is especially true when it comes to marketing online.

When you show advertisements and have that go to a particular page it is imperative that they see the same thing on the page that they are sent to. If you have an advertisement for “blue widgets” then you will want to have at the top of the page and preferably in the headline of the page “blue widgets”.

This will fulfill the advertisement and the user will feel like they found what they are searching for. The websites that normally have high bounce rates are those that do not fulfill whatever the user clicked on and so they leave.

Having a website that is not easy to navigate and find things will also increase bounce rates because if the landing page that the user found does not show great road signs so to speak they will leave as well.

For the search engines bounce rates are crucial data. For SEO’s the bounce rates of a website are also crucial data because that shows that when you are working hard to get a website to the top of the SERP’s and people click on your listing they will leave the first page.

There is no point in getting a website listed at the top of the SERP’s if no one likes to be on the website.

Blogs normally have higher bounce rates as a lot of people will visit the blog to see what the latest posts are which are on the home page and if there is not a new article then they will leave. However blogs have an increase in repeat visits because users know that the content is always changing and so they will visit the blog to see if there is any new content.

So you might be wondering how you find the bounce rate of a website and what is good and what is bad. The best way to find the bounce rate of a website is to use analytic tools which track how a website performs. The best one I would use is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics will show you what numbers and data you need to know about a website. When it comes to bounce rates you would like to see low numbers which show good bounce rates. The higher the number means the worst for the website.

Ideally you would always like to see the bounce rate numbers below 50%. If they are higher then that is not a good sign and shows you that people do not like to navigate through your website. You will want to have the website up for a while and track the numbers and data over a while to get more accurate results.

You will want to take notice of where your visitors are coming from and that will also give you an idea of why your bounce rates are the way they are. When you are doing SEO for a website having excellent bounce rates are crucial.

If you need to make changes to things to lower the bounce rate make them one at a time so you can track if that was the problem. Do not change everything all at once. Always remember that bounce rates are an indicator to search engines how users engage and interact with your website.

Keeping users on your website is crucial and the more pages they visit along with how long they stay on your website are important goals for any website owner.