What best performing websites know
February 13, 2011
So you want your site to do profitably. You want it to get top search rankings and change plenty of visits into real actions. Well, you are not alone – not by a long shot. You’re in the same situation as thousands of millions of other organisations, who all require their web sites to get the same results. You are in immediate conflict with thousands of web sites that supply entirely the same product as you do. And yet some sites usually seem to come to the front of the line. How?
Recall how successful people are rumoured to perform a certain number of recognisable behaviours – the ways of good acumen? Your site should be doing the same thing. Every high placed web site shows a clutch of behaviours behind it that set it apart from the rest. If you need your site to fight it out with the rest of them, you need to know how they behave.
Money for nothing: doesn’t happen on the net
Net users aren’t going to come to you for mousetraps just because you happen to sell it.
The web is really very huge – and it’s crammed, literally heaving, with people and sites who vend completely the same service as you. If you accept it according to the odds, as a bet the Internet is dead and buried. It’s hopeless. There’s no way you can build a website for selling a product and then expect trade to come find you.
No – the premier and most guarded behavour of profitable sites is this: do everything you need to get your market through your portal. The most fashionable techniques right now include geography specific marketing, which ignores the global landscape and locks on finding customers in your neighbourhood; and the long tail key word, which leaves off wide angled searches for your product and focuses on absolutes instead. Both, by reducing your area down to well honed platforms, ensure that you’ll attract a steady quantity of spending traffic through your web site.
Be who you are
You will not sell a lick of modern plumbing apprenticeships unless you look as though you sell it. You must wear the clothes that fit the business.
Every website is constructed of bits and bytes.That code changes a lot – and if it doesn’t change in rhythm with present search engine “fashions” then your website is quickly going to fall out of grace. Picture the trends in site building as trends in shirts or hairstyles. A skinhead gives off one idea; a clerical collar another. A search engine “sees” your web site by checking out its programming first. If the programming “looks” correct, i.e. resembles what it is selling, then your web site performs well in results rankings.
The aspect of your website is important too. Customers are afraid of websites that don’t load or function as they expect them to. Whatever you vend, you need to be positive that your web site looks and feels in the same way as all contemporary sites: or else no-one will stay around long enough to buy anything.
Good existing sites
Have a good look at this site. It has been made in line with modern design trends and it anchors itself in a well though out niche market.
You can identify the marks of success immediately. Slick design, excellent navigation and a superbly outlined specialty product. Unless you’re one of the very few multinational uber websites, then your web site has to appear and work like this one. It needs to be clear, obvious, simple and aimed at the customers who are sure to take what it promotes.
The number one secret of successfully performing sites is this: recognise your limits. The Internet is not the boundary-less cornucopia of eager custom we all used to think it was. It’s a jammed up, sprawling mess of a global marketplace that can’t work at all without that you set your limits and operate within them. Our example web site has done exactly that – and it’s collaring huge benefits. You should be, too.