Optimizing your website is just not enough to attract visitors and search engines or ensure repeated visits in these super-competitive times. Your attention-attracting website needs to combine several factors such as appealing design, useful content, ease of usability, high potential for conversion, while possessing a healthy presence on search as well as social media.
You can begin by knowing your target market in detail including their specific needs, your competition, and unique services that you can offer to your audience. Once you have set detailed goals and defined conversion points for every page on your site through nattily placed calls to action then you can begin laying the foundation of your website.
The first fundamental foundation, of course will be the design of your website. A clean look along with easy-to-understand commands and navigation buttons will help engage each visitor and will certainly reduce bounce rates. Your web design team needs to work with your SEO and marketing team to make sure that your website is not only visually alluring, but also achieves high rankings amongst major search engines while pleasing arriving visitors to the site at the same time.
Following Apple’s design elements that offer a flat look is one option that can catch the attention of your target audience while making it very easy to navigate will ensure repeat visits and high levels of user satisfaction.
In addition to striking looks, your website needs another important foundation in the form of high quality and related content. You must understand the needs of your audience and display content that keeps them engaged on your site as you subtly lead them towards a conversion.
The content on your site must be precise, relevant, easily understandable, and should be separated by adequate white spaces to rivet your visitor’s attention on that page. You must make full use of all your marketing assets and ensure that they are easy to locate on your website.
Usability is another foundation that needs to be extremely sturdy to ensure success. In the past only technical architecture was considered important to ensure successful crawling, indexation, canonicalization, and finally robots exclusion.
However, these days information architecture that involves presenting related information in an eye-catching and riveting manner has also gained importance since even a one-second delay could potentially result in losing a visitor and a sale.
Of course, no website can achieve increased visibility without effective SEO techniques. Your technical and marketing team must work together seamlessly to deliver a functional, optimized, and stunning website that attracts search engines and your target market alike.
Your URLs must be search-engine friendly and be based on a similar URL structure that includes XML and HTML site maps. Use Relevant Post Titles, Anchor Text Links, and Image ALT Attributes to call out to search engines for improved ranking. Avoid an overdose of H1 tags as well as Flash and Splash menus since they can confuse search engines.
Furthermore, you need to ensure optimum integration so that your website works with ease on an increasing number of devices such as PCs, laptops, tablets, mobile smartphones, etc. Using responsive web design can help you optimize your website for different devices and ensure that users across various devices enjoy a wonderful experience.
Finally, you must ensure that your website possesses a healthy link on proven and upcoming social media sites. Rising popularity of Facebook, Google+, Linkedln, and Twitter, among other such sites must be exploited by prominent buttons placed at strategic location. Furthermore, you must integrate your link campaigns to lead more visitors to your website. Inserting “Share” buttons on highly visible locations on your site will enable you to receive healthy organic links with higher traffic.
Each of the fundamental foundations mentioned above are extremely important to catch the attention of search engines and visitors as well as engage them enough to lead to successful sales. Make sure that your website possesses and merges them for a successful campaign.