To kick of the New Year right, take a few minutes to make sure your website is fully optimized, or to find ways to add to what you’ve already accomplished in way of your local business web site design.
1. Design Look and Feel
Is your website catchy, but not too busy? Are the different pages clear and easily accessible? Can a visitor find what they’re looking for without much effort? If you can’t answer yes to all of these questions, then you need to really look closely at your local business website design, or hire a professional to do it for you. Your site should be easy to navigate for visitors and provide all of the information they’re looking for without a problem.
2. Visitor Friendliness
It’s great if you have a site that’s optimized to attract visitors, but if those visitors don’t hang around once they get there, then the most optimized site in the world won’t make much of a difference. To reiterate info about the design look and feel of your site mentioned above, it needs to be something that’s catchy but not confusing for your visitors. Less words is often better to clearly get your point and business information across.
3. SEO Optimized
You want to strategically place keywords throughout your website, use subheadings and bullet points with keywords included, and do what you can to optimize your site ‘behind the scenes’. If you’ve already got the basics down, consider hiring a SEO professional to help you really boost your business to the next level by letting them help you get the most exposure as possible with the search engines via SEO.
4. Call to Action
Each of your website pages should have a clear call to action. The call to action should be strategically placed in the middle of the page. Web forms are great to use for Call to Actions to help you gather valuable visitor information. Presenting eBooks and white papers for download are also great examples of Calls to Actions that encourage your audience and give you a means to gather visitor information for later use.
5. Content Clarity and Focus
At risk of sounding repetitive, I thought it was worth it to mention content clarity and focus in a section of its own, though I’ve mentioned it to some extent previously. Without clear content that involves clarity and focus, it will be hard to hold a visitor’s attention. When someone lands on your web page, they should quickly be able to decipher what it is you do and the services and products you offer as a local business. They should also be able to read succinct and helpful content that intrigues them enough to keep reading and coming back for more.
You can use these tips if you’re just getting your website up and running as a local business, or you can use them as a checklist to make sure you’re heading in the right direction to have a sticky (for visitors to hang around and convert), fully optimized website throughout 2012 for more leads and sales than ever before!
One must take care that the site should not be over optimized with SEO and it may show it effect as Google panda.
guys,google has now started to penalise site that are over seo optimised,
google engineer-matt cutts said
This year is going to be tough and I might gear up my SEO tactics to be in competition. Extensive keyword research, new traffic generation strategy to try and hopefully more ideas to write on. Providing quality content is the hardest part for me. Hope to figure that out.
We can help you with that! check out our website http://www.surefiresocial.com and fill out our online visibility report.
Content Clarity and Focus are more than necessary! I agree completly with what you said, Chris. Thanks for sharing this tips!
With this blog post you have absolutely hit the nail on the head. As a reader and blog visitor the first thing that attracts me to a blog is its look. Clarity and focus are the factors that lead me to it the next time. And call to action is the catalyst that makes people read and follow bloggers on Twitter. Liked your pointers and people especially those new to the blogging world, can benefit a lot by following these steps. Thanks.
design is an integral part of a website. As a reader I would like to read a site which has a newt and clean look with good content.
Agree with you, the website must be user friendly. This will help readers to be attached with the website. Also the website should be attractive enough to attract visitors. SEO optimization is also very important to increase the number of visitors to websites. Also the content on the website must be of high quality. Information which is useful for the readers must be posted. This will make readers to be attached to the website.
Inorder to gain success in business, online presence of the business is very important. Also the website should be very attractive to gather readers. To achieve this SEO optimization is a must. But inorder to make most from this one should hire a professional. This will really help in boosting the business.
These are great. You're right, the new year is ahead of us and we should start it with a good plan for our SEO. And keeping our minds in check when it comes to the changes in the algorithm that Google has implemented the past year will also help us. They have made a lot so familiarizing them is a good start.
I think the biggest thing right now is updating our sites regularly and consistently. Based from what I read, the value of it has increased by a lot.
Good list of checklist which we can use. I have tried to do most of what you have listed, but then… if I may ask, what do you think of my web hosting site? Any way do you think I can improve it further?