Effective Web Sites: 5 Things That Should Be On Every Web Site

As the Web has matured, web site design patterns and best practices have emerged. Consequently, there are five essential elements of any successful web site. Implementing them on your website may mean the difference between success and failure.

1. There’s No Place Like Home — The Home Link

Not since The Wizard of Oz and the ruby slippers has teleporting back home been such a useful talent. The ability to jump back to the front page of a website is something that every web surfer appreciates. The Home link is something that has been around since the early days of the Web and it is still just as useful today. It is an unwritten rule that the main logo on your website should always be linked back to the main page of your site. Additionally, placing a home link on every page of your website is essential; here’s why:

• The Hansel and Gretel effect
  Visitors like having a way to backtrack their surfing. Breadcrumb navigation is the best way to provide this, but the Home link is the easiest and most effective alternative.
• Search Engine Optimization
  Here is an SEO tip: Use the title of your site as the anchor text for your home link (instead of the word “Home”). This will help search engine crawlers associate the title of your site with the URL.
• Coming in the Side Door
  With the widespread use of search engines , it is likely that visitors are entering your site on pages other than the front page. A well placed Home link provides these visitors with a way to the front of your site.

2. Let Me Show You What It’s All About! — The About Page

Jackson 5 knew what it was all about, and so should your visitors. There is nothing worse than leaving a visitor on their own to figure out what a company does. Don’t be shy, take pride in your website and what you provide. Create a page and title it “About” or “About Us”. Use this page to explain what you do, what this website is for, and who you are. Be upfront about it and your visitors will appreciate your respect for their time. Here are some tips for a good “About” page:

• Explain Every Aspect
  Tell your visitors about your company, your people, your philosophies and your website. Don’t use this area to try to sell your products or services, save that for other areas of the site. The About page is about the company and people behind the products.
• Get Personal
  Use the About page to give a brief biography of all the key players in the company. To add credibility and a personal touch, include pictures of all the key people so that visitors can associate faces with names.
• Branch Out to the Front Page
  It is also a good idea to include a very short (about one or two sentences) description of your company on the front page. This can usually be accomplished in the form of a tagline or a unique selling proposition. One of the best examples I’ve seen is on Amy Bass’s blog, My Debt Free Goal. Right under the title she tells everyone what the site is about:

  My goal to pay off $72,900 of debt in two years through a lot of hard work and sacrifice. I want to show others that it is possible, you can be debt free if you set your mind to it.

3. 3-2-1 Contact — The Contact Page

My wife used to watch 3-2-1 Contact as a kid. Why you would care, I have no idea. The Contact page on a website is a no-brainer. Unless you don’t want to talk to potential clients, there needs to be a page dedicated to communicating with you and your company. Most sites have a Contact page, but rarely do I find a site that puts enough information on it, especially business websites. Here are the essentials for a company’s Contact page:

• Email Address
  Put the email address of a specific person on your contact page. This gives visitors the comfort of knowing that they can contact a human being directly. Be careful, though, when posting an email address online; make sure you run it through an encoder so that it is not harvested by spambots.
• Contact Form
  A contact form is nice because it lets people submit a more formal request for information. Bonus if you provide visitors with a selection of departments to which to route their request.
• Physical Address
  A lot of Contact pages neglect this. Make sure you list your physical mailing address and all applicable telephone numbers. You never know who might want to send you something via snail mail. Additionally, this helps current customers find out where to send cash and checks — and nobody wants to miss out on that!

4. You Gotta Get Yourself Connected — The Subscribe Page

Stereo MCs knew what they were talking about. Web surfers want to connect to the sites they like and be instantly updated when new content is available. Sites that do not provide an RSS feed or a means of subscribing via email are in danger of being viewed as stale and out-dated. Giving visitors the ability to subscribe to your site guarantees return visits. Create a page that lists all of the ways that a visitor can subscribe to your site:

• Blog
  You’re not blogging yet? Better get to it, this probably deserves an article in itself.
• Newsletter
  A newsletter is a great way to keep visitors up to date on new products, services and promotions. This also plays into the theory of Permission Marketing, suggested by Seth Godin. When users subscribe to your newsletter or blog they are giving you permission to send more information. This is as quality of a lead as you can find.
• Calendar of Events
  If your company holds public events, give your visitors a way to be updated when these events are near. Not only will this get people to come back to your website, but it will also increase the attendance at your events.

5. Tree Fiddy — The Pricing Page

At least the Lochness Monster gave his prices right up front. Nothing upsets me more than a web site that makes me do work to find out prices and rates. “Fill out this three page form to get a quote.” This is like a giant sign that says, “We don’t want your business, go away.” I understand that some companies will have pricing models that vary based on the customer and the type of work to be done, but that shouldn’t discourage you from at least giving your visitors a rough estimation. This can also serve as a filtering mechanism in the event that someone is looking to spend way less than you are charging. Here are some strategies for listing your prices:

• Tangible Products
  List the prices straight up. This is easy and smart to do.
• Time-based Services
  List your rates and possibly give some examples of the average time it takes to finish common projects.
• Custom Pricing
  Provide case studies of some projects you have completed in the past and list how much the client was charged (make sure to get permission from the client first). This will give potential clients samples of what they can expect to pay for a similar project.

Adding these five elements to your web site will ensure that visitors have everything they need to make an informed decision about your company. This means more visits to your site and increased sales — so get to work!

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SEO Tip: Please Don’t Click Here

As the waitress mindlessly points in the general direction of the restrooms, the tension on the walls of your bladder increases. You bob and weave through the tables and make an awkward lunge towards a corner of the building with two doors. You think you are home free except that both doors sport the same sign: “Enter here.” Which is the men’s? Which is the women’s? You’ll never know, and neither will any of your site visitors when presented with similarly useless text, “click here“. Go ahead and click it, I dare you…

Just as bad as your visitors being left in the dark, search engines will also have a difficult time with ambiguous links such as these. Anchor text is the text used in a hyperlink and is used by search engines to associate keywords with the link. Take this link for example: “The Web Stack Explained“. In this link the anchor text is “The Web Stack Explained”.

Using non-descriptive anchor text in links on your web pages is bad for several reasons:

1. Visitors will have a difficult time determining the purpose of the link. They will not know whether or not the link is of value to them or not. In these situations users don’t bother clicking, and that’s bad news for you.
2. Search engines will associate these non-descriptive, irrelevant words as keywords for the link. This means that when people search for keywords you are hoping to capture, they will not see your link.
3. There is no cross-site SEO benefit. If you are linking to a friend’s website, or if they are linking to you, there will be no SEO benefit, again because the keywords associated with the link/site are irrelevant.

Let’s use an example to illustrate this point. Imagine you own a health club and that you have a unique group fitness class that integrates racquetball into the workout. After creating a page on your website that describes the class and highlights its features, you add a link to your blog that looks something like this:

“Click here to get more information on our newest group fitness class“

When search engine bots crawl your blog page, they will examine all of the links and add them to the search engine index. The bot assumes that the anchor text should be used as the keywords for those links. In our example, the bot will use the words “Click” and “here” as the keywords for your racquetball fitness class page. Whoops, that’s not good…

For better search engine optimization and usability, let’s rearrange our example:

“Looking for a fun way to get fit and learn a new sport? Check out our new Racquetball Fitness Class!“

What we’ve done here is linked to our Racquetball Fitness Class twice: once with the anchor text “get fit and learn a new sport” and once with the anchor text “Racquetball Fitness Class”. Our friendly search engine bots will now associate these important keywords with the page: “fit”, “learn”, “sport”, “Racquetball”, “Fitness”, and “Class”. When a person searches for any combination of these terms, you will drastically increase the probability of your page showing high in the results! In addition, this helps our users to understand exactly where they are going when they click the link.

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