You'll need to spend more time and effort making your business blog more user friendly, but there is a pay-off. So what you'll do is a lot of work on the front end, but you'll be building a foundation of strength. What you do is the most important thing, and you can get a real edge if you take the time with this. Here are three important elements you need to make your business site more user friendly.
Today is just the beginning of another part of your journey in online marketing, so let's get started.
The general approach for sites is to have short, strong home page copy. You won't capture every visitor's heart, but a well crafted home page will get a percentage of them. The strong focus now after Google's Penguin update is to make all your content as good as possible. Never make visitors have to click through more than two or three times to find what they want. Three clicks is pushing it, and there's really no reason to make people click three times to navigate from the home page.
You might not understand what "above the fold" means but, in this regard, it means what is immediately visible when you visit a website. This is the stuff you see before any scrolling is required. The above the fold space is where your most important information and page elements ought to be. These are the things you might want to force your visitors to see when they first get to your site and before they move on to something else. It makes absolute sense but there are too many sites out there these days that just seem to not get it. You'll need to evaluate how well your site does in this area. If you need to redesign your home page to be better here then you should do that--that is how important it all is. Always remember that the most important thing you need to do--the thing you need to do before you do anything else--is communicate what you've got to offer. Be smart about what you have for admin pages, and this is about your contact page. Google actually looks for these supporting pages on sites at different times, and once such time is if you're doing PPC. Also, people do check out these pages on your site if they're a first time visitor because they want to know if you're up and up. I've had my cell phone number on a sales page and only one person used it in several years - but it looks good.
There are lots of things you can do to set yourself apart but what matters most is that the ways you do this actually work for you. This is a strategy that involves your making sure your visitors are immediately aware of what your business has to offer. This is the thing that every person who finds your website is going to want to know. Not only do they want to know what you've got to offer, they want to know how it will be of benefit to them. Come up with a short tagline for your logo and then either include it in your header or right under it. That's one informational device, and then the site title and first paragraph will take care of the rest.
It's so easy these days to get a privacy policy even if it's a basic one - and you really should do this. It's a good idea to read it just in case there's something that just should not be there, and you do not want to have any surprises down the road. Most of the time you'll see these links in the footer section, and that's the best place for them. If you're heavy into SEO, you may have read that it's not a good idea to have these admin links on every page.
It's too easy to make writing mistakes either in your content or in other areas. Your side columns are just one of these areas. This is where things that also need to be promoted are going to sit--things like special offers, the opt-in boxes for your subscription list, etc. So your copy in those places has to be very effective. Just because most other website owners stick to tossing up graphics for eBooks and subscription boxes and leaving it that way does not mean that you should do it as well. This is what most people are used to both seeing and ignoring. You can put a smaller box in your side column with copy that is written in a smaller font and then include an email field. Use smaller fonts but not fonts that are too small to see and make sure that you have written something different and compelling as well. The truth is that, if you know what to do, you can completely turn around any website--even one that has turned into an abysmal failure. Of course knowledge is only good if you know how to use it and how to use it confidently. It's really all up to you and how badly you want to have a successful business on the web.
Today is just the beginning of another part of your journey in online marketing, so let's get started.
The general approach for sites is to have short, strong home page copy. You won't capture every visitor's heart, but a well crafted home page will get a percentage of them. The strong focus now after Google's Penguin update is to make all your content as good as possible. Never make visitors have to click through more than two or three times to find what they want. Three clicks is pushing it, and there's really no reason to make people click three times to navigate from the home page.
You might not understand what "above the fold" means but, in this regard, it means what is immediately visible when you visit a website. This is the stuff you see before any scrolling is required. The above the fold space is where your most important information and page elements ought to be. These are the things you might want to force your visitors to see when they first get to your site and before they move on to something else. It makes absolute sense but there are too many sites out there these days that just seem to not get it. You'll need to evaluate how well your site does in this area. If you need to redesign your home page to be better here then you should do that--that is how important it all is. Always remember that the most important thing you need to do--the thing you need to do before you do anything else--is communicate what you've got to offer. Be smart about what you have for admin pages, and this is about your contact page. Google actually looks for these supporting pages on sites at different times, and once such time is if you're doing PPC. Also, people do check out these pages on your site if they're a first time visitor because they want to know if you're up and up. I've had my cell phone number on a sales page and only one person used it in several years - but it looks good.
There are lots of things you can do to set yourself apart but what matters most is that the ways you do this actually work for you. This is a strategy that involves your making sure your visitors are immediately aware of what your business has to offer. This is the thing that every person who finds your website is going to want to know. Not only do they want to know what you've got to offer, they want to know how it will be of benefit to them. Come up with a short tagline for your logo and then either include it in your header or right under it. That's one informational device, and then the site title and first paragraph will take care of the rest.
It's so easy these days to get a privacy policy even if it's a basic one - and you really should do this. It's a good idea to read it just in case there's something that just should not be there, and you do not want to have any surprises down the road. Most of the time you'll see these links in the footer section, and that's the best place for them. If you're heavy into SEO, you may have read that it's not a good idea to have these admin links on every page.
It's too easy to make writing mistakes either in your content or in other areas. Your side columns are just one of these areas. This is where things that also need to be promoted are going to sit--things like special offers, the opt-in boxes for your subscription list, etc. So your copy in those places has to be very effective. Just because most other website owners stick to tossing up graphics for eBooks and subscription boxes and leaving it that way does not mean that you should do it as well. This is what most people are used to both seeing and ignoring. You can put a smaller box in your side column with copy that is written in a smaller font and then include an email field. Use smaller fonts but not fonts that are too small to see and make sure that you have written something different and compelling as well. The truth is that, if you know what to do, you can completely turn around any website--even one that has turned into an abysmal failure. Of course knowledge is only good if you know how to use it and how to use it confidently. It's really all up to you and how badly you want to have a successful business on the web.
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