Top Tips for Setting up a New Website for your Small Business
by Paul Rowson
[Nov 17, 2006] So you have a new business and are ready to either create your own or employ someone else to create you a shiny new website. Here are a few top tips which you should follow in order for the site to work as hard for your business as you do.
Keep it simple
A website is fundamentally either a source of information or another vehicle for selling your products and services. Your customers are highly likely to want a pleasant experience and most importantly, not get frustrated with a highly complex site. Therefore, whatever you do, please don’t have a site using flash animations all over it, search engines find it difficult to find these, users generally hate them and worst of all, they make me want to throw stuff at my screen.
Make the site search engine friendly
This is really not that difficult. Optimising your site for search engines such as Google can be achieved with the following steps (don’t worry if bits of this gets technical, you can skip pass this - but do look at the first point, it’s the most important) :
• Content, content, content – Generate relevant, keyword rich content and the search engines will love it, just as much as your users do.
• Titles – If you are familiar with H1 tags then make sure the titles on your pages are H1! These again should be keyword rich and relevant.
• Meta data – Long gone are the days when you can stuff a load of keyword into the meta tags, but optimising the titles, keywords, and descriptions should still be filled in as search engines do still use them, even if it is to a lesser extent than a few years ago.
• Include a sitemap - Users can use this if they get a bit lost whilst wandering round your site and search engines spiders use them when…well..wandering round your site.