Are you starting your web design planning from the right place?
Structuring your website design for success
Most small business websites underproduce because they start their planning from the wrong place. The most common flaw to most planning is to start from the product. The idea is that if you simply put all products out on the site, sales will follow automatically.
That's like assuming that the simple act of opening the doors of your store will suck people through them and cause them to buy. Just as planning how to get people into a physical store is a big part of making it a success, structuring your site to produce sales is essential to a website.
Let's assume you already have a good, market-tested product or service that you can sell. Finding a saleable product deserves an article all on its own. So, with that assumption in place, you need to answer two important questions and complete two processes:
What do you want your website to do?
How will your website design meet visitors' needs?
Plan your pages
Link it all together
What do you want your website to do?
Set your goals
First and foremost, determine your goals for the site. Many small businesses miss this essential step. Building a website becomes the goal in itself and what it will do for the business is left to chance.
A website can do a lot of different things for you. Do you want it to increase sales? Develop leads? Build relationships that can grow into regular customers? Provide information that will boost offline sales? Provide customers with help that will reduce your customer service expenses?
Decide what you want your site to accomplish. Write it down. Keep it central to everything you do on the site. Test everything you're considering putting on the site with the question, “will this help our site accomplish this goal?” so you can build every step of the say toward whatever goals you have for it.
You don't need specific sales projections at this point. But at least know what kinds of actions you want your visitors to take so you can build it into the site for them.
How will your website meet your visitors' needs?
Give your visitors the solutions they're looking for
After you've decided what actions you want your visitors to take, determine how you want them to find you and move through your site. This means sorting your keywords into a structure that will underlie your site.
Hopefully, you've already done your keyword research to find search terms that will bring good traffic to your site. If you haven't, check our article on Choosing Keywords that Bring You Visitors. Without good keywords, your site can sit, virtually unnoticed for years.
Choose relevant keywords
Develop a good list of keyword phrases that are frequently searched, yet lightly targeted by your competitors.
Don't choose keywords that are too much of a stretch for your site, though. Remember, even the most attractive keywords can become a liability for you if you have to struggle to connect them to your site.
Create your identity for a search-engine pleasing site
Take one to three of those most relevant keywords and make them the identity for your site. If you can, add them into the business name for the Internet portion of your business. Making them part of your business name will have great benefits when you start promoting your site online.
Don't get too greedy, though, in stuffing identity keywords into your business name. Keep your business name under 40 characters, if possible, and definitely under 65. And make sure your keyword-rich business name sounds like a business name and not like a list.
Choose your identity keywords carefully at the start, because once you're established, it's hard to change how the search engines and all of the web businesses that you deal with identify you.
Make your identity keywords the theme for your entire site. Everything in your site should relate to them.
Plan your pages
Make your home page stand out from the pack
Plan your home page to be rich in your identity keywords and full of valuable content that encourages visitors to explore further.
And don't feel your home page has to answer every question they have; just make sure it leaves them feeling that they can find anything they don't find on that page quickly and easily on another.
Plan your supporting pages to build off of your home page
After you've chosen your identity keywords, plan your next level of keywords, the keywords that reflect the specific sections of your site. Again, use frequently searched keywords relevant to that section. These are your sectional keywords.
Create pages that introduce your sectional keywords. Think of these sectional introduction pages as home pages for those sections that can lead your visitors deeper yet toward their goals and yours.
Make them rich in your sectional keywords and in content that encourages your visitors to move into even more specific areas of your site. Make sure that your sectional introduction pages are rich also in your identity keywords.
Rule of thumb is that your page should be richest in the keywords for the page itself, then for the keywords of the levels above it, then for any pages it links to directly in the level below it.
Make sure your sectional pages also move your visitors toward the actions you hope they'll take. If your goal is sales, focus your content toward leading them there. If it's to subscribe to your newsletter, include content that will interest them in that.
Your goals may vary depending on what stage of your visitors'decision process the page is focused on, but make sure each page leads your visitors toward your ultimate goals. See Serving All Stages of Your Visitors' Buying Process for more on leading visitors toward your goals.
Keep your site structure shallow
Do the same thing on each successive layer of your site. Keep your site as shallow and broad as possible. Avoid having directories within directories within directories. The farther down a page is in the layers of your site, the less important the search engines will consider it to be.
Base your decision of how many layers to have, though, not on artificial formulas, but on what will make your customers comfortable reaching your goals. Always put satisfying your customers ahead of pleasing the search engines.
Include as many pages as you can create useful content for. Large, comprehensive sites not only satisfy more customer needs, but also impress the search engines.
Link it all together
Once you have an outline for your site's structure, set up your linking structure. You may want to wireframe your site at this point, that is, to create files that contain no content and no images, just a summary of the role that page will play in moving your visitors toward goals, and the links that will connect them to the next step.
This helps anyone who tests your design to click through your site and assess just how effectively your structure moves visitors toward your goals. Once you're satisfied with your structure, you can replace the summaries with the actual content of the pages.
Reinforce your site structure with the way you link the pages, focusing your links on your most important pages.
Internal linking tips
- Link to as many pages of your site as you can from the home page without cluttering it. A link from your home page shows the search engines that you feel that page has high importance.
- Make sure you have a link from the home page to a site map and that the site map links to every page on your site. This ensures that no page on your site is ever more than two clicks from your home page.
- Link to your home page and to any other pages that you want considered key pages from every page of your site. This again shows that you place a high importance on them.
- Keep the links that go to key pages toward the top of the page to show the importance of the link.
- Use keywords in link text. This ensures that the search engines will consider the target page relevant to the keyword rather than to meaningless phrases, such as, “click now.”
This is especially important when it comes to your links to your home page. Which would you rather have the search engines consider your home page relevant for, the keyword-rich name you chose as your business identity or the word “Home?”
- Interlink your pages. Make sure that any pages that you want the search engines to consider important have lots on links coming in and lots of links going out and that the text used for each link is keyword-rich.
- Make use of your page titles. In addition to using keyword-rich text in links, try, when it makes sense, to have the same keyword you use for the link in the title each page.
Obviously, this isn't something you can do with every link. But the search engines consider the link and the page title as critical elements in determining how relevant the page to which the link goes is for that keyword.
Don't knock yourself out, though, trying to boost your rankings by doing that for every link. Remember, you're only trying to show how important that term is to the topic—not inflate your rankings artificially. Doing things just to mess with the search engines will always bring you down in the end.
Essentially, planning ahead to structure your site it makes for a site that is both easier for your visitors to accomplish their goals and yours, and for the search engines to understand what keywords your site is relevant for so they can send you more traffic. Do your homework and you'll have a site that works.
Helping you become the successful business owner you want to be.
LIKE THIS PAGE? ADD TO YOUR SOCIAL BOOKMARKS: Blink Del.icio.us Digg
 Furl Google Simpy Spurl
 Technorati
 Y! MyWeb
 |
Your choice of three free newsletters with tips on improving your rankings and your sales.
- Site-Sell! ezine with real-life examples of building sites that sell
- Sales from the Edge with reports on how to take advantage of developments on the Web
- 5-Pillar Affiliate Report with advice and strategies to help you build sales for any affiliate program
Click here to boost your sales!
|
|
