Factors to consider for a healthy web presence
Website design By BotEap.comThe 21st century makes a strong and healthy web presence a vital necessity for businesses across all industries. The lack of a recognizable website leaves companies virtually invisible. Considering the great global competition, businesses (particularly start-ups or smaller businesses) without such a “digital business card” have little hope of success. Here are some factors to consider when trying to achieve a healthy web presence and subsequent business growth.
Website design By BotEap.comcustom domain
Website design By BotEap.comMany small and new businesses toy with the idea of starting their web presence by taking advantage of free web hosting offers. However, this has drawbacks. First of all, resources like bandwidth and storage space are usually limited on free hosting plans. This means that as a business grows, hosts need to be upgraded or changed. The process of upgrading/changing hosting plans could be more expensive than using paid hosting in the first place.
Website design By BotEap.comSecond, and more importantly in this context, free hosts often provide users with domain names that are tied to the hosting company. If, for example, you create a site to sell jewelry through a free hosting plan, your domain name would look something like this: yourjewelryname.hostcompany.com. If, on the other hand, you have a paid host, you will be able to choose your own custom domain name, which might look like this: yournamejewellery.co.uk. The latter looks much more professional than the former. It also tells potential customers that you care enough about your business to invest in your own domain name. In other words, a custom domain adds credibility to your business.
Website design By BotEap.comprofessional design
Website design By BotEap.comWebsites obviously have to be attractive. However, there is much more to designing a professional website than just the look. To attract and please both customers and search engines, business websites need to conform to current design trends to some extent. They also have to be easy to use; easy to navigate and accessible from any device, from desktops and laptops to tablets and mobile phones. If you have little or no experience designing a user-friendly and attractive site, hire a professional designer. This may not come cheap, but a well-designed site will help strengthen your online presence and usually pays off your initial investment very quickly.
Website design By BotEap.comCopy and content
Website design By BotEap.comWebsite copy and content must be relevant to your business, informative and/or entertaining. In short, they have to be of value to visitors. Visual content such as photos, videos, graphics, etc., should be of high quality, but should be small enough to avoid slow load times. Copy/textual content should be well-written, easy to read, and free of grammar and spelling errors. Optimizing both copy and content for search engines with the help of relevant, well-researched keywords without “stuffing” the site is equally vital to ensuring your internet presence is healthy and strong. Once again, recruiting professionals to help you create proper copy/content and search engine optimization may be the most profitable option in the long run.
Website design By BotEap.comsocial networks
Website design By BotEap.comYou can significantly strengthen your web presence and substantially increase your target audience by creating and regularly updating company profiles on social networks (Facebook, Google+ and Twitter; Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.). Providing unique, fresh, informative, educational and entertaining content, even fun, and interacting with other users on a regular basis is imperative to building a healthy web presence. So is avoiding too much sales talk and dubious methods like ‘sock puppets’ (creating fake profiles to post positive comments/reviews about your own business). Linking these pages to your website is naturally essential as well. This, of course, clearly leads to the next step of creating a strong web presence, namely link building.
Website design By BotEap.comlink building
Website design By BotEap.comHaving relevant inbound and outbound links on your site is also an important part of ensuring a strong web presence. For obvious reasons, it is important to only link to reputable websites. Such sites can be related blogs or other industry-related websites, for example. The main point to remember is to have organic links. In other words, you need to build links by providing content that is valuable enough for others to want to link to, rather than ‘harvesting’ links from so-called ‘link farms’. Such ‘farms’ can provide an almost unlimited number of links, but many of those links may originate from/lead to disreputable sites. Using those links could easily backfire and get your site penalized or blacklisted by search engines.
Website design By BotEap.comSummary
Website design By BotEap.comIn a nutshell, creating a healthy and strong web presence for your company depends, at least partially, on having:
Website design By BotEap.com– A custom domain name
Website design By BotEap.com– User-friendly, attractive and responsive website design.
Website design By BotEap.com– Well produced/written, valuable content/search engine optimized copy
Website design By BotEap.com– Regularly updated social media profiles
Website design By BotEap.com– Lots of valuable organic links to/from your site
Website design By BotEap.comIf achieving a strong web presence means enlisting the help of professionals, the results usually outweigh the original expense in a very short time.