How to Make Your Small Business Web Site

A Web site is an important component of your marketing strategy because it can broaden your target market to include anyone who has access to a computer and the Internet. In 2003 about 60% of Canadians had Internet access at home, and about 8 million had regular Internet access from anywhere at home, at work or school.  And that's just in Canada. Ecommerce sales from Canada were $7.2 billion, and we only captured 4% of the global ecommerce market! So, how can you reach some of those Internet surfers, and how can you make ends meet some "of the" $7.2 billion you spend in e-commerce? First, of all, you build it The first step is to design your website. If your company already has business cards and letterhead, it's best to design your website around them. Matching corporate identity and website helps with branding. I love simple websites with a simple layout and easy navigation. A nice, simple layout, with nice graphics, balanced looks and nice color combinations is my #1 goal when designing a small business web site. Remember to use graphics sparingly and optimize them for your website, as internet surfers tend to be impatient. If your page loads too slowly, they will be gone. Navigation should be easy to find and use, and it should be consistent from page to page. I've left multiple sites frustrated because I couldn't find their navigation easily. Small business web sites are not static. They develop. You need to start somewhere, and it's probably easiest to start with an introductory web site.  All you really need to start is five pages. You can add pages later at any time. The important thing is to just do it—take the plunge and get it out there. Your five pages may include an index about us, or a home page, services, contacts and sitemaps.  The index page is your landing page. Usually its design is a bit more elaborate than others, but it doesn't have to be. I prefer to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) for designing because it is easier to create a web site and edit its layout with CSS instead of just HTML (HyperText Markup Language). Changing the CSS sheet replaces all the pages on your site at once. Content is king Once you have your site ready, you'll want to start thinking about content. Design is very important, but it's not great to have a beautiful site without high quality content. Your small business home page introduces you and your company - who you are and what you do. The About Us page is typically used to give more detail than the home page about who you are, and 'the', Your, Service's. The Page gives more details about what you do. You may wonder why you would "ruin" a page on a sitemap because you only have 5 pages, but sitemaps help search engines find all the pages on your site. As far as ingredients go, up to a point more is better. Your pages should be content-rich and informative, but they should also be relevant to your small business. If your visitor can't figure out what your Web site is about in a matter of seconds, they may leave. The Internet was strictly informational before, and remains so today. Many times people have tried to use copywriting similar to direct mail sales letters, but they have all failed. It seems like people surf the internet for more information than anything else. Knowing this will help you write pages that people will want to read. Attracting Visitors, You can follow your instincts and just start writing, but wait. There is research you must do first, or your web site simply won't be good enough to be discovered. Search engine optimization is too big a topic to cover in this short article, but search engines find your pages based on keywords, among other things. So, pretend for a moment that you're on the other side of the desk. If you were a customer of your own business, what words or phrases would you use to search for your product or service? Ask friends and neighbors how they will discover your product or services. When you've come up with a few, check them out on the Keyword Suggestion Tool. You can also use that tool to suggest similar words and phrases. Then find out how many results you would get if you searched for that word. What you want to do next, narrow down your choices to the words or phrases that are searched the most but get the fewest results. Remember that people generally don't look beyond the first three pages for any search term, so if you're not in the top three pages, your business is unlikely to be found. If you have millions of results for your phrase, you may need to make it more specific. For example, let's say you have a small business consulting company specializing in communications for small business. Using "communication" as a search term is almost pointless because there are about 2 billion results for that term. But, there are only 974 results for "small business communication". Much better, but how many times was that searched? According to Corncracker, it is searched 10 times a day.  Not bad, but I think we can do better. How about "Small Business Consulting"? It was searched 261 times a day and got 373,000 results. What you want to do is write your content around those words and phrases. You don't want too much or need too much - three or four is a lot. Motivating them to keep coming back is relatively simple, to keep visitors coming back to your site over and over again. Keep your content fresh and lively, make sure it is informative, and add to it often. I hope you decide that your small business needs a web site.