Blog Directories: There are many blog directories out there like Blog Catalog or Blogged that showcase some of the best industry specific blogs in any industry. It is a great starting point to start with your research when you are trying to put together a blog commenting campaign.

Blog Rolls: Often times when you find a blog in your industry they might have a blog roll set up to show their audience other industry specific blogs that are relevant. I have come across some blogs that have been known to showcase almost every single important industry blog in their specific field in their blog roll really helping out my research efforts.

Blog Search: As simple as it might sound try just doing a search for your specific blogs in the search engines. See what you come up with. You might just find some of the best blogs to leave comments on directly in the search results. Try doing a web search and also look for keywords in your industry under the actual blog search attached to your favorite search engine. Most search engines will allow you to actually do a blog search right through the engine.

Blog Lists: Use the word “lists” in your search phrases to find others who might have put together a list of your top industry blogs already. Putting together a list of the best blogs in a certain industry can often times bring nice rankings along with traffic so someone in your industry will often times complete the grunt work to find the top industry blogs for you already.

Unless you are in a very tight niche you should be able to find some blogs in your industry where you can leave educated comments on. Just take the time and look around in order to find what you are looking for.

The following ten tips are key to maintaining a successful web site. Follow these and your site will do better. Nothing will guarantee that a web site will be successful as there are simple too many different factors that impact web success – but as a general rule these ten tips will always lead to better performance.

• Content
• Freshness
• No Tricks
• Links
• Structure
• Accessibility
• Quality Code
• URLs
• Style
• Images

1. Content

Content is key!

Almost all the search engines scan a sites content now – almost ignoring things like meta tags. The more content you have on your site the more the search engines can scan – but there is more to it then that: people like content too. Many people measure a web site’s success by the number of visitors it gets – so ask yourself – why would people come to your web site? Do you offer them interesting and informative information that relates to your product or service? if not, why would they come?

Relevant content and lots of it is a key for a successful web site. There is always room for more content on a web site, and you can never have too much.

Take this article you are reading for example, while it’s fairly useful information for many of our visitors, it’s also additional content for our web site – and will serve to help our site do better. Writing articles about aspects of your industry is a great way to generate content.

Set asside an hour a day (or at least an hour a week) to devote to adding new content to your web site.

2. Freshness

Keep it current

Having lots of content is great – but if it is all three years old it’s not going to look like your site is much of a priority. The search engines actually track this. They monitor how frequently your site changes as they visit it for indexing. The more often it changes the better your rank in the freshness category.

What constitutes change? Pretty much anything – which is why keeping a BLOG or adding frequent news articles to your web site usually produces such good results. It is also the reason why having something as simple as rotating content and the current date on every page has been shown to make a difference.

3 No Tricks

Don’t try to outsmart the Search Engines – Eventually you’ll loose

Many web design companies promise success through the use of tricks, backdoors, and special tactics designed to sneak a web site into a top position rapidly. Something, of course, that the search engines are constantly battling to defeat. Why play the game? As the search engines find the cheaters they will plug the holes and a rank (that usually costs a pretty penny to achieve) will immediately be lost.

Rather, follow the recommendations of the search engines – most set out rules for web masters that outline what they would like to see in a web site. By following the rules the engines are actually battling all the cheating web sites and working to promote the sites that follow the rules – they are fighting FOR you!

4 Links

Links both in and out must be relevant

There has been a lot of talk about link exchanges – people linking to others merely to gain a higher rank (hmmm this smacks of breaking tip 3) if you are going to link to someone and/or ask them to link to you – ask yourself: is it relevant?

Any old link is not going to help you much – search engines will look at who is linking to you – they also pay very close attention to how many links you have off your web site on a page. This is being done to try and drop sites with pages of links (do you have a links page on your web site?)

It is far better to have relevant links places throughout your web site – on only those pages that specifically the topic that relates to the page being linked to.

Unfortunately you can’t exert too much control over the way that other sites link to yours but it is worth looking at how a site usually links to others before to specifically go requesting a link from them.

5 Structure

Organize your web site and everyone will thank you.

Both the search engines and your web visitors prefer a web site that is well structured. The search engines due to their very nature (being computer programs) must break down all web sites into elements based on the structure of the pages. People, so frequently rushing to find the specific information they are looking for, rarely read through web pages but rather scan headings and bulleted lists to find the detailed sections of interest. In both cases a well structured site will be far better received then one that is a mish-mosh of information haphazardly thrown together.

This is simple to do – but all too often missed. Make headings, use the correct coding tags for them, organize sections of content into groups, and use bold and bulleted lists to present key points.

Keep in mind when writing paragraphs of text that most humans will not read them unless they are specifically titled with a headline that matches what they are looking for.

6 Accessibility

A web site that speaks to all is better then a site that only speaks to some.

Tips no 6 and 7 are closely related: The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) provides a list of guidelines for how to create web sites that are accessible to as many people (and systems) as possible. Think about your web site – can someone with a visual disability (perhaps even something as simple as colour-blindness) still get information about your product or service? If not, how do you feel knowing that you have just excluded a vast segment of the population from accessing your web site?

7 Quality Code

Well coded web sites perform better.

Many small business owners don’t have too much control over the code used to create their web site – but it is still important to know how important it may be. Standard compliant code that has been checked for errors is easier for the search engines to assimilate. It is more widely visible across varied platforms (computer types) and in different browsers.

Ensure your web designer is writing standard compliant code that is validated for errors. You can also check your own web site using free on-line tools from the W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium – the standards body that administers Internet technologies). All NECSES Webdesign websites comply to W3C Standards – giving our customers peace of mind.

8 URLs

Prudent choice of URLs will impact your web site’s performance

Professional web designers should already know this – but if you are using a content management system to build your web site, or portions of it, it is important to understand the significance of the URL used to access pages on your web site.

Search engines look at the address of every page on your web site and try to extract key-words from the content of the url. For example, you may have a page about “Widgets” on your web site called “somewhere.com” creating the page with a filename of widgets.html will give a better keyword rank then page6.html

This is a fairly subtle point but makes a significant difference for most search engines. It can also make it much easier for people that are typing in a URL to access a specific page of your web site. Notice the URL for this web page – it’s called http://www.necseswebdesign.co.uk/top-ten-small-business-web-site-marketing-tips/ for a reason!

9 Style

Looks do matter – but perhaps not the way you think…

In the grand scheme of things the “looks” of a web site in the classic sense are not really that important – honestly! Once people have looked at a web site for a few minutes they will quickly discard their first impression (based on looks) and move immediately to asking – is this site giving me the information I need – and can I find it quickly (going back to tips 1 – content and 5 – structure)

So what are we on about with style? Simple – ensure the style of your site makes it easy to read. Avoid things like black backgrounds with white text (inverse text is harder to read) and ALL CAPS (humans read by identifying word shapes – writing in all caps forces people to read every letter and quickly becomes annoying – plus on the net it is used as a typographic method of indicating you are shouting) font.

10 Images

Selling a product – better make sure it looks good

If you are selling something that has a visual representation – then professional looking photography is key. Even a multi-million dollar resort will not look good if the photographs are amateurish. If you care about what you have to sell, then it’s worth investing in some professional photographs to show people what you have. Remember, on-line people can’t get a hold of your product – so you need to give them some really good photographs so that they can feel confident that it meets their needs.

Using Word Press as a content management system we created a simple design that allows the utilisation of a sidebars for navigation as well as advertising on the site. Features within the site include a News Blog, Gallery and contact forms. Using Word Press widgets allows the full optimisation of the website ensuring that optimisation costs are kept to a minimum whilst giving full exposure to search engines.

Testimonial

“To put it simply, ‘WE LOVE IT’!  Your blending of the statue into the picture of Endeavour House really does set the website off.  It produces such a fantastic tone – you’ve done an amazing job! Guy is also delighted that he is able to add pages to the website himself.”

Philip Mutton, Assistant to Guy McGregor.

The site has a built in slide-show, on-line booking form, and blog section. Additionally, the site includes a news service for London and an Events Calendar detailing events taking place within the company’s radius. The site is currently placed 1^st for Chauffeur Services Essex in Google.

But how — and how much?

To answer these questions, I looked at data from 1,531 HubSpot customers (mostly small- and medium-sized businesses). 795 of the businesses in my sample blogged, 736 didn’t.
The data was crystal clear: Companies that blog have far better marketing results. Specifically, the average company that blogs has:

• 55% more visitors
• 97% more inbound links
• 434% more indexed pages

Take a look for yourself in the graphs below:

Why are website visitors important? Because more visitors mean more people to convert to leads and sales.

Why are inbound links important? Because they signal authority to search engines, thus increasing your chances of getting found in those search engines.

One of the biggest measurements of a website’s success is the stickiness of its visitor base. Generally web masters would rather have 1,000 visitors who return regularly (they are “stuck to the site”) as opposed to 3,000 visitors who only visit once or twice. These days the web is massive, carving out a niche for your site and gaining a following within that niche is the key to success.

There are many reasons why you should try to make your website as sticky as possible. Visitors who return regularly are more likely to purchase some of your products or services. If you have a membership site, then retaining your member base is critical for growing your income and long term success. Also, a faithful following will encourage viral promotion of your site.

There are “three C’s” of stickiness to remember, and they are:

Content

Regardless of the site’s design, without good content, the visitor will not come back or stay at the site for more than a few minutes. “Content is King” is a cliché, but true. High quality content is far and away the most important factor in attracting people back to a Web site consistently, and keeping them there for more than a few minutes when they do visit. It is said, in fact, that content is what drives 75 percent of consumers to return to their favourite sites.

In addition to your site being content rich, try to also keep it fresh. At least part of your site will be regularly updated, preferably at least once a month. This is why web sites which resemble online brochures generally fail in the stickiness stakes. Delivering the same content in a blog, posted in instalments, can be much more effective. This will encourage users to come back regularly, as they check in to see what new content you’ve added lately. This is stickiness in a nutshell.

Community

When a site attracts enough visitors with similar interests it has the potential to develop into a “community.” That can be very powerful for the site owner. Providing message forums, chat rooms, podcasts, user profiles, blogs, etc. are all tools to allow your visitors to interact with both you and each other. This also makes your site VERY sticky if you are able to develop a thriving community.

Rather than visiting your site once a month people may begin to visit it multiple times a week. Having a thriving community can be viewed as developing a site which is constantly developing its own content. Rather than requiring you to spend hours developing content, you can instead monitor the postings on your site to ensure they retain the kind of atmosphere you want for your site. As time goes by you may also be able to appoint some of your more responsible members to monitoring positions to do this job for you as well.

Communication

Communication is equally important as content and community. Communication includes building and maintaining your list, reaching out to people on it and interacting with visitors to your site. Try to respond to any question, comments, or feedback you receive promptly. This builds relationships with your visitors and will keep them coming back.

One of the best ways to reach out to customers is to provide quality, free information. For example, if you run a site teaching presentation skills tips and tricks, after your visitors have seen your “foot in the door” content located on your “splash page,” provide them with a discount on the first lesson of your course in exchange for their name and email address. You benefit from this by having names to attach to the IP addresses of your visitors. This provides you with more information about who is being drawn into your site. It is also important you use a quality auto-responder for this step, as communication is a critical part of your site and must be handled professionally.

One last note on communication: Be sure to provide your name and contact information clearly throughout your site. It will frustrate and turn away visitors if they have a question or comment and cannot figure out how to reach you.

How can NECSES Webdesign help?

NECSES Webdesign provides solutions for our clients’ online needs. We help generate ‘sticky’ websites through the inclusion of Content Management Systems (CMS) with ALL our websites.

This allows businesses to keep their website fresh and up to date whenever they like and can include a host of features, including; Blogs, Photo Galleries, Testimonials, online Polls, Chat functions, etc, that allow businesses to develop close relationships with their customers, and potential customers. Our content rich, search engine friendly and flexible websites provide you with everything you need to build your business on-line and ensure you get full return on your investment.