TOP 10 TIPS FOR NEW WEB SITES
By  Chris Costa – 11/30/08

Creating a website for your business is a must in today’s age, but you want to make sure that you follow certain guidelines to create the best possible website.

The goal is to create a professional looking website that is easy to navigate, has solid content and pleases both your visitors and the search engines.  Here are some of the top practices to follow to create a great website that will help bring you new business.

#10-            Highlight What You Do & Your Geographic Location

Make sure that you highlight the type of business you run on the home page.

Add your physical address & phone # in text format on each page. This is good to establish your geographic location.

#9-       Create a Simple Contact Form For Users to Contact You

Make the contact form basic and easy to fill out.

Make sure the contact form has a CAPTCHA security feature to keep spammers away.

#8-       Use Professionally Done Graphics, Photos & Flash Animation.

High quality graphics can make a difference in how your site is perceived. Low quality images can give your site a bad look and turn users off.

#7-       Use Text Navigation on All Pages

Many times sites will have javascript or images for navigation to the other pages within your site.  Text navigation is easier for search engines to follow and helps get your pages indexed.

#6-       Phone # & Email Address Should Be on Top of Every Page

You want to make it as easy as possible for someone to contact you. So make sure your phone # especially is located on the top of each page and in a large font.

#5-       Have a Solid Navigation Structure and Organize Your Content

Make sure you have a dual navigation structure with links to your main pages on the top and bottom of every page within the site.

Break up long paragraphs with bullet points and images.  Having too much text in a row will bore the user, give them information in an easy to read manner.

Break up your content into multiple pages. Don’t create one page and try and fill it with 4 different types of services you offer. Break it into as many subpages as makes sense. The more pages you have with unique content, the better.

#4-       Install Google Analytics

Setup a Google analytics stats account and place the code they give you on each page within your website.  This way you can track all the visitors that come to your site. You can find out key information like how long they stay on the site, how many and which pages they view, what keywords they used at the search engines to find your site and much more.

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#3-            SITEMAPS – Create a Google XML Sitemap and a HTML Sitemap

Your new site should have a sitemap page that lists all the other links within your site.  Your homepage and the other pages should have a link to the sitemap page.

A Google XML sitemap is different and is a file you create in XML format that you then upload to your Google Webmaster tools account.  This is a file that Google uses to index all the pages within your site and then they have many useful tools you can use to view key information on your site.

#2-       Have an Eye-Catching Flash Logo

Create a professionally done Flash Animation Logo with images and text related to your business. Use it on the home page and other pages within the site.  This can make an instant impression on visitors and get your message across.

#1-       Create Unique Page Titles & Meta Descriptions for All Pages

This is one of the most important things that you can do to get your site ranked high in the search engines.  It also provides the ad text that a user will read when they find your site in the search engine results. Creating unique titles is a big part of search engine optimization.

Its key to have unique titles and descriptions on each page, they should match the on page content. Most people will use the same exact description on each page and this can have negative results.

There are many other things that need to be done when creating a new site but these are some of the most important.  If you can’t create a site yourself, make sure to hire a web design and SEO professional to not only design the site, but to optimize the site so it comes up in the top 10 results when someone does a search for your type of business at Google, MSN and Yahoo.