The Basic, Essential Ingredients for a Successful Web Site

Your site should be neat, professional, enticing, simple and easy to navigate and make it easy for your potential customer to contact and/or find you. Also check spelling and grammar. One of the biggest mistakes people make is to have an amateur build their site for FREE. If your site looks amateurish it makes a statement about the quality of your business and your level of success. This type of so called "FREE" site will cost you in sales and credibility.

This should go without saying but you would be surprised at the number of online business owners that overlook and neglect this VITALLY IMPORTANT ingredient and then wonder why they don't get any contacts from their site. If you have a physical location and depend on "foot traffic" you should also include some sort of map feature that gives your potential customers the ability to get door to door driving directions. Yahoo Maps has a free program as do others.

If you are hosting on a cheap or FREE hosting service and your business site domain looks something like this: www.freepages.com/joe you have already lost credibility in the mind of your customer. You should have your own domain name .. www.yourdomain.com. It gives the impression of permanence and stability. Ownership as opposed to loaner ship. You should also register your domain name for more than one year. I recommend at least 5. Some search engines actually penalize 1 year registrations due to the fact that most spam sites only register for one year, knowing full well they will not be around for the second. The engines know this and some take it into consideration when considering you for inclusion.

For most businesses, ultimately, most of their visitors will come from the major search engines. In fact, if your site is optimized properly over 85% of your website visitors will come from Google, Yahoo or MSN searches. Search Engines are not optional, they are an ESSENTIAL ingredient of just about any successful web site. There are both paid and unpaid types of listings and ideally you should use BOTH. In an ideal situation the engines can bring hundreds of people per day to your site.

This could be a free giveaway, coupons, interesting and helpful articles, self updating RSS Feeds, a newsletter or anything that gives the consumer something of ongoing value without them necessarily having to buy from you. It establishes good will and good reputation.

Believe me when I say from experience.. "All hosting services are not created equally". You want to make sure your site is available when someone decides to visit. You also want to make sure your email system is dependable and your host has the features you can grow with. It is very time consuming and costly to transfer hosting services, especially after your site has evolved and incorporates more advanced features like shopping carts, databases and third party features. A good hosting service isn't that expensive but it isn't free either. If you are serious about your business do not trust it to a free web hosting company. They simply can't afford to pay good help.

Business cards, flyers, Yellow Pages (if you use them), print, newspaper ads, coupons and even the side of your building if it is visible to passers by. Everything the public comes into contact with related to your business should have your web site address on it.

The more credible sites of similar content you can get to link to your site using relevant keywords and phrases the better. Getting listed favorably in the Search Engines depends heavily on this "off site" factor more than ever before. What your site says about itself is considered an "onsite factor". When other credible sites link into you it is a statement about your Internet community popularity and credibility. Each link is like a vote and weighs heavily with Google. The best kinds of links are one way incoming links where you don't link back but any links from similar, credible sites will help. AVOID LINK FARMS. Essential Link Information Article

Just because your site looks good doesn't mean the Search Engines will favor it. You have to appeal to both the Human and Robot audience and they see things differently. What is appealing to one is not necessarily appealing to the other and there are plenty of web designers out there who don't take both audiences into consideration when constructing a web site. Your site should include meta tags, alt tags, comments, headers, titles and such and all targeted to the specific keywords or key phrases your target audience is using to find your type of product or service. Your web designer should know about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Ask him/her. If they don't, find someone who does.

Another thing I hear too often is "I don't know anything about the Internet" or "I don't even know how to check email" If this is true for you and you are in business then all I can say is either LEARN or HIRE SOMEONE to take care of your Internet division. You may know nothing about the net. You may not even use the net but I can assure you that YOUR CUSTOMERS DO! This will only become even more true with the passing of time. I've said it for years now and I will say it again: The Internet is the Future! and the businesses of today who ignore or neglect it will either be gone tomorrow or at the very least will suffer greatly at the hands of their Internet savvy competition. If you read this article, don't say you weren't warned!