Web Site Content
This may sound stupid, but many people have difficulty
finding content for their web site. Yeah, I know. Sometimes
we have a basic understanding of what we want to have on our
site but don’t know how to present it in such a way that is
functional. Being that most of us a creatively illiterate,
we fall back on photos for web site content.
Photos have their place but it is easy to overdue it. Don’t
use them on your home page as a means of just making it look
good. Use photos as much as you would like but give your
customers the chance to go look at them. Don’t force them to
see your Aunt Ethel.
The home page is your hub. When a customer lands there you
want to hold their attention and get them to spend a little
time. Here’s a statistic that might surprise you. I would
estimate that within all of the web sites that I own and
maintain, there are thousands of visitors each month. Of
those, clearly more than 80% of them spend less than 30
seconds there. Frightening statistic isn’t it.
I want my home page to be a place where my customers can
quickly and easily find what they came looking for. Time to
pick on someone else. The Pleasant River Motel is located in
West Bethel, Maine. They are open year round. During the
winter months, I would guess the most of their business is a
result of Sunday River Ski Resort. We all shouldn’t be shy.
Use the name to your advantage. Swallow the pride.
My home page, at least for the winter months, wants to be
focused on giving my customers what they want. Here is where
knowing your business comes in handy. If 95% of my room
sales between the months of December and April come from
skiers, I don’t want to sell them canoe trips down the
Androscoggin River – sell them one of those before they go
home from skiing.
A potential customer decides they want to go to Sunday River
Ski Resort and go skiing. During their search, they land on
www.pleasantrivermotel.com. Let’s stop a minute and ask
ourselves a question. What are they looking for? We have
established that they want to go skiing, so we can assume
they must be looking for a place to stay while they are here
skiing. Those are the two major issues. Let’s break it down
a bit further. Are you responsible for telling these
potential customers about Sunday River? Not directly, but
this would be a good opportunity to let them know you know
what’s going on up there. So, let’s put a link somewhere on
your home page that lists the ski report for Sunday River. I
think they even have a live camera shot you can show. These
are relatively small but could be of value to you. If
nothing else it will give your customer a sense of security
that you are connected to Sunday River. Change these links
with the seasons as your business changes.
These are all good but what are they looking for besides a
connection to Sunday River? A place to stay. Remember the
8-second rule? What’s most important to them? Here’s where I
interject some honesty. I don’t know! But I’m going to
pretend I do and hopefully you can take your expertise and
fill in the blanks accordingly.
Let’s say the price of the room rental is the foremost
important thing. We now know that customers feel better
knowing that the Pleasant River Motel must be near Sunday
River because you have let them know. If price is it, my
home page is going to tell the visitor. “Best room rates in
town!” “Two people stay for two nights for only XXX
dollars”. I got their attention in two ways – Sunday River
and price.
Now that I got their attention, I can direct them to the
other things like, a picture of the room, facility and
whatever else I want them to see, my other amenities, where
they can eat while they are there, do I offer any package
deals, etc. etc.
I’m not trying to suggest to anyone how to market their
business – only ways of implementing it into their web site.
What I am saying is use your home page as your hub for your
customers but use the “above the fold” section to hold or
get their attention. From that point on, you can direct
them.
I am as guilty as the next person for putting too much
content on my home page. We all have that “some is good more
is better” outlook. Keep the home page extremely functional
and attention getting. If you can get them beyond that, you
have succeeded.
Let’s look more closely at web page content. Let’s face it.
We are not all fortunate to be born a Pulitzer Price writer.
So how do we know what to write for our web pages?
It is important to include good content on all your pages
and this includes text. There are two aspects in writing
text for web pages. One is getting your message across to
your customers and the other is keeping the search engines
in mind and including keywords. If you cannot write to save
yourself, find someone who can. Even if you have to pay them
something for doing it, it’s worthwhile. But don’t just grab
anyone. Find someone who knows how to write for web design.
You can find them on the Internet but if you use all your
available resources, you can do this. I’ll assist you if you
ask.
I had mentioned before about writing in short paragraphs and
to be short and to the point. You are not writing for a
prize. Use limited and descriptive words to convey your
message. Let’s examine two short paragraphs for a moment to
decide which might work better:
“At Tom’s Custom Balls Caps, where our business is to make
the best ball caps around, we spend countless hours sifting
through thousands of different kinds of hats to find the one
we think would work the best.”
Or we could say the same thing this way:
“We use only the highest quality hats for all our designs!”
Finding wordy sentences worked pretty good back in Freshman
English class for those essays we all had to write. We don’t
need them here.
In keeping with not forcing your customers to see things
they don’t want to see, let’s talk about creating links
within our text for a moment. You can benefit your customers
by making their search process as easy as possible. In the
above sentence that I wrote about quality hats, I am going
to create two links within that sentence that could be
useful to my customers.
I am assuming that most of you know how to create a
hyperlink on a web page. If you don’t email me and I will
gladly teach you. I’ll repeat the sentence for you. “We use
only the highest quality hats for all our designs.” I am
going to create a hyper link with the three words “highest
quality hats”. That link will take any interested readers to
a page that describes in detail about the hats we use, where
we buy them and the materials they are made from. Then I am
going to make a link from the word “designs” to a page
describing all about our custom designs.
What does this accomplish? Two things really. One it gives
inquisitive customers easy access to that information should
they need it. If you were reading something someone else
wrote and it made you curious, wouldn’t you like to be able
to just click on a link and go read it? And aren’t you glad
you didn’t have to peruse through countless pages just to
find something that easy? That is the second thing it
accomplishes. It doesn’t force your customers to do
something they don’t want to but at the same time, you do
have all the information that someone might want. This makes
you an authority in your field and thereby you will create
security and ease with your customers.
This brings us to another aspect of page content and writing
text for your site. You might be saying right now that you
don’t know enough about this subject or that subject or
perhaps you don’t have the confidence to write something on
your own. There are countless resources for this kind of
information online if you go looking. You can do a search
for “free web site content”. (There’s one of those freebies
we talked of earlier). Find related content for your site
and use it. Most often people, myself included, are not
opposed to you using their writings to put on your site.
They just ask that credit be given where credit is due. Most
writers will include a “trailer” at the end of their article
and within that is a link back to the writer’s web site.
Another source of free web site content is press releases.
Sunday River puts out press releases all the time at their
web site. I went there and sent e-mail to Susan Duplessis
and asked if I could re-publish some or all of those
releases to one of my web sites. It makes good content, it
is informative to your customers (potentially) and it’s
free.
Don’t bog down your meat and potato pages with text. Never
distract from the task at hand and what you are trying to
accomplish. If you get a customer beyond the home page,
don’t scare them away with pages of useless information,
text, pictures, etc. The same rule applies to all pages of
your web site – simple, informative, interesting and easy to
navigate. Always provide options for your customers. If a
customer sees that you provide them with links to valuable
resources in your field, they feel comforted and will view
you as an authority.
A bit later on in our discussions, we are going to be
talking about creating networks or links with other related
web sites. We will spend a fair amount of time on this
subject for its’ importance to you and your business
community. Before that though, I just wanted to begin to
tell you about the importance of community and business
networking on the Internet.
I have mentioned about putting snow reports or web cams and
that sort of thing on your web site if it is a benefit to
you. Therein lies the keys to creating a good, professional
and functional site that customers and search engine will
like. It is beneficial to all to work toward creating
unending networks. I said it before, the Internet is no
place to be selfish and stingy.
We will cover this in depth soon but you need to get
together with those in your community that have a web site
and figure out how you can help each other. Have you gone on
the Internet and started doing regular searches using your
“keywords” or “keyword phrases” to see how you are stacking
up? If you haven’t you need to.
Start with a local search – meaning within your town,
community and state. In other words, if you are a restaurant
in Bethel, search for restaurants in Bethel. Where are you?
Do you show up on the first page of results? If you are a
lodging establishment in Bethel, where do you show up? First
page? Second page? Third page? How are people going to find
you?
It becomes easier when a community presents itself as a
source of information – one business linked to another and
so on. People who stay in motels need a place to eat, they
need gas, they want to be entertained, they need a taxi or a
bus. You need to begin to piece together this puzzle by
contacting the others and discussing how you can help.
Don’t rely on the Bethel Chamber of Commerce web site to
bring you that extra business. They have a great site and it
more than serves its purpose but for a visitor to find you
there, the odds aren’t the greatest. Your contact
information is buried quite deep in their site and the odds
on customers digging that deeply are not good. Those are the
facts. It has nothing to do with the Chamber.
Hopefully, whether you are doing your own designing or
someone else is, you can have access to your web site
statistics to know how your Internet visitors are finding
you. We will cover this more at a later time but if your web
hosting service doesn’t provide you with that information,
it’s time to find another service.
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