Putting together a plan for your website

As you develop your website, there are three things that you need to consider. You have to set the right goals for your website, encourage visitors to your website to interact with it, and include social media interaction.

Goals

The goal for your website depends on several factors. If you are a new company, you might need to introduce your company to the internet. If you are an established company, you might need to try to improve your conversion rate.

Once you determine the goal of your website right now, you can decide what kind of content you need on the website. Introducing your company might entail offering information that shows off your knowledge. Trying to improve your conversion rate might mean you need to include soft sales messages in the content.

The content on your website matters

Your company’s website has to provide an accurate portrayal of your company. This means that your website must be authoritative. The readers who come to your website should be able to click through a few pages and know that you know your stuff. It doesn’t matter what field you are in, your website has to place you a step above your competitors.

Informative

When you are online looking for information about a topic, you probably aren’t looking for a page that simply restates basic facts. Instead, you want a website that gives you information. You want that information to come from a reputable source. You want the page you are looking at to be authoritative.

Keywords are important (but not how you think)

The keywords that you choose for a page aren’t some magical chant that is going to get you to rank higher in any of the search engines. Keyword stuffing, which means that you are including the same keyword and various versions of it at a rate that sounds unnatural, isn’t the way to get to the top of any reputable search engine. This is a practice that was once common, but the search engines will now downgrade you if you are stuffing keywords.

Scope of the page

Search engines now consider the overall scope of the page as a component of the ranking. This means that it doesn’t matter if a “keyword” is on the page once or 1,000 times. The search engine is going to pick up that keyword during the crawling of that website.

What is search engine optimization?

One of the most common conversations I have with clients pertains to search engine optimization. Many domain owners still think that the old way of optimization is still the best way to optimize a website for search engines. That is not even close to the truth.

Who should websites be optimized for?

When you are coming up with a plan to optimize your website for the search engines, you can’t think about the search engine. You have to get your website ready for human visitors. The content that you have on your website must be informative, authoritative, and rich. It has to sound natural.

3 things clients should know before contacting freelancers

Contacting a freelance consultant to get a project started isn’t something that clients should do on a whim. Calling a freelancer to say that you want a blog post on the medical field is way too broad unless you are just trying to fill space on your blog and don’t mind giving the writer carte blanche with your blog.

Even before you have the first meeting with any freelance consultant, there are three things you should consider. It doesn’t matter if the consultant is a writer, web designer, or finger painter. You must know these three things before you contact the freelancer.