Experience has shown us that, as long as a website looks ‘professionally designed’ ( not amateurish ), and gives visitors the confidence that they are dealing with a real business, it doesn’t really matter what the design looks like, because everyone has a different opinion of what looks ‘good’ anyway.

Yes you need the site to be fast loading and easy to navigate to make your visitors experience a good one, but the REALLY important thing is to get the right words on the pages….

1. to make sure the website will ( eventually ) attract your target market via the search engines (SE’s) and
2. to turn visitors into sales

1. First and foremost you need to attract visitors so, if the intention is to do this via the SE’s, the copy on the pages of the website needs to be full of the keywords and search terms your target market is using. The more keywords and search terms you can identify and include in your copy, the more chance you have of gaining visitors.

To identify the best and as many keywords / search terms as possible, I recommend my clients use Wordtracker.com. You can do a free ( but limited ) test to familiarise yourself with the way it works then, when you are ready to do the full job you can buy a 24 hour subscription for around US$10.00. If you get lots of keywords search terms in your list you’ll need to be creative in your copy writing to include them on the website.

2. Once the visitors are coming to the website, having good sales copy is extremely important, if the website is to turn those visitors into sales. It becomes even more important when you are paying to send visitors to the website via advertising, wether online or offline. And, initially at least, you will have to pay to drive visitors to the website, because it will take several months before you start to get visitors from the SE’s for even the most niche of your keywords.

So, to get people to go to your order page, use links embedded in enticing copy all around the website and in your ads. To get visitors to order, once they arrive on your order page / shopping cart, the copy on the order page needs to be very well thought out and written. The use of testimonials and money back guarantees can help people make their decision, but I recommend that clients use professional copy writers to make sure this job is done well. Once the copy is in place you’ll need to keep a close eye on your web stats to make sure your conversion rates are good enough, if they aren’t, be prepared to rewrite your sales copy.

Another VERY important factor, in gaining top positions on the SE’s for the more competitive search terms / keywords, is to have lots of unreciprocated links back to your website. You can generate unreciprocated links by getting on to product and geographical Directories, by writing articles for other webmasters etc etc. The more popular the website linking to your website the more importance the SE’s place on that link.

Finally, for top rankings the SE’s need to see new copy being regularly added, so you’ll need to try to keep adding to or updating the copy on your website.

If you can write about your subject regularly, a Blog is an excellent way to fulfill ALL the SE’s main requirements.

A popular Blog, well promoted, will generate lots of unreciprocated back links to your site, it will allow you to keep adding your keyword search terms, and it will keep the SE’s happy with their requirement for regular updating.

WordPress, an extremely popular blog software package, is available to our hosting clients, at no extra charge, via cPanel. If you need help configuring the software or, getting the pages to look like your webpages, we offer those services at minimal rates.