Designing a SEO Business Website

Before you start designing your own website there are many things you need to consider.  This webpage will give you an overview of that information.  If you are looking for detailed information about designing your own business website, you will find that information in the Alpha Omega SEO Webdesign website.

When you start creating your business website, use your internet business plan, which should contain a specific part covering designing your own website.  Keep referring to your internet business plan during your initial website and webpage layouts. This is your starting point to organizing your website design, when your satisfied with the layout, then you start designing your business website.  It is very important not to rush into the actual designing of your business website before you consider everything possibility, making changes later can get costly and use up precious time.

Depending on your type of business, a search engine optimized website might not be a priority or as critical if you only intend to serve your local community, such as a therapist, doctor, local store, or service.  You can reduce your world wide competition by including the name of the area you serve in your keyword phrase.

Create your own business website

It's time for another personal assessment.

Twelve basic questions to ask yourself before you start to design your own business website.  Be sure to give yourself honest answers.

1. Is there a demand for your product or service?
2. What about your competition, is your market already saturated?
3. Is your product or service a new concept, have you tested the market?
4. Do you have an in-depth knowledge about your product or service?
5. Do you have the equipment machinery and tools?
6. Do you have a business background, if not what are your alternatives?
7. Can you put an honest business plan including website design together?
8. Do you have the ability to operate a computer?
9. Do you have the programs and ability to design a website?
10. Do you understand how the search engine protocols work for good placement?
11. Do you have experience in writing, especially marketing copy?
12. Do you have the resources and money needed to last a year or more?

Dialup

Your dialup is your connection to the World Wide Web.  Since you are reading this we'll assume that you are already connected.  It is important, if you intend to create your own website, to have the best connection you can afford.  If you live in the sticks, you will only be able to get 28K to 56K modem services in most places.

Also, be sure the company you chose for your dialup has good equipment; few restrictions, backup systems and they are not overloaded with clients.  You will be spending hours researching, downloading information, uploading your website and setting up and maintaining your shopping cart.

There isn't anything more aggravating than to listen to a busy signal or getting bumped off the net over and over again, especially when you are uploading your own website.

Site Hosting

Finding a good hosting company is very important, preferably a local hosting company, where you can walk in the door and talk to a person face to face if you have a problem.  But, make sure they provide everything you need and have a record of 99.5% up time and lots of bandwidth.

Also, they should have weekly backups, power backup, FrontPage extensions (if you are going to use this program for designing your website, we prefer Adobe), cgi bins, traffic reports (we like Urchin or WebTrends), and secure online servers for your shopping cart.  There are other considerations for designing your own website, but this is the minimum.

Merchant Credit Card Account

Before you start creating your own website you'll need to decide whether or not to accept credit cards, this will save you a lot of time later.  Just keep in mind that you need to make purchases easy.  If you don't provide an easy method for your customer to purchase your product, no matter what method you use, you will lose sales.

A merchant credit card account is what you need to process credit cards.  Credit card online orders are growing daily and becoming very important.  However, if you don't have a merchant account nor able to obtain one, then you might consider programs like the PayPal, Buy It Button, or others.  PayPal is simple and straightforward and buy it button provides a complete escrow service or you can joining a mall that will process your credit card orders, but may take a small percentage (5-10%).

Also, when creating your own business website you might what to consider an toll free phone number.  They work good for those that don't trust the internet yet with their personal and credit card information.

eCommerce Hosting

eCommerce hosting is the secure online server for a shopping cart and/or credit card orders.  There are many types of shopping carts, some are slow and cumbersome and others are easy to use programs.  Whether your hosting company has a secure online shopping cart or you find another company to provide your shopping cart or you buy your own software, this is where you display all your products and take your orders.

Another way to look at it is, your website is your marketing website for the search engines, email, advertising, business cards, speciality directories, etc. Your shopping cart is where you display all your products, make your sales and collects the payment.

If you only have a few products or services, all you will need is your business website and secure hosting for credit card transactions. You can have that information forwarded to you and process that order yourself, or use the secure hosting company if they have a program to process your credit card orders or you can buy your own secure credit card processing program.

This will work for a small number of products or services, and you keep the extra coding to a minimum on the webpage. Shopping carts don't fair well with search engine placement.

Shopping carts are a wonderful product management, inventory control, and sales recording database, especially for a large number of products. Some programs have a database that will merge seamlessly into your shopping cart and give you all your financial, sales, inventory, reports and records you may want.

Setup Shopping Cart (eCommerce site)

Spend some time carefully organizing this part of your internet business.  Don't use to many sub-categories, yet don't place to many products on one page, that can cause a long load time.  Keep your site simple.  Follow the Kyss principle.

Furthermore, this part of your internet business needs to be operated internally, it may take some time to learn the shopping cart program, but this part of your internet business will need constant attention.

Computer and Software

The computer and the software you will need to work on the internet is another important part to design your own website and to operate your own business website on the internet.

The older, slower computer may be able to get the job done, however, it will cost you time.  Upgrading your computer, accessories, and using the newer programs designed for your operating system will make a world of difference in operating or creating your own website, save time and money.

Marketing using the Search Engines

Many think that if you design their own website, all they have to do is submit it to the search engines and the customers will come.  NO! NO! NO!  Ain't so.  You will have to create a business website better than thousands of other hopeful internet businesses.

You'll need to create your business website specifically to satisfy the search engines requirements, use exceptional marketing copy to motivate your customer to click to your website and stay there, and then motivated them to order your product or services.

The percentages are changing daily but the number of people that go beyond the first three pages of search engine results are minimal.  So if you have 100,000 competitors show up on the search engine results, only the best optimized websites will be in the top 30 and get the traffic.

You will need to design your own website for the search engines first, then the customer second and then they may come.  Getting customers to your website is only the beginning of a successful website, there is much more that needs to be considered.

Research Internet Market & Competition

You should average 30-40 hours during the initial research before starting the actual designing of your business website.  You need to research your competition on the search engines using as many keyword phrases as possible, you need to note their position, their ad copy, general content, the source code, descriptions, keywords, appearance, and navigation links, saving the best ones for later reference.

When you have completed 50 to 100 of them, then go over and over your findings until you can decide what you need to do to get ahead of them without violating (spamming) the search engine requirements.  This is where you need to pay strict attention to their directory names, file names, title, meta description, meta keywords, use of headers and alt tags, first two sentences, general content and more.

Research Keyword Phrases

During this research time you should be searching for every possible keyword phrase (keyphrase) you can find that your competition is using, then we go beyond and start brainstorming for areas they have missed.

By using keyphrases that your competitors have neglected, you are now potentially adding additional top thirty positions that may dramatically help your traffic count.  I have always wondered why most websites use all the same old keywords on each webpage. Only a few reach beyond the common keyphrases and invariably find themselves in more of the top 30 positions.

Again, good keyphrases are critical, get as many as you can think of and only use two or three per webpage.  Also, it's surprising how many keywords that seem good are seldom used by the potential visitors.  This has shown up on many of our clients traffic reports.

Finally note: You'll never hit a 100%, so don't expect to have all of them in the top 30.  Our present low and high are: 15-24% in first place, 44-66% on the first page and 68-84% in the top thirty, and that's after 8 years of experience.  And, these positions only last from 6 months to 2 years.

See why it's best if you learn to design and maintain your own website, it will need constant attention and changes to keep up with your competition over the years, not to mention new or discontinued products or service, and price changes.

Website Layout - Search Engine Friendly

The first part of creating your own business website is deciding how many directories (folders) and subdirectories (subfolders) you should use.  Some search engines only index the root folder, others will go down one or two levels of directories (folders) and some will index the entire website.

You can place all your pages in the root folder, however sometimes it helps to have folders with names related to a root keyword or keyphrase for that area.  Also, folders help to organizing your website by breaking up webpages into categories organized in these folders.

Webpage Layout - Search Engine Friendly

The search engine robots that collect specific information from your website do not see your website like we do.  The robot (spider) follows the html code looking for specific code used by the search engines and most important, the content and how it's tagged, location, and size.  That's why you see so many description with gobbledegook (logo, pic#, gfx# or link names (home, products, about us, etc.) it's picking up the first words in text to form its own description.  You need to place the your most descriptive text as close to the top of the html code as possible.

So the layout of the webpage becomes critical to get the words (content) in the right place to get your descriptive text showing properly in the search engines descriptions.  Many of the search engines ignore some or most of the meta tags contrary to popular belief.  This is because of the abuse of keyword spamming by unethical webdesigners.  Keyword spamming or tricking the search engine may cause your entire website to be removed or band from a search engine.

Remember, when designing your own business website, the first impression the person gets from the search engine results about your website is critical, if you want them to click to your website, create your website right, especially your description for the search engine results.

Hidden needs of the Search Engines

The search engine inquiry program, a search and find program, works exclusively with a database (indexed web sites) to find web sites that contains information relating to a specific inquiry.  It is this program that measures each webpage for relevancy related to the keyword inquiry and will display its results in the order that it deems relevant for your inquiry, starting with the most relevant to the lesser relevant.

The program that is used by a particular search engine may vary from another search engine, but both will have many requirements that have to be satisfied before a webpage can be selected, then it assigns a percentage of relevancy to all the pages and the one that has the highest relevancy is display in the first position.

The requirements, areas of concern that the search engine may look at, are the domain name, subfolders names, file names, titles, meta tags, alt tags, headers, comments and the page content to make its decision about a pages relevancy.  There are hundreds of books written about this, but for now this should give your a little insight as to the importance of understanding how each search engines program works.

First Two Sentences

If you place high on the search engine results, the first two sentences on your website become the next most important area to be concerned with.  Make them the best you've ever written, full of emotion and motivating.  Sell the sizzle, not the steak!  Sell the smell, taste and tenderness (it'll melt in your mouth, image it) not how the steer was raised and what it was feed and how well it was aged. I know, poor analogy for a vegetarian.

Do not overlook this part, sell the sizzle most and especially within the first two sentence!  Even though many of the search engines are ignoring the meta tags now, I still use the first sentence for the meta description.  And don't forget about the text that may be in front of your first two sentences, you may never see your sentences in your search engine description and that could be costly.

Content and Keyword Relevancy

Content and keyword relevancy is the chant of the search engines today.  Does your webpage have good content related to the keyword inquiry and is the keyword used the right amount throughout the webpage?  Use it too much and you are spamming, don't use it enough and your keyword relevancy and content falter.

Graphics & Logos

Graphics whether it's logos, titles, buttons, mapping graphics, etc. need to look professional and load fast.  Designing graphics for the web is different than for brochures.  Designing graphics for a website can be time consuming, requiring a talented artist, software expertise, and compromise in quality because of load times.

Load time is very important both for the spider timeout settings and visitor patience.  In the case of the spider, if it times out, it leaves without indexing your webpage and if the customer reaches their personal timeout patience, you lose.

Product Photographs

Depending on your expertise in photography, lighting and photo editing you can save yourself a lot of money if you do it yourself. You'll need to perform magic with these photos, this is your only way of displaying your product or service on your website.

Your picture has to jump out at them and grab their imagination.  But, it has to be small in file size so it's fast loading, this can be one of your hardest trade-offs.  Most of your photos will be used in the shopping cart (if you are using one), but remember the customer with the slow dialup connection and low timeout patience won't wait for your catalog (shopping cart) webpage to load.  Again, try to keep the photo file size small 5-8K and/or break up your catalog categories down with more sub-categories.

If you are using a shopping cart for orders don't forget about your website webpages.  You'll want to use a few of your best photos as samples to wet their appetite.  You can use a clickable thumbnail or medium size photo to display a larger photo to reduce initial load time.  Your background and lighting is another area you need to experiment with.  Your photo needs to look near perfect and not like it was taken in your house, however, a natural setting can be good sometimes.

Backgrounds and Testimonials

Background of your company history and key staff members, and customer testimonials will help in establishing credibility.  Credibility is a strong influence in establishing customer trust in you and your product or service.  Use it wisely and don't exaggerate.

Also, the Better Business Bureau has a logo you can place on your website.  It basically acknowledges that they have verified your business, that you really exist and you have no complaints or issues that has been brought before them.  You have to apply for it.

Submit Website to Search Engines

When you start creating your own business website, do not attempt to submit your website to any search engine until it is ready, and I mean ready!!!  If you have to create your business website online, it's a good idea to put a robots.txt file on your website blocking all search engine robots from prematurely indexing your webpages before you are ready.

When you are ready, manually submit your index page to the major search engines first.  It may take up to six months to get indexed on some search engines.  Be patient.  Also, don't over look targeted directories.  Be careful of the automated submitting services, some can get you bumped off the top engines.  If the automated submitting service will allow you to excluded specific search engines that you manually submit to, go ahead and use them, it never hurts to get as much exposure as you can.

Remember, if your website is not ready or designed for the search engine, you'll be pouring money down the drain because your webpages may never see the light of day on some search engines.

Believe It or Not, this is only a brush stroke, the details are on Alpha Omega Web Designers website and that is only two brush strokes.  Good luck and call if you need help. 509-684-8080