What a top website knows that you don’t

December 8th, 2010

So you want your web site to do profitably. You need it to achieve excellent search results and translate tons of visits into real transactions. Well, you aren’t alone – not by miles. You’re in the same situation as thousands of millions of competing organisations, who all want their web sites to do the same thing. You are in direct races with millions of sites that sell exactly the same service as you do. And yet the same websites usually seem to come to the front of the line. How?

You know how good business people are supposed to perform a distinct number of recognisable behaviours – the actions of good acumen? Your web site ought to be doing the same. Every profitable web site possesses a run of habits behind it which set it apart from the crowd. If you need your site to work with the best of them, you have to understand how they operate.

To build is not enough

People can get adhesive sanding discs in any location on the net. Why should they come to you?

The web is really unbelievably big – and it is also full, literally bursting, with companies and websites who supply precisely the same product as you. If you accept it at face value, as a numbers game the world wide web is defunct. It’s hopeless. There is no way you can create a website that sells a service and then expect people to come looking for you.

No – the first and most guarded attribute of most successful websites is this: do anything you need to pull your trade through your doors. The hottest strategies at the moment include geography specific marketing, which leaves the world wide landscape and concentrates on getting trade in your hood; and the long tail key phrase, which ignores wide angled searches for your service and homes in on on absolutes instead. Both, by whittling your market down to finely honed niches, ensure that you’ll pull a proper quantity of spending traffic through your website.

Sell what you are

The net is a really old fashioned place. Your website needs to look like it sells apprenticeships- because otherwise it won’t.

Every website is constructed of code.The code alters often – and if it does not alter in line with current search engine “fashions” then your web site is going to fall out of grace. Imagine the fashions in programming as trends in dress or haircuts. A mullet gives off one idea; a clerical collar another. A search engine “sees” your site by reading through its code first. If the code “looks” good, i.e. looks like what it is selling, then your site performs well in results rankings.

The aspect of your website is paramount too. Visitors are wary of web sites that don’t load or work as they expect them to. Whatever you supply, you need to be certain that your website presents and works in the same way as all similar sites: or else no-one will stick around long enough to buy.

Good existing sites

Take a good look at this site. It has been made according to current design trends and it anchors itself in a perfect niche market.

You can pinpoint the marks of good practice immediately. Smooth design, excellent navigation and a superbly defined specialty product. Unless you’re one of the few multinational mega websites, then your website needs to look and work like this one. It must be sharp, blatant, uncomplicated and aimed at the people who are likely to want what it vends.

The first secret of top performing sites is this: know your limits. The net is not the wide open cornucopia of eager buyers we all used to think it was. It’s a jammed up, roiling mess of a world wide marketplace that won’t work at all unless you set your lines and work within them. Our example web site has done exactly that – and it’s reaping considerable benefits. You ought to be, too.

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