How To Build A Successful Website

by Sukhvinder Bahra

Business of the Internet today is worth billions of dollars a year. So much so has eBusiness become important, that people are falling over themselves to build successful websites.

Over the past ten years I have not only developed websites but have consulted on large corporate websites.

You can have the best looking website, but if it does not convey exactly what you are offering within a few seconds, then you are losing potential customers.

I am not going to mention names, but I have seen corporate websites which they have obviously spent thousands of dollars developing, but the website is totally unusable. This leaves you totally frustrated and ends up in you moving to another website.

Let's begin with the basics to a successful website:

1: The first thing you should take note of is that your website should look professional. It should not look as though you have spent 5 minutes developing it. By looking professional, it shows you are serious about your business. One of the ways to make your site look professional is to have a cool logo. If you cannot do this yourself, get a logo company from the Internet to do it for you. It should cost you no more than around $25.

2: Include META tags within your HTML code. META tags allow search engines to find your pages when users enter words in their search engine. Ensure you read up on META tags and you utilize them for each page of your website. Because there are so many websites today, it is becoming harder and harder to become ranked in search engines. Nevertheless it is crucial that you make use of META tags, maybe you will not get into the top 10 straight away, but you never know, so the least you can do is try!

3: The main page of your website should open within 10 seconds of visiting it. Any longer than this, and consider that you are losing potential customers. You can increase the speed of your website by decreasing the number of images in your website. If you have to use images in your website, ensure that you include the "height" and "width" attributes for the image in the HTML, this will ensure the page loads faster. Else, the browser receives the image and then has to work out what size the image is.

4: Your main page should be direct and immediately tell the user what you are selling. If the user cannot see what you are selling, I promise they will not hang around to find out. They are coming to your site to find something, if it is hidden on another page, the user will not waste their time looking for it.

5: Banner exchanges are a good source of income for your website, but be careful on the amount of banners and links you use. Ask yourself, do you want the user to go to another website or your own. I more of then not, don't get involved with banner exchanges. I believe this distracts the user from your own website. If you are going to get involved with banner exchanges ensure that you limit this to a couple per page.

6: Include a contact page where you have an email address, which the user can contact you with. This is essential. You may have a potential customer visiting your site, if you do not supply any contact information, they will go on to a website that can fulfil their request.

7: Keep your website consistent and use a basic colour scheme. In terms of keeping your website consistent, make the basic structure of all the pages on the website look the same. The last thing you want is to make the user confused. Avoid using highlighter bright colours. Use simple colours and ensure they are nit too bright. Also, ensure that your text is readable. You would not believe the times I have seen websites with an image in the background and white text on the top of the image, of which only 50% is readable.

8: Spelling and grammar is important in your website. Before uploading your website to your web host, run each page through a spell checker. You may not think so, but having a correctly spelt website again indicates you are offering a professional service.

9: Navigating on your website should be easy. Keep links to pages on your website at the top, bottom or left hand side of the page. As stated before, be consistent, so keep all links in the same location for each page. You do not want the user to be searching around for pages they want to find but cannot due to the location of your links.

10: Keep updating your website to get visitors to come back. Add new pages regularly and submit these pages to search engines. This will give you a higher ranking to your website and will also give you more visitors to your website. Ensure you use the META tags to match your content.

11: Include a bookmark link on your website. It never fails to surprise me how many websites do not have a bookmark link. It is simple code which does not take long to include in your website. It allows the user to mark your page so they do not forget it. Remember, you want the user to come back to your website, the very least you can do is help them remember your website.

12: It is important that you change your website regularly so it is picked up by each search engine spider you have submitted your website to. My content remains the same, but I change the page every day, how do I do this, I simply have some JavaScript code on my website which changes every day. You can get this code from my website and use it for yourself.

13: Include ALT tags for your images. Many corporate websites I have seen and been consulted upon do not include any ALT attributes for the IMG tag. By including ALT attributes, you are providing two benefits to your website. Firstly, you are giving your website a higher ranking. How? Well simple, in the ALT tag you describe the image with keywords. These keywords are used by search engines to rank your website. The more times the search engine finds your keywords in your page, the higher it will rank it. The ALT attribute also lets you supply some text which can be displayed to the user if an image from your website is not found. This is good because at least the user can still see what the image represents.

I hope you have found these tips useful, and I can honestly say that I have supplied these tips to many corporate companies.

Keep your website fast, simple and professional and I promise you will have a successful website.

I invite you to take a look at the greatest tool available over the internet for Building a Successful Website, it is call Site Build It. Site Build it is a revolutionary piece of software. Basically, it covers absolutely everything you will need to create a successful site. Some of its features include:

Domain registration, hosting, graphics tools, site building, traffic stats, website optimization, keyword tools, search engine submissions, pay per click research, and much more… People are really fascinated by this complete Solution ranked 1st in the Web. I personally have two sites running with them and they are really successful and profitable.  Click Here to learn more about Site Build It.

Back...

Sukhvinder Bahra is a successful writer and owner of BooksYouCanSell.com. Visit his site at http://www.BooksYouCanSell.com  Includes a FREE Ebook for download worth $45 on Starting Your Own Website.