From my years of success in website building and online marketing, these are the seven skills I believe it takes to run a website development plan.
It’’s worth mentioning that your website is an asset to your business. It showcases your business, builds your reputation in search engines, and collects data about who is interested in your site/business, which is detailed in the analytics you use. Plus, when you go to sell your business at retirement time, a quality website will increase the perceived value of your hard work.
The #1 goal of every website is to produce and sustain organic search results. As you improve your website authority, you are contributing material that ensures you will receive higher rankings in search results.
As a website owner, you want to define your territory in the digital world containing billions of websites, which include your competition.
Owning your domain and publishing content on a website or app in that domain, is claiming your territory.
Conversely, companies rely on social media campaigns to boost their presence or stake their business claim. Social media is a good tool for staking your claim, but you do not own that space. Instead, using social media to boost your business presence and then including a link or direction back to your website will ensure that your business has a rock-solid foundation - or as I like to say it, you will own your digital territory when your social media directs people back to your website.
Social media is a component of the marketing segment in a website development plan.
The five main segments in this website plan are as follows.
As a website owner, you must take steps to ensure that your domain and content are protected.
Paying a domain registrar for your domain each year. The average fee is $12 - 20 a year. Some examples of domain registers are Google Domains and Godaddy.
Owning your domains allows you to send and receive emails using your domain that is a professional look and feel versus sending business emails from your gmail account. There is a method to send an email, from your gmail account, that uses your domain - without incurring a fee. Or, you can purchase the Google business services to accomplish that task.
The website hosting service is someone you pay to publish your content to the public. It could be a domain registrar or an independent company. The features you can compare are reliability, cost of email accounts (no fee is better), email storage (lee fee is better), and support for tech issues. For those that are more advanced, you want to have access to the C Panel which allows to all the website components - files, error pages, databases, 301 changes and so forth.
One new development in website design is AI. It seems like a powerful tool with exciting possibilities, but is it a good tool or will it detract from your search rankings?
This type of content is the coding of your website and the file layout of your website - both of which are how the bots will access your content. Bots are the search engine code automation that reads billions of websites each day to determine what is new content, what has changed, and so forth. That is how SEO results are determined - bots read the website content and in turn search engine algorithms then sort the website data that bots collect.
Let me share two essential Google tools with you that will improve your website project.
Google Search Console
This tool covers all aspects of your website and is geared toward webmasters, website owners, and SEO professionals.
Google Structured Data (Rich Snippets)
This tool applies mainly to optimizing content which is the next component we will discuss. Using data snippets on your website will greatly enhance the communication search bots to correctly index your website content. Be sure to specify all required properties for your data snippet type. Items that are missing required properties in the snippet are not eligible for rich results.
Content is basically sorted into three categories: marketing, visual, and responsive. All of your website content plays a role in your SEO, either positively or negatively.
Marketing is using the content to reach your target audience. Visual is how the content on your website pages will display - aka website design. Responsive is how your content displays on different devices. Visit the content design article for quick ideas on how to present quality content.
As an overview, and for your consideration, here are website design trends in 2020:
In other words, in 2022, those topics were the trending content characteristics to make your website look the best.
As evidenced by the list above, building websites does require some aortic skill as well as, being a nerd. For example, fonts, and typography, work well together in readability. Along with how you install fonts on your website - which is the nerd ability.
It's good to remember that it's always better to use fonts that are installed on your website versus using fonts from Google. When the fonts are installed on your website, it means a faster page load versus having to travel the internet to get the font displayed.
That seems like a small nuisance, but the more you can tweak your website architecture and content for speed, the means after page loads, and that contributes to a better, or higher, ranking in the organic listings displayed in each result.
Three things to avoid with structured data, rich snippets, on your website.
This is the rich snippet checker to check your structured data.
Be sure you have published a privacy policy. While there are no Federal privacy laws in the USA, as of today, some States, like California and Nevada, do have them and your site must comply.
Nowadays, videos are an essential ingredient in website content. They make it easy to connect with potential customers. Each video you publish will have a link back to your website, an inbound link, in the video description.
"81% of businesses use video as an outreach tool — up from 63% over the last year.
~ Hubspot, 2020
"75% of all video plays are on mobile devices."
~ eMarketer, 2020
"Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text."
~ Insivia, 2020
In outreach, you have two themes: engagement and inbound links.
Engagement begins at your website. You want to offer opportunities for visitors to connect with you. This can be as easy as subscribing to your newsletter or watching a video, even sending you a message from the contact page is an engagement strategy.
An inbound link is a link to your website from another website. A simple example is a post in Facebook with a link to your website. Or, a video you posted in YouTube with a pin back to your website.
The key with inbound links is you want them from high-traffic sties and trusted sites.
In other words, paying a service to create hundreds or thousands of inbound links to your site is NOT an effective strategy. Conversely, if you are on REDDIT and talking with people there about your services and drop links in your posts, that has more credibility and relevance.
As far as inbound links go, less high-quality links are much better than massive non-relevant links.
In social media, the search engine algorithms don’t give as much credit to links posted on social media platforms as in prior years. A more refined and long-term strength is required if you want to build relevant inbound links.
Organic listings in search results are displayed due to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When done correctly, SEO beats paid advertising for every dollar spent. Why?
A newer aspect of marketing is protecting website visitors' privacy. With the various third-party apps and cloud services available to automate work flow, be sure that your website visitor privacy policy is in place to explain how you are ensuring privacy rights.
Because paid advertising only appears while you pay the advertising fee. Conversely, SEO results are a result of content, aka permanent media, which will continue to thrive long after you paid an SEO fee.
Below are nine website elements to use as guidelines as you build your marketing machine, aka website, and related workflow processes. Hopefully, these will identify the important elements in your roadmap to having a successful online business.
Build Your Marketing Plan Based On Results
There are many case studies of SEO out there to review. The analytics you install on your website will clearly point to how visitors find you and what they do once they land on your site. Use that information to fine-tune your website content and marketing campaigns.
Success Stories Abound
Based on the way search engines appear to be developing, it is not likely that SEO will cease to be effective at any time in the foreseeable future. On some level, even audio and video searches ultimately depend on keywords the same as traditional text-based content; this link ensures the continued success of SEO techniques as long as it exists.
SEO Is Measurable & Affordable
Compared to the costs associated with other forms of online marketing such as PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, social media marketing, or purchasing leads for an email marketing program, SEO provides fairly good ROI. While PPC may drive more revenue and social media may be more important for your image, your organic SEO in many ways remains a bedrock of your online presence.
Use Analytics To Examine Website Visitor Traffic
Somewhere between 80-90% of customers now check online reviews prior to making a purchase, and this number is only expected to increase. It won’t be long before virtually everyone is searching for products and services online. Do you want them to be able to locate your business, or not? Without organic SEO in place, people will have a very hard time finding you and will instead find your competitors.
Design Website To Connect With Mobile Users
The amount of traffic delivered to mobile devices is expected to exceed that delivered to traditional desktop devices - year after year. With this dramatic explosion in mobile usage, a whole new world of effective SEO techniques has opened up for companies, such as local search optimization, targeting your website design on mobile devices to display differently, and drilling down in analytics to examine what mobile users do on your website.
Information Age: Quality Content Is Primary Focus
With each and every update to its search algorithm, Google and other engines change the way they look at websites. Things that didn’t exist a few years ago, such as social media indicators, are now given fairly high importance in terms of their impact on your rankings. Not building a healthy content profile spread over months and years is potentially damaging to your business, as it is one of the factors Google evaluates when looking at your site.
Must Keep Up With Competitors
the best way to keep up with your competition, or exceed them, in search engines is by publishing quality content. Filling the steps in the article will support you in building a better website while improving your website skills. Use analytics and researching marketing trends to identify what your competition is presenting in content and design your content accordingly.
Local Business Listings In Search Engines
Obtain a free local business listing today. Set up a free Google Local Business and Bing Local Business listing.
Engagement Strategy
Integrate call-to-action strategies into your website content. There are many to choose from, from the simple to the complex. One of the newest methods is a chat bot. They are easily produced and easy to customize to fit your site and style. Best of all, they provide a quick method for visitors to leave you their contact information with specific questions.