3 Steps To Your First Small Business Website

When planning your first small business website, there are three essential questions you should ask yourself:

1. Who is your target audience?
2. How will your target audience find you?
3. How will you convert your visitors into sales?

These questions sound obvious, but it’s amazing how many people don’t bother…and then moan that “our website doesn’t bring us any business”.

1) Who is your target audience?

Give a great deal of thought to your target market. Who do you want to attract to your website? Why? The answer to that is more than likely to sell them something – a product, a service, or an idea perhaps.

Claiming that your market is anyone and everyone is far too vague, and your website will lack focus, and fail to maximise its potential. Ideally you should be aiming to create a niche.

2) How will they find you?

Creating a niche will also help you with the search engines, and drive hot leads to your site.

Consider what keywords your target market might type into a search engine to find you. Actually do the searches yourself. Who comes up in the top 30? Because that’s where you need to be. Are your competitors there? Look at their sites. Do they work? How can you improve on them? Identify something unique about your business that sets it apart from the rest.

Those keywords – or keyphrases to be more accurate – need to be incorporated into your pages of your site – in the page titles, in the headings, and in the internal links.
Be specific with your keyphrases. They will be less competitive than the more general single word searches, and will more accurately target your market. You may have to localise or specialise to get in that top 30 – and the top 30 is where you need to be to drive traffic to your site. As I am sure you are aware from your own experience, if you haven’t found what you are looking for in the first 3 results pages, you look elsewhere.

The key to achieving high search engine rankings is building inbound links to your web pages – that is pages on external websites that link to pages on your site. Crucially this link acquisition should be a natural growth – where inbound link count increases at a gradual pace. The pages that link to yours should be relevant, on-topic and ideally contain the same keywords – especially in the linking text. Search engines rank pages based upon their reputation – your ranking will be determined by what other (preferably high ranking) pages say about your page.

3) How will you convert your visitors into sales?

Don’t just tell them what you do or sell. Tell them why they want it (yes, want – not need). Offer incentives, freebies, discounts – anything to get that dialogue started.

Current research indicates that the human brain makes a judgment about a web page within a twentieth of a second! That doesn’t leave you very long to make an impression. So, make sure that you have your Unique Selling Point (USP) clearly visible on your home page – and preferably prominent on every one of your other pages. After all, it’s not a given that the home page will be the first page that the visitor sees, particularly if they have found you via a search engine.

Then make sure that you list your bullet-pointed guarantees. Visitors have to understand why you are different from the rest, and why they should deal with you and not your competitors. And as we’ve discovered, they have to understand this pretty much instantly.

Lastly, make sure that your site has a funnel-like structure. Identify your important pages – usually the “call to action” or purchase pages – and make sure all roads lead to those pages. Your internal links – like their external equivalents – should describe the target page. If you sell blue widgets, don’t call your products page “Products”, call it “blue widgets”, and make sure that the links pointing at this page also say “blue widgets”. This will not only help the search engines identify and rank the most important pages in your site, it will also lead your visitor to that all important conversion.

ASK: Link Building ?

Search engines currently base relevancy primarily on linkage patterns. Who links to you and how they link to you are what determines where your site will rank for competitive search queries.

Text in Incoming Links

What Link Text is Good to Use?

If you link to SEOBook.com, a link with the words Search Engine Optimization or SEO Book are more valuable than a link that says other site. Evaluating the text in the links, along with who links where, is how the major ways search engines get feedback from external sources.

Search engines can look for noun-verb patterns in text, but machines can be taught to crank out text. There is limited cost to content creation, so search engines must look offsite to understand what a document is about.

Currently link analysis is the most effective way to determine document quality.

How Powerful is Link Anchor Text?

Many bloggers are politically outspoken and view George Bush in a less-thanfavorable light. Hundreds of people have linked to his biography page using the phrase miserable failure as the link text. Searching on the phrase miserable failure in Google, at one point in time, ranked the biography page of George W. Bush at the Whitehouse.gov website as the #1 result in Google. It is a good example of just how powerful link text can be.

The above mentioned marketing technique is called Googlebombing. In early 2007  Google defused the practice of Googlebombing by deploying algorithms that check if link anchor text is related to the content of the page, but link anchor text is still an important aspect of SEO.

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Link Building: important factors to remember

In the area of link building, there are many important factors to remember. After all, link building is the single most important part of achieving a highranking website in modern search engines. As such, there are many things that can significantly impact the growth and spread of links to your site:

• Make sure your site has something that other webmasters in your niche would be interested in linking to.
• Create content that people will be willing to link to, even if it is not directly easy to monetize. These linkworthy pages will lift the authority and rankings of all pages on your site.
• Create something that legitimate webmasters interested in your topic would be interested in linking to.
• When possible, try to get your keywords in many of the links pointing to your pages.
• Register with, participate in, or trade links with topical hubs and related sites. Be in the discussion or at least be near the discussion.
• Look for places from which you can get high-quality free links (like local libraries or chambers of commerce).
• If you have some good internal content, try to get direct links to your inner pages.
• Produce articles and get them syndicated to more authoritative sites.
• Start an interesting and unique blog and write about your topics, products, news, and other sites in your community.
• Comment on other sites with useful relevant and valuable comments.
• Participate in forums to learn about what your potential consumers think is important. What questions do they frequently have? How do you solve those problems?
• Issue press releases with links to your site.
• Leave glowing testimonials for people and products you really like. Oftentimes when the product owner or person posts the testimonials, they will include a link back to your site.
• Sponsor charities, blogs, or websites related to your site.
• Consider renting links if you are in an extremely competitive industry. Adult, gaming, credit, and pharmacy categories will likely require link rentals and/or building topical link networks.
• Mix your link text up. Adding words like buy or store to the keywords in your some of your link text can make it look like more natural linkage data and help you rank well for many targeted secondary phrases.
• Survey your vertical and related verticals. What ideas/tools/articles have become industry standard tools or well-cited information? What ideas are missing from the current market space that could also fill that niche?
• If you have a large site, make sure you create legitimate reasons for people to want to reference more than just your home page.
• If you are looking to hire an SEO, you may want to look at http://www.honestseo.com or feel free to ask me to recommend you to someone.
• Brett Tabke (owner of WebmasterWorld) wrote a quick guide worth looking at before building your site: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/2010.htm