Building Effective Websites

In the previous article, we discussed how internet can be used as an effective marketing channel. This article will focus on giving you some tips on how to select domain names as well as build effective websites.

Domain Name Selection

Selecting domain name or names could be one of the most critical decisions you will take to market your business on the internet. In order to select one domain name, one needs to know the keywords people are searching to look for your product and services.
Here is a practical tip to select the domain names. Come up with a list of keywords that you think are relevant. Go to google and search for the selected keyword. If the result set contains websites that are of your competitors’, then look for domain names that contain that keyword.
Google AdWords has a tool called Keyword tool that will tell you the number of times a keyword is search in a month from a region. If someone you know has an adword account set up, you can use that to know the keywords being used to look for your product and services.

Keyword tool is available only as part of Google Adwords which is a paid service.
Once you have list of domain names that are relevant for your products and services, you will need to check their availability. This can be checked for you by the company that is going to develop your website or you can check that on your own.  There are websites that will generate domain names when you provide them with your keywords. Here are the sites that do that
http://www.nameboy.com/
http://domainfellow.com/
http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-rich-domain-suggestions.php
 Availability of domain can also be checked on http://whois.net. The site will also tell you when the domain name’s registration will expire.
Best strategy is to reserve 3-5 domain names with right keywords and then direct them to your main webpage.

Website Creation

Your website is the centerpiece of your internet marketing strategy. Your website will give surfer a glimpse of the company they are going to deal with.
Few things to consider while making a website.

• Over 70% of internet traffic originates from search engines
• An average visitor to any site spends about 30 seconds to get the information he/she seeks
• If he/she finds right information, you can expect another 3-4 minutes of surfer’s time on the site

Given above information, create websites that market your products and services. Trying to sell in that time is almost impossible. Use website to generate brand awareness.
While building websites, following key criteria should be kept in mind:

• Easy to find on internet: Your website must be search engine friendly. It must contain pages that are created to attract traffic to the site which contain keywords that you think surfers are using to find you. Dynamic websites where most of the information is built using databases, do not lend themselves to be crawled by the search engines hence do not give good results. Websites built completely in flash can not be crawled either. Most crawlers look for keywords in specific “tags” of the website. It is important to use the tags wisely. No information can be crawled from the images. Search engine reads and interprets information in a slight different way than the way you and I do. It is important to keep that in mind while building websites.
• Easy to navigate: Ease of navigation is very important while building a website. Common mistake made by companies is to “expose” internal structure of the organization to the surfers. Remember, the surfer is trying to find information about your product and services. He/she is least interested in your internal departments. Information, that is embedded under 2-3 layers is not going to be found easily. Remember that if you want someone to read something, make it easy for them to find it first. Provide plenty of internal links to the relevant sections and the links should be made very conspicuous.
• Track visitor behavior: Websites built now a days, should allow surfer behavior to be tracked. Google Analytics is a free tool that should be used to track surfer behavior on the website. As far as possible, there should be one page per action for the user. Showing enquiry form and successful submission of the same, should be separate pages. This will allow you to tell the number of times enquiry form was visited and the number of times it was submitted. Low submission rate may tell you that your enquiry form needs to be looked at. You may be asking for information that the surfer does not think is necessary to be provided.
• Disseminate information that can be digested and easily accepted: Many websites make claims that are easy to discard. Do not make your surfer doubt the information you are putting forth. Give claims that the surfer can believe and may invoke his/her curiosity.  Most surfers, now a days, do plenty of research on the internet. Assume that the surfer on your site will be well informed and knows exactly what he/she is looking from you. Providing him/her with your unique selling point will probably make him/her curious to know more about you. On a product page, putting too much information is not a good idea. Keep your product pages short and simple to read. Remember, you are trying to market and not sell. In order to build effective websites, one must know the company’s true Unique Selling Points (USPs). Then turn that USP into easy read for the surfer before putting that on the website.
• Action oriented: Each page of your website should have a link that allows user to take some action if he/she likes the information he/she reads. The action can be submitting an enquiry, registering to the site to get information on a periodic basis, make a phone call, chat with some support person etc. One thing to remember while building enquiry form is to know the information that the surfer would be willing to share. Most companies build enquiry form based on their needs but tend to forget that the enquiry form has to be filled out by the surfer. He/she may not have the information or may be unwilling to share some information. A rule of thumb to follow is to ask for information that you would provide on someone else’s website. Time to fill out an enquiry form should not be more than 1 minute for most businesses.

In the next article, we will discuss Google Analytics tool in detail and how it can be used to get valuable information about your website visitors. Please send your queries on my email address at ajoshi@erpconsultantsindia.com  related to Internet Marketing and I will answer your questions in the next article.

About the author: Ajay Joshi is the president & CEO of Creative Edge India provides IT advisory and Internet Marketing services to companies globally. For more information Log on to http://www.creative-edge.in  Or Email: info@creative-edge.in