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Web Development for Your Business
There was a time when becoming relevant on the Internet as a business was as simple as putting up a website and not worrying about much else. As time has passed, search engines have become more sophisticated, and you have to develop a web development plan to allow your business to have a fighting chance of becoming relevant in your industry. This plan should involve developing web properties that are not only informative, but interactive as well. The reward of following a structured plan is a pipeline of customers looking for the products you sell. The penalty for not doing this may be dire. What a Business Website Needs A business owner should put as much care and planning into building their website as they would if they were building a physical building. A good website will have two distinct aspects to it: what you see, and what the search engine sees. What you see is the physical, visuals of your web pages. They should be aesthetically pleasing with colorful images, powerful videos and informative text on every page. This speaks to the professionalism of a business; a website is a representation of this. The layout and wording are important to establishing credibility and getting the sales message across. There may only be one chance to make an impression on a customer – the business website must deliver success to be an option. There are several pages a proper business website needs to have in order to look good and behave properly in the search engines. The main page of a website should supply the basic sales questions: What you do? Who you are? Why engage in business with you? This can be difficult to pare it all down to one page, but it must be done in order to get a powerful sales message across to potential customers. Next, there has to be a page that describes in detail about a business. This page details the experience a business has, the people behind the business and the story of the business. It doesn’t matter if it is a brick and mortar store or an online business; it is vital to include pictures of the business owners so that customers can place a face with a service. Professional pictures that transmit a feeling of trust should be used here. Finally there has to be a contact page with the basic information of your website, mailing address, email address and phone number. This information should be available in other places on the site, but it adds credibility to a website to include this information on a specific page. Behind the scenes of a website, it is vital that the web developer understands the techniques and the value of choosing appropriate keywords and presenting them in a proper format for search engine optimization. A web developer should choose between six and 10 of the most important keywords that describe the business completely. Each of your pages should have a short description that will clearly inform search engines like Google, what your site is about. The length of this should be no more than 160 characters. With these basic factors in place, a website is set up for success, but it will most likely take a bit more for assured success. Blogging for Business As a website is developed, one of the most important factors for success and getting traffic is the value a website provides. A static business site is somewhat limited in this because there is a danger of having too many pages and distracting from the sales message. This is where blogging comes in. Providing relevant, original content about the industry or products involved will drive traffic to your site. The content must be original, informative and provide value. A business can’t just copy information from another site and publish it as theirs. This practice will render a blog useless. Creating interesting and informative posts about relevant topics continually on a blog will provide invaluable credibility. The reason that blogging works so well is that a business can contribute to a community in a personal way, which builds a trust in your service and attracts customers. Content is king in search engine optimization, and a powerful and well thought out blog can be the key to driving large numbers of potential consumers to your website. The Power of Social Media Social media has become a catch phrase that is almost universally misunderstood by businesses, because the first word in the phrase is often ignored: social. Businesses hear this phrase and think of large groups of people on Facebook who are just waiting to be sold products. This causes businesses to waste money buying Facebook likes or Twitter followers, when the only way social media can help you is for a business to invest time and effort connecting with people, and being social. As a business connects with people, through real interaction, the following for that business will grow naturally. This organic following will be much less fickle and more reliable than a following that was paid for. There can be any number of ways to build a following, from having a contest, to sharing unique and interesting photos and information. It is a great way to promote the great original content a business has on its blog. A business shares a blog post on Facebook or Twitter, an individual benefits from that and in turn, shares it with their contacts. Those contacts see this value and share it as well. Before long, a message has gone viral and new customers are coming to your Facebook page and getting linked to your website, bringing in business. Conclusion To market a business online today, there has to be an overall understanding of the tools that are available and how to use them appropriately to get the greatest benefit for your business. Hiring a great web firm and having them professionally manage an online campaign is a great place to start. In an ever changing world, it is important that businesses keep up with all modern technologies available to help sell products. A business that is able to learn how to maximize the benefits that building a great website system is one of the most important factors in successful online sales today. This guest post is by Janice on behalf of web design blog www.inspireyourway.com
