What Makes A Website Successful?

To those of you with informational sites that give your business a web presence, it is likely that an increase in business stems from your web site.

For those of you with E-Commerce sites, you would probably measure success in sales from your web site. But the truth of the matter is, before you can see those results you must first be found on the Internet. After being found the next step is to have a web site that makes people stay and makes them want to do business with you. But the first step is the hardest to overcome with millions of other web sites promoting the same type of products as yours, how do you get on the first two pages, or even page one for what you do or sell?

I am surprised on a daily basis of the number of small businesses that think they will put up a web site and register it with Google (once) and the world will then beat a path to their door. Or even some who do not register with search engines at all! Google, by the way, holds 52% of the market, but MSN Search and Yahoo also hold a significant share, as does Ask Jeeves (http://www.Ask.com). At the start of 2006, these 4 make up the bulk of the search engine usage.

The truth of the matter is that search engines are the life's blood of a web site. The way people find you on the internet is to go to their favorite search engine (which may not be Google) and type in a phrase to describe what they are looking for. The search engine then returns results, usually about 10 to a page, of links to the sites that it thinks are most relevant based on the words or phrase they typed in.

Did you ever go to a search engine and do a search, and take notice of the heading above your search results? It tells you on the first page that this is 1 through 10 of 4,185,672 web pages that matched your search term. Did you ever go to site #4,185,672 to look for your search term? Nobody else does either! But what is the difference between the site that was number 1 on the first page and the one that was last on page number 418,568?

First off.....your web site must be built properly! If your sure your web site is built right, visit our Sins of web design page and compare it to your web site. In the future newsletters we plan on covering this subject in great detail. Keep your eye pealed for our next news letter!

Now for the most important phrase you will ever hear.

"CONTENT IS KING"!

Two web sites with good programming and none of the deadly sins of web design are both submitted to the search engines at the desired interval. All things being equal except that one web site has limited text (maybe 200 words per page) and is about 5-10 pages in size. The second web site is much more expansive, has numerous internal and outbound links to relevant material to it's subject matter. The second site will rank far above the first site

An excellent example of content (relevant content) can be found at http://www.EastEndRealtor.com. This web site has a link to town codes for home owners or purchasers. It ranks higher for the towns building codes than the town's building code department does. Although this web site has a few flaws, it is extremely well done. It is one of the few "frames" web sites I have seen that was programmed properly. But most of all, it has gobs of (relevant) content and links to relevant material in regard to Real Estate In Eastern Long Island (New York).

If your web site is having difficulty breaking into the top 50 pages, never mind the top two, you might want to look at our article on deadly sins in web design and see if you are guilty. Then you may want to look at your content and outbound links to relevant content and compare it to the East End Realtor site.

Regards

The HeffComm Webmaster