This is just a thought I wanted to put out here for you to contemplate if you’re planning a new website.

Sometimes a person or company will feel they need to have as much information as they can, to describe their product and services on the website. They may want to add a lot of details, specs, history and more thinking this will assure the visitor/customer of the quality and necessity of the products or services advertised on the website.

In a world where many are still a little leary of doing business on the web, many would think adding all this information is a good idea. In some cases it is… in some cases  it isn’t.

Some of our clients have started with a simple site that sells their products and services. Sales would be at a decent rate. At a later date the client decides he/she wants to add more details about the products, or more history, product testing, etc… this sounds like it would be a good idea, right? Not always.

In some cases, when more “helpful” information was added, sales tended to drop off. The theory being that it often seemed that the visitors/customers were more inspired to buy when it was a simpler process with less information to digest. Of course this is not always the case, but it is something to seriously consider when planning your website. Different products and services would require different approaches. Given this information, think about what would be best for you site. You could always start of simple, keeping things pretty streamlined towards the purchase, then if needed, add more content to the site to offer more reasons for the visitors to become customers.

When someone comes to your website, you want the impression to be one that shows a high level of professionalism, integrity and ultimately inspires confidence in your products or services that transforms the “visitor” into a “customer” or “client.”

Think very seriously about this. It’s not good enough anymore to just “have a website.” You need to have a site that shows your business in it’s best light. Of course you always need to stay within your budget when having your site designed, but make sure the company who you hire is concerned with your sites presentation (look and feel) and has the competence to provide you with the quality design work and functionality that your site (and your business) require.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. What it refers to is, simply put, optimizing the pages of your website so that it has a better chance of ranking well with the search engines, and receive better results in relevant searches. Most website owners would like to have their websites appear on the first page of a Google search. This is great for business! Having the pages of your website optimized really helps your chances of this happening.

On-Page SEO

Some of the aspects of SEO include Keyword-Rich title tags, meta tags and copy (the text of your site). These are things that your website developer can implement when coding the pages of your site. This is “On Page” SEO.

Off-Page SEO

One of the most important thing you can do to really improve your site’s importance to Google is to have as many one-way, inbound links from other sites pointing to you. This indicates to Google (and other search engines) that your site is an authority in it’s field. It helps if these sites that link to you are in the same field as your site. For example, if you sell bricks, it helps if these other sites are related to “bricks.”

There’s a lot more to this subject than this post, but hopefully this gives you a little bit of an understanding on what SEO is and it’s importance to a successful website.