How Do I Get Visitors to My Site?

Administrator — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 22:00:47 +0000

How do I increase visitors to your website? There is SEO; however, there are some weaknesses to SEO which are:

1. SEO takes months to implement fully — and you need traffic to your site now!
2. SEO may deliver an insufficient volume of traffic. You may need to supplement SEO through paid search ads.

Paid search, often called Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, displays your text ad on search engine results pages when someone searches on a keyword or keyphrase that you’ve selected. The beauty is that you get targeted customers, but pay only when someone clicks on your ad. Start with Google AdWords (http://adwords.google.com), since they have the most search traffic, but also consider Yahoo! Search Marketing (sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/) and MSN AdCenter (adcenter.microsoft.com).

Paid Search is complex, but you can begin to understand it if you visualize it in four basic stages.
Stage 1. Selecting Your Keywords

Start by compiling a list of keywords that people might use to search for your service or product. Tools such as Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com) or Google AdWords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) will help you develop such a list. Generic keywords may not be best. The more specific the search phrase, the greater the likelihood that your searcher is ready to buy and the higher your conversion rate will be. Bid on a list of hundreds of keyphrases with two or three words each, not just the top dozen. If you’re a local business, use local place names in your keyword list and use Google’s geotargeting feature, so your ad isn’t shown unless the customer is in your trade area.
Stage 2. Developing a Landing Page

Don’t pay for advertising just to send click-throughs to your homepage. It’s a waste of money. Rather, develop a specific landing page for each category of keywords. The landing page is designed to get your visitor to make the purchase, sign up, or leave contact information — whatever your objective is. Read my book How to Develop a Landing Page (www.wilsonweb.com/ebooks/landing.htm) for specific instructions.
Stage 3. Forming Your Bidding Strategy

Next, develop a bidding strategy. Factors to consider are:

1. Price. Price per click is based on two factors: (a) The closer to the top, the more you’ll pay. (b) Quality Score measures how relevant your ad is — in Google’s humble opinion. Not having a relevant landing page, for example, will lower your Quality Score and raise the cost per click you’ll be charged.
2. Position. Position #1 gets the most traffic, but position #7 might get a better conversion rate at a lower cost.
3. Ad location. You can specify your ad to appear only on search results pages, but you might experience good sales by allowing your ad to be displayed on content sites, too.
4. Precision of keyword matching. You can select “broad match” so your ad is shown when any of your keywords appear in someone’s search phrase. “Phrase match” requires these keywords to be in your precise order. “Exact match” means that your ad is displayed only when a searcher uses your precise keyphrase and no other. “Negative match” will stop your ad from showing if specific keywords indicate that this searcher isn’t a good prospect for your product or service.
5. Daily Budget. If you’re on a tight budget, specify the maximum amount you can be charged in a single day.

Stage 4. Testing and Refining

Fortunately, the search engines provide statistics so that you can determine the cost, the click-through rate, and the conversion rate for each ad and keyword combination. Use this information to fine-tune your strategy and improve your results.

1. ROI analysis. Some keywords cost you money, but don’t get any conversions. Eliminate them or change wording and positions to make them profitable.
2. Ad testing. Test your ads with variations in the title and text to see which performs best.
3. Dayparting. You may find that most of your sales occur only during certain times of the day. To improve your overall ROI, show your ad only during these hours.
4. Click fraud. Unfortunately, you could end up paying for bogus click-throughs. Monitor click-throughs for patterns that might indicate fraud.

This week let’s consider traffic from other forms of advertising. Good traffic is traffic that is interested in the products and services you have to offer.

Let’s look at several of these briefly and I’ll give you my take on each.
E-mail Newsletter Advertising

Perhaps as a newsletter publisher I’m biased, but I believe that one of the most cost-effective advertising approaches for small businesses is to find e-zines that are squarely targeted on your particular niche and advertise there. To find appropriate e-zines, search Google for a keyword for your niche along with the word “newsletter” or “e-zine.” Also try these e-mail newsletter directories:

* BestEzines (www.bestezines.com)
* The Ezine Directory (www.ezine-dir.com)
* EzineHub (www.ezinehub.com)
* John Labovitz’s E-Zine List (www.e-zine-list.com)

Then contact the publisher of each matching newsletter regarding advertising rates. Some will have unrealistic rates, others don’t really take ads. But you’re looking for the one with a targeted list and “reasonable” ad rates. Of course, what seems “reasonable” to you will depend entirely on the profit you earn on each sale. Implementing this strategy will take some work to find the right newsletters with responsive subscribers. But it may pay off big in getting targeted traffic to your site. Be sure to encode the URLs so you can track click-throughs and sales using your analytics program.
Solo E-mails

These same niche e-zine publishers may accept solo e-mail ads, that is, e-mails that consist entirely of an advertisement which is sent to the entire newsletter list. Don’t confuse this with sending spam. Readers of such lists implicitly agree to receive some advertising e-mails in return for free newsletter content in their chosen area. Solo e-mail “drops” or “blasts” may seem expensive, but since the click-through rate is often significant, this is the advertising vehicle of choice for many savvy advertisers. If you’re going to try this, consider employing a copywriter to write powerful ad copy that gets the click-throughs you need. More info.
Comparison Shopping Engines or Bots

Online merchants often have good results using comparison shopping engines or “bots” such as Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, NexTag, and Shopzilla. Some charge merchants on a cost per click determined by the category of products you are listing. Others have a bidding approach. Many merchants use shopping bots to advertise tangible products, especially commodities. More info.
Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are sweet for merchants. They pay a fixed commission only when a sale is made, a subscription is complete, or a lead is confirmed. The difficulty, however, is finding affiliates who (1) have targeted traffic to their site or a good e-zine list, and (2) who are willing to commit to featuring a link, button, or banner ad on appropriate places in their websites or newsletters. Perhaps 95% of affiliates bring zero traffic to the merchant, so you’re looking for the 1%, the super affiliates. To attract them you need to offer commissions generous enough to lure them away from competing merchants’ programs — not an easy task. If you can recruit your own affiliates, you can purchase your own affiliate software for $100 or so. The other approach is an affiliate company that will expose your company’s ads to its existing network of affiliates. Commission Junction (www.cj.com) does this for medium to large companies. More info.

Get more traffic! Yes, but what about the people who have already visited your site and liked what they saw? They are the very best prospects you can imagine for your products or services. How do you bring them back? Develop an e-mail newsletter or blog.
Insulate your Website against Energy Loss

You’ve spent lots of time and money for search engine optimization and advertising to get people to your website. But if your conversion rate is only 2% to 3%, like energy being lost from an house without insulation, you’re wasting 97% to 98% of your marketing efforts.

You can turn this around using a strategy adopted by tens of thousands of successful online businesses — develop an e-mail newsletter of value and then make it a high priority to get site visitors to sign up. Done right, you should be able to get at least 10% to 20% of your visitors to subscribe. Multiply that over a year and you’ll have a substantial e-mail list of highly targeted prospects.
Develop an E-mail Newsletter of Value

People won’t sign up to get more e-mail unless they believe they will receive value from doing so. So what value could you offer site visitors in the form of an e-mail newsletter? It will vary from one business to another, but consider:

Helpful how-to articles
*

Industry updates and analyses
*

Links to new trends and important news articles
*

Product reviews
*

Special prices on Internet-only sales

Pause right now and write down several ideas. Once you’ve determined how to offer value, you have two primary challenges.
Get Visitors to Sign Up

The first challenge is to get site visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. You can get a subscription form from your e-mail marketing service such as iContact or Constant Contact. To get sign-ups:

Put the sign-up form in a high-visibility spot on every page of your site.
*

Next to each sign-up form explain how a person will benefit from this newsletter.
*

Provide incentives for signing up, such as a free whitepaper or a coupon.

Build Trust Regularly

The second challenge is to provide great content on a regular basis. Too often a small business will start an e-mail newsletter or blog that bogs down after the first month or so. Indeed, writing a regular e-mail newsletter is a commitment of at least half a day each issue. Look at the time as a marketing expense that will bring back your best customers to your site again and again. I recommend that you:

* Set a regular schedule of at least once each month.
* Plan ahead with an editorial calendar that lists topics you’ll cover for the next 6 to 12 months, one topic per issue.
* Assign a person the task of writing and publishing this newsletter and give him or her time to complete it.
* Hire a local writer to take this project, if you don’t have the resources in-house.
* Consider using free articles available online at article sites, such as EzineArticles.com.
* Feature and link to one of your products and services in each issue to generate repeat traffic to your site.

Article by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson Web Marketing

Four Basic Ways to get Traffic to your Website

Administrator — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 21:56:04 +0000

There are four basic ways to get traffic to your website. Oh, yes, there are lots of variations, but for the average small business they probably boil down to only four. In this four-part series I want to outline each of these very simply so you can get the lay of the land. You can always dig deeper later. The Big 4 are:

1. Traffic from search engines, known as search engine optimization or SEO.
2. Traffic from paid search ads, the pay-per-click or PPC text ads that appear in Google.
3. Traffic from other advertising, such as newsletter advertising, solo e-mails, shopping bots, affiliate programs, banner ads, etc. I’ll tell you which I think are the most effective and why.
4. Traffic from former visitors, how to develop an e-mail newsletter that helps you keep in touch with visitors and customers so they’ll return to your site again and again.

But let’s start with the most basic and arguably the most important — traffic from search engines.
Search Engine Traffic Is the Cheapest and Best

Far and away, the least expensive traffic you’ll ever have to your site will come through the “natural” or “organic” search results on Google or Yahoo. To get traffic to your site for the search words or keywords that are important to your organization, you need to do what is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

Fortunately, this is something that the average small business owner or staff person can do himself or herself. Yes, it takes time and knowledge. But it doesn’t have to take much money — that is, unless you are trying to rank high for very competitive keywords.

SEO has two parts, each equally important: (1) webpage optimization and (2) getting links back to your website.
1. Webpage Optimization

Basically, webpage optimization involves setting up each of your webpages so that it can be easily “understood” and indexed by the search engine robots or “spiders” that come calling.

Each webpage (except your homepage, of course) should be clearly focused on just a single topic. The more focused the better. Then you give the search engines spiders clues to the nature of this focus. The strategy is to use the main keywords for that page in the title tag, description metatag, headline or subheadings, and in your body text. You don’t stuff keywords everywhere; just make sure that you’re leaving a clear trail of clues as to the content. But webpage optimization is just half of the equation. The other half, and the harder task, is getting …
2. Incoming Links to Your Site

Search engine ranking formulas, known as “algorithms,” rank sites higher the more links they have that point to their website. Links are considered a kind of recommendation that a site is relevant, worth visiting. But getting links from sites that Google considers trustworthy isn’t easy. Start by submitting your site to various directories. Provide great content on your site that is worth linking to. Write articles that others would want to host on their sites, each with a link back to yours. Some use blogging to get links. Perhaps the most difficult approach is to exchange links with websites in your industry, called “reciprocal linking.” It is inexpensive, but takes patience and constant work.

Search engine optimization will take several months to get traffic flowing well, but don’t skip this step just because you’re in a hurry. I consider SEO the essential foundation for Internet marketing. It’s well worth the time you spend optimizing your website or the money you spend outsourcing the project to a competent SEO company. When you’re ready to dig deeper, get my book Guide to Search Engine Optimization (www.wilsonweb.com/ebooks/seo.htm), which will fill in the details.

But SEO by itself may not get you enough traffic, at least not right away. You’ll probably need to build on SEO with the next step, Pay Per Click Advertising, also known as Paid Search Advertising.

Article by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson Web Marketing

What is your website’s purpose?

Administrator — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 21:43:01 +0000

When you begin a website, you must have your main purpose clearly in mind. I say this because it’s easy to have conflicting purposes.
• If you’re a website design firm, you may want to show off your high tech goodies with your client’s site as the showpiece.

• If you’re an employee stuck with this task, you may want to look good for your bosses and not do anything for which you can be blamed — you’ve got to protect your backside.

• If you’re a volunteer, you may just want an excuse to tinker and be praised for it.

• If you’re a business owner, you probably care about the bottom line. You’re wondering, How much this will cost? and Will it be worth it in the long run?

Dear friends, recognize your own needs — they’re legitimate. But to build an effective website, you’ve got to look at the business’s or organization’s needs and make those primary. From the organization’s perspective, what must this website do in order to be successful?
Let’s look at some common website purposes. Put an X next to all that apply.
• Build your brand. Create an online brochure that will help potential clients, customers, and partners learn about your company and look at it in a favorable light. You’re trying to enhance your brand or organization image. I’ve heard people disparage this kind of website as “brochure-ware.” But this is very legitimate for some kinds of companies, especially local businesses or organizations that aren’t trying to conduct national or international commerce. You want people to know who you are, what you do, where to find you, and how to contact you.

• Provide product information to drive local sales of your products and services at dealer locations. Auto sites are a good example. Many manufacturers don’t sell on their sites, but point people to retailers who carry their products.

• Sell advertising. A few sites are designed to sell advertising — Yahoo!, Google, and other portal sites are examples. But these days, there’s far too much advertising space and not nearly enough money to fill it all. Internet advertising is improving, but is still under-priced. You may be able to sell a little advertising if you’re a portal site for an industry, or perhaps put some Google AdSense ads on your site. But these aren’t big money-makers. Look at advertising sales as a hopeful bonus, not as a sure thing.

• Sell products or services directly over the Internet. You want to conduct e-commerce and sell to a national or international market. You’ll have some kind of ordering system for one or more products, or perhaps an extensive online catalog. You may offer an online service that can be delivered over the Internet or that can be initiated online.

• Earn affiliate commissions for sales and leads generated through links on your website. Savvy marketers are building micro sites designed to generate search engine traffic for a particular hot product or service. When a visitor clicks on one of their links, he is referred to an e-commerce site, and, if a sale results, the affiliate gets a commission. Perhaps a form on your site generates leads or subscriptions for another company.

• Provide customer service and support. Websites are a great place for troubleshooting guides, FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), technical information, etc. You can generate Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) labels. You can provide multiple ways for your customers to contact you (see under Point #9 below).

• Save money by means of online efficiencies. Companies have used the Internet to save billions of dollars. Taking orders online with real-time credit card authorization saves paying call center operators and cuts entry errors. Online catalogs save lots in paper, printing, and distribution costs. Online FAQs and knowledge bases cut the number of customer service personnel you need. And I’m just scratching the surface here.

What’s the design decision here? To be clear and focused about your site’s objectives and purposes.
Worksheet. Now go back and put the numeral “1″ next to the most important purpose, “2″ for the next, and so on. Then in this space explain exactly what you want your website to achieve, in one or two sentences.

2. Decide Whether to Outsource or Do It Yourself
After clarifying your purposes, you need to decide whether to outsource the design of your website or to do it yourself. Let me tell you my bias. For nearly all businesses and larger non-profits I recommend outsourcing initial website design, but be very sure that you bring site maintenance back in-house. (See Point #12 below.)
Website design done right is complex and requires a number of different skill sets that aren’t commonly found in any one person, especially someone that doesn’t do this for a living. Some of these skills include:
• HTML savvy. Good web design software can help. But the kind of HTML code produced by many WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) programs can be kludgy and hard to maintain. Fine-tuning your design requires you to get into the raw HTML code.

• Graphic design, color experience and good artistic taste. No software package bestows artistic taste on its user, but good taste is indispensable for an attractive site. Of course, graphic software expertise is required to produce attractive and clean photos and site graphics, optimized to the smallest possible file size for quick loading.

• Website navigation design and implementation. Helping visitors get where they need to go quickly and efficiently is difficult, especially on sites over 20 webpages or so. Good navigation design comes from experience, not from good software.

• CGI and database programming. Even smaller sites use a “contact us” form and often a site search program that require CGI program installation and configuration. Larger sites may need to be integrated with an online database, which is no job for the faint of heart.

• JavaScript and Flash programming. Functional websites are dramatically helped by Flash and JavaScript features such as animation, drop-down navigation menus, and small windows that open to answer a hyperlinked question. Automatic pop-up windows that encourage e-zine subscriptions can be effective, but can be annoying if you don’t make them to turn off after one pop — and these days are increasingly blocked by pop-up blockers.

• Marketing and business experience. An outside company doesn’t really understand your business like you do. Make sure you communicate exactly what you need to achieve. The best website design firms understand how to build Web marketing into the site design to make it search engine friendly, to make the sales pages really sell, etc.

What does outsourcing cost? For a simple five or six page website, expect to pay $750 to $1,500. For a more complex site you may pay $3,000 to $10,000 and up. For database-driven sites you’ll need custom programming. Of course, sites designed for high traffic or for Internet-focused companies can cost much more.
If you have no money, it is possible to teach yourself website design. I did. Arm yourself by reading some website design books first and expect to make some mistakes.

Where you lack the necessary experience, what will you do?

3. Divide Your Website into Logical Sections
My first website had 100+ pages and I made the mistake of dumping all the webpages into a single directory. What a mess! I learned quickly that you need to organize your site both logically and with multiple directories, one for each section. Here’s a typical small-site structure:

Click to enlarge and print in PDF format http://www.wilsonweb.com/articles/images/site_structure.pdf
This site layout isn’t meant to be prescriptive, but only suggestive. Get a blank piece of paper and begin to lay out what your site will look like, with similar functions grouped together.
Don’t be afraid to create multiple subdirectories to keep your site organized. When you’re setting up newsletter archives, for example, create a directory for each year of issues so a single directory doesn’t get too cluttered. Remember, you’re not designing for just the present moment, but for the growth your site may undergo over the next two or three years.
I set up my file structure with a /syspix subdirectory that contains the system graphics which appear on nearly every page of the site. I also use an /images subdirectory under each major section of the website to contain the graphics used in that particular section. You may know where everything goes right now, but what happens when you try to make sense of it a year or two from now? Organize!
Your home page should provide a statement of exactly what your company or organization does. Preparing a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) for your company is a great way to begin. I’m amazed at how many websites don’t really tell me what they do. I have to nose around trying to figure it out. That’s stupid! State precisely what you do, and then provide links to the rest of your site so your visitor can learn more. For more information, see my article “Just Who Are You Anyway? Developing a USP,” Web Marketing Today, 3/1/2000 (www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/plan-usp.htm).
My site structure diagram includes product pages, landing pages, and an ordering system. More on those in Point #10 below. The focused content and reciprocal linking pages are designed to boost your search engine ranking, and are described in Point #8 below.
In your “About the Company” section be sure to tell your organization’s story. Big companies spend millions to build confidence through brand name familiarity. Small businesses tell their story, often illustrated with photos, to help visitors understand and trust them. If you have a passion about what you do, tell your visitors about it in this section! Here’s where a local business or organization will include a map and driving directions to help people find it. I’ll talk about the importance of the “Contact Us” form in Point #9 below.
What’s the design decision here? To structure your site and break up your webpages into logical directories and subdirectories to avoid confusion later.
Worksheet. What will be the names of the directories and subdirectories in your site? (Better yet, write this out on a full sheet of paper.

4. Develop a Site Navigation System
Now that you’ve laid out your website, you can see how important a good navigation system is. One of the chief complaints that visitors have is that they can’t find the content they’re looking for. The larger your site, the more important redundant navigation systems are — more systems than you think you might need. Here are some of the basic systems and a few you might not have thought of:
• Left-side menu lists the various sections of your site, and perhaps some of the subsections, too.

• Tabs near the top of the webpage help the visitor quickly see the most important sections of your site. This facilitates browsing.

• Search the site or the product database. Larger sites need a search feature so visitors don’t get lost.

• 10 most common gifts, etc.

• View today’s specials or recent news releases.

• Bottom links provide hypertext links to all the sectional pages.

• Site map shows the structure and has links to every page (or sectional page).

Except for the very smallest five- or six-page sites, I encourage you to implement two or more of these systems. Over-kill, that’s the ticket. What may be obvious to you and your designer after looking at the site for weeks may not be obvious at all to your visitor. Each separate navigation system gives her another opportunity to find what she’s looking for.
If you’re a do-it-yourselfer, consider using a free search engine such as Atomz Express Search (www.atomz.com/applications/search/trial.htm) or FreeFind (www.freefind.com) for your search function. Another approach is to use Google Free web search with site search (www.google.com/searchcode.html).
Some websites are “button happy.” They have graphic buttons down the left side of the page and across the top. They may look nice, but there’s a big cost in download time. There’s a strong trend on high traffic sites toward text menus made with HTML characters, not GIF images. Look at a text menu you admire and study the HTML by viewing the source. Text is good; buttons are bad — especially when overdone. Got it?
Finally, I’d like to say a word about “frames,” a kind of HTML menu that lists page names in a window on the left side that scrolls up and down independently of the content window on the right. Website designers used to love them, until they discovered that they cripple a website’s marketing potential. Insist that your site developer not use frames! More on this in Point #7 below. Instead of using frames, set up your navigation system with Server Side Includes (SSIs), described in Point #6 below. If you have a complex site, I recommend that you employ a professional website designer to set up your navigation system — even if you do all the rest. Leverage professional experience to help your customers find what they’re looking for.
You can find more information in my article, “Navigation Systems for Business Websites,” Web Marketing Today, 8/31/2000 (www.wilsonweb.com/articles/navigation.htm).
What’s the design decision here? To make clear, redundant navigation a priority — for your customers’ sake.
Worksheet. Put an X next to the types of navigation system you plan to use from the list above. Why are you choosing these? What is your rationale?

5. Give Your Website an Attractive ‘Look and Feel’
Why should a website look good? Why should it look professional? Because like the sign hanging over a store in the strip mall, your website reflects upon you and your business. If the sign’s lettering looks crude and homemade, people won’t say, “The thrifty shopkeeper is trying to save money by making his own sign.” They’ll say, “How tacky! If this is how the sign looks, then the products and services can’t be of very high quality either!”
You owe it to yourself to make your website look top-notch. To succeed, you’ll need some artistic flair, or perhaps you should hire a graphic designer’s talents for the basic design and site graphics.
I’d like you to look with me at IBM’s homepage. It is a well-designed page, but it isn’t “graphics heavy” and doesn’t take a long time to download.

IBM’s US homepage as of 8-Jul 2003. Click to enlarge to a printable PDF document http://www.wilsonweb.com/articles/images/ibm_homepage030708.pdf
I won’t be exhaustive, but I want you to notice:
• The site is clean and understated, not gaudy or in-your-face. Few colors with lots of white space contribute to this light, airy feeling.

• The page is designed with colored cells of HTML tables that take practically no download time. Most of the parts that are blue, black, dark grey, and light gray are table cells.

• Graphics are few. The largest is a gif image 25K in size. Other gif images are small, with some reusable “go” and “search” buttons.

• The left-side menu is text.

• The navigation system consists of: (1) left-side menu, (2) site search in the top right corner, (3) four major categories in the black bar at the top, (4) solutions (browse by industry), services, and shopping in the gray blocks, (5) recent news releases, (6) selected popular products highlighted with graphics, (7) company-oriented menu in a black bar in the bottom left corner.

• Photographs contribute to the classy, professional look. Photos can be very effective on business websites.

I could take you to many websites, but you can do that yourself. Become a student of how to create a simple, clean business look. It takes a lot of skill to design a site this well and with this kind of restraint.
Let me tell you a secret. Some graphic designers like to build sites with lots of graphics. They have fast LAN or DSL connections and have no idea how long their sites take to download on a 56K modem. Try to keep your homepage to 60K maximum, counting the file sizes of all the graphics and the HTML. (It’s a hard, but an important exercise.) Resist a designer’s yen to show off his skills. Quick loading — that’s important.
There’s no way I can educate you on complementary colors, warm and cold colors, heavy and light colors, etc. But bear in mind that everything you do has some effect on your visitor’s perceptions of your company, her state of mind, and her emotional response.
One of your best website investments will be in a few excellent, royalty-free stock photos. Well composed photos add a touch of class to your webpages. They provide a visual center of interest in an otherwise plain webpage. They add spice and color. You don’t want just dull pictures of business people in suits. To create a sense of energy and maximum effort, you might use a theme of photos from competitive sports, for example. Use your imagination. For high quality photos you can license and use on your website for $35 to $60 each, look at PhotoDisc (Getty Images, www.photodisc.com). I subscribe to ClipArt.com (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/clipart.htm) and have access to hundreds of thousands of photos (some great, many good). I can use anything I can download for $14.95 a week. Such a deal!
What’s the design decision here? To develop a quality, professional appearance for the website that represents your organization.
Worksheet. In three sentences, how do you plan to achieve the professional look and feel that your website needs?

6. Build Basic Webpage Templates
Commercial websites are built from templates. You or your designer will create a template that constructs each part of a typical webpage, with a “hole” in the center for the unique page content. This takes many hours to build from scratch, but it’s worth it. Now you can create page after page from the template. For each webpage you’ll insert a page title, meta tag content (see Point #7 below), a headline, and the text content, each in its appropriate spot. Have fun!
But let me take this a step further. Take a look at the sample webpage from my site. I’ve simplified it here, but the article content is surrounded by four sections, each of which is shown when a web browser comes to the webpage:
Webpage sections showing SSI files
• top.ssi — inserts the masthead graphic, a banner ad, and some of the “tabs” navigation system at the top of the page. This is a separate file, called “top.ssi” that is inserted at the top.

• menu.ssi — inserts the complex left-side menu plus a database search feature.

• bottom.ssi — inserts a subscription form for my newsletter, plus more navigation links, copyright and trademark information.

• right.ssi — inserts cover shots of my books, plus links to purchase my e-books and affiliate links to products and services in the field of web marketing and e-commerce.

Each of these files is called a Server Side Include (SSI) file. On the webpage a single line of code calls one of these files and places it where it belongs on the page. Here’s what it the code looks like:

The beauty of this kind of modular system is that a site built with SSIs can be modified or completely altered by just changing one of the SSI files and uploading it to the server. Now all the webpages in the entire system reflect the change. When I discovered how to do this it cut my maintenance time dramatically. Yes, it takes a learning curve to make it work, but it’s well worth the time you spend! For more information see my article “Server Side Includes (SSIs) and Navigation Systems,” Web Marketing Today, 8/1/1998 (www.wilsonweb.com/articles/ssi.htm).
It is possible, of course, to use a template for your pages that doesn’t employ SSIs. But if you anticipate a site that could grow to more that 8 to 10 pages, you’re much better off building your site with SSIs. If your designer doesn’t know how to use SSIs, find another designer.
Modern websites control the font sizes and colors using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). When you change the font size on a single master CSS file, it changes the fonts and colors in all your webpages. Cool! Make sure your website designer builds webpages using a single CSS file, since it saves maintenance costs in the long run.
The design decisions that you need to consider here are many, since they involve every detail of the look and feel of your basic template. Hopefully, you’ll decide to employ both Server Side Includes (SSIs) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that make your entire site easy to modify and maintain. Also consider features available with XHTML.
7. Construct Your Site to Be Search Engine Friendly
With a little practice, anyone can build a webpage. But a webpage that search engines love to visit and index — vital if you expect your site to get traffic — that’s another story. So many, many business websites don’t have a clue how to do this. Let me mention two important aspects of building a search engine friendly site:
A. Make Each Webpage a Search Engine Siren
In Greek mythology, as you know, partly-human female creatures called Sirens lured mariners with their singing. Your webpages ought to entice search engine spiders or robots to index your site. Each webpage you construct needs to contain the following elements. Note the careful placement of keywords, the search words people would use to find this particular webpage.
• Title — provocative and descriptive, containing the most important keywords from that webpage, no more than 80 characters. This is what shows up hyperlinked in search engine results, so make people want to click on it.

• Meta tags — The description meta tag should include one or two sentences (up to about 250 characters) describing the contents of this particular webpage. Work into the sentence the most important keywords and keyphrases that occur on this page. Some search engines will display your description. I still include a meta keywords tag, since Yahoo currently uses it for indexing, though Google doesn’t.

• Headlines — H1, H2, H3 in HTML parlance. Your headline and subheadings should include your important keyword at least once.

• Body text — The first paragraph of the content of your webpage article or text should contain the main keywords for that page.

• Hyperlink text and filenames — Search engines believe that the words contained in hyperlinks on your webpage (such as widget) are important, and thus rank them higher. If the filenames contained in the hyperlink URLs contain important keywords (such as widget.html for the filename of your widget order page), so much the better.

Don’t emphasize the same keywords on every page. Let the actual content on that page dictate what keywords should stand out. Your goal is not to trick the search engines in some kind of bait-and-switch scam, but to help the search engines recognize and index appropriately the actual content of your webpages. Construct every webpage with search engines in mind and it’ll help your rankings. Of course, search engine rankings are heavily influenced by incoming links to your site, but constructing your webpages with an eye to search engines is very important, too.
Dr Wilson’s Plain-Spoken Guide to Search Engine Optimization
You’ll find lots more about this in my 42-page book Dr. Wilson’s Plain-Spoken Guide to Search Engine Optimization (www.wilsonweb.com/ebooks/seo.htm)
B. Search Engine Savvy Navigation Systems
Navigation systems are built to help actual humans find their way around your website. But these navigation systems had better be designed carefully or the search engines will throw up their hands in disgust, with the result that actual humans will never get to your website. Search engines need a chain of hypertext links — starting at your homepage — that will take them, page by page, to every webpage in your entire site. But let me explain three common navigation design problems that can disrupt search engine indexing of your site:
1. Frames (mentioned in Point #4 above) produce a navigation system where the menu on the left scrolls independently of the page content on the right. Unfortunately, frames can wreak havoc with search engines. (a) Unless you are careful to include

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