Is your web site winning you business?

I'm cleaning my desk and thought these notes would be useful. They are also posted here.

Is your web site winning you business?

This was the title of a presentation done on July 26, 2006 by Brian Bluff of Site-Seekers as part of the Dollar$ and Sense Workshop, held at the Greater Syracuse Chamber of Commerce.

Bluff talked about the need to:

• Drive traffic to your web site
• Convert that traffic into contacts and sales
• Measure the results

In his fast paced and information packed presentation, Bluff gave the audience some tips and information. Among them were:

• He noted that the Internet is outside of most companies' core competencies. Therefore, companies may need to look to an outside "expert" to help them with their web site.
• 45% of companies cannot measure the effectiveness of their web sites.
• People will judge a web site in milliseconds. Therefore, it is important that people instantly be able to recognize what you do when they visit your site. He actually showed us web sites and counted how many seconds it took for us to recognize what the site did. "What" definitely should be evident in under five seconds.
  
• Have your contact information on every page.
• Keep your web site content fresh, which means updating content on a regular (frequent) basis. This will attract the search engine "spiders" that index the Internet.
• Include a site map on your web site, since a site map helps spiders find and index all of your pages.
• In the title tag on your web pages, place the product information first, not your company name. This helps with the indexing of your site in search engines.
• Bold important text. Search engines assume that what is bolded is important.
• Have target phrases for each page.
• Make sure that there is synergy between the words in your title tags, the phrases that you bold, and the target phrases on each page. This is important so that the search engine spiders clearly understand what the page is about. It also helps with your search engine ranking.
• Those sites that you link to should be "natural." In other words, if you are a software company, link to other web sites in your industry or in a related industry. Don't link to a site that is totally unrelated to what you do. (Of course, you should link to client sites.) Why? Because you want everything on your site to be focused on what you do and your subject domain.
• Create your web site to be viewed on 1024 x 768 pixel size screen. Evidently, this is now the prevailing screen size.
  
• Hotlink your logo so that it returns the person to your homepage.
  
• Solicit and include customer testimonials.
• Write white papers on your topic area and make them available on your web site.
• The more pages a person has to go through to get the information they need, the fewer people who will do it. There is a 40% drop off for each page a person must go to in order to find the information he wants.
• There is useful search engine optimization tools and information at SEO Book.
  

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