Sunday, February 1, 2009

What You Need for Your Great Website

By Angie Sandy

The key to internet marketing success is to attract website visitors and convert them into loyal and paying customers. This is accomplished with a variety of strategies and tactics which all begin and end with your website.

Wow your Customers

A fantastic customer experience is paramount to a great and profitable website. How do you create that fantastic experience? First and foremost, in order to make a decision to buy anything, your customers need to be able to find what theyre looking for quickly and easily. Make sure all your information is right up front and easy to find.

Customers will want to read product descriptions, have shipping calculations be quick and easy and a FAQ page is a great way to take care of all those recurring questions.

A powerful customer experience also includes feeling welcomed and valued " a sense of connection. This can be provided and enhanced by utilizing frequent buyer programs and an about us page to show them who you are and what youre about.

Valuable and Consistent Content

For business owners, in order to provide your customers and visitors with a fabulous experience a CMS, content management system or article management system will make providing valuable content quick and easy.

A CMS enables the user to manage the creation, modification, and removal of content from a Web site without needing the expertise of a Webmaster. This means you dont need to know any programming language to create your website. You can create, schedule, edit and remove pages without spending hours modifying HTML.

Top Notch Shopping Cart

The checkout process is where many businesses stumble. Customers demand, and deserve, a simple and very secure system and many shopping carts just dont measure up. Items are dropped, customers are asked to jump through too many hoops, and quite often all of the information they need, like shipping charges, isnt apparent until they hit the pay now button.

A good shopping cart system is imperative for a valuable customer experience and itll make your life easier too with simple reporting procedures and readily accessible sales information and a reasonable pricetag.

Search Option

In order to make the most of your customers time, and to keep them on your website, make it easy for them to find what they want. Provide a search tool which lets them enter their keyword and find exactly what they need with relative ease. For example if you own a store selling pet clothing, rather than asking your customer to search through pages of products, provide a search tool lets your customer find dog sweaters quickly and easily.

Providing this functional search feature enhances your customers experience as well it provides you with valuable keyword data to incorporate into your marketing strategy and product line decisions.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Theres no doubt that SEO plays a critical role in driving website traffic and sales. Finding a website builder with integrated SEO systems is like finding a wining lottery ticket. Imagine being able to link and tag your content and website code without having to jump through hoops or learn a programming language.

Dont forget to include a sitemap in your website. Sitemaps will help you stay at the top of your search engine rankings by informing the search engines each time a change or addition is made to your website.

Branding

As internet marketing becomes more and more competitive. If youre a solopreneur that means your personality is in large part your brand. While logos are important, its often more effective to demonstrate who you are and what youre about in the content and design of your website.

Many website building tools are difficult to navigate, have a steep learning curve and make it extremely difficult to get the look and feel you want to convey. A profitable website, one which provides customers a memorable and enjoyable experience, isnt impossible to create. You just need the right tools and to know what you want the end result to be.

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