The fourth step in starting an online business involves building your site. When preparing it, two audiences should consider. Obviously, site visitors are the first viewers. You should also remember the second audience, the search engine robots. Both audiences are very important and, fortunately, they both want the same thing.
Lean, Straight Structure
Your site needs to be clean and fast if you want to succeed. Slow, crowded sites definitely fail because visitors and spiders get distracted and walk away before taking the action you want. Let's take a closer look.
Visitors
The design of your site should allow visitors to find information and solutions quickly. To achieve this, each page must not be two clicks from the home page. Have you ever been on a site where you had to hunt for a particular page? Negative structures increase and damage the conversion rate.
Make things as easy as possible by linking between the pages of the site. Each page should have links to basic pages and as many other pages as possible. If you are looking for a good site, links to basic pages are listed at the top and bottom of each page. Links to specific apps or products are always listed on each page. It may sound like an overstatement, but make it as easy as possible for your customers to get around.
Spiders
Search engines use programs called “spiders” to navigate the net and index sites. When the spider finds a page, it reads the code from top to bottom and left to right. If the code is clean, the spider will index the page and follow the links to other pages of the site.
If the code is not clean, the spiders will stop pointing the pages. When pages are indexed, they do not appear in search engine results. What prevents spiders? The following are the most common problems:
1. Bottles - Make sure each page of your site links to at least one basic page. You do not want the spider to get stuck in a rut and miss the others.
2. Powerful Pages - Your pages need to be structured or carefully designed. If strong, spiders will usually not point because they are not sure about the content.
3. Frames - Do not use this classic design method.
4. Poor URLs - The biggest mistake is to include website parameters in the URL. URL must contain only the domain name and keywords of the page. A good URL reads: http://www.marketingtitan.com/internet_marketing_services. Bad URL with parameters can be read: http://www.marketingtitan.com/id#us57486&095783
5. Photos - Do not overuse images and do not add text to photos. Photos degrade your site, so make them smaller and fully customizable. Robots do not read text within images, so text needs to be exported without images or ALT tags need to be used.
Building Inspection
Once the site is done, TEST IT! Browse the pages and see if you can stream to the site. Add internal links where possible. Lastly, check your site loading times for 56k dialing modem. If the site is loading in less than 20 seconds, you are heading in the right direction.
The structure of your site is important. Make sure it caters to the needs of visitors, whether human or spider.
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