Why is it important to have a highly visible and highly effective website?

by boogersite.com

When companies set out to develop their first website or update their existing website they often underestimate the importance of two areas.

The first area of developing a website that is often underestimated is the visibility of the website. If it is not highly visible then no one will come to your website. If no one comes to your website why did you spend money on it? Simple question, simple answer, but again something often overlooked.

Visibility can be obtained in a number of ways:

Make sure your website is SEO-friendly so that search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc. pick it up. This will translate into high amounts of organic traffic, which is very important.

Make sure your existing customers know about your website. Is your website on all your literature, handouts, etc.? Is it on your business cards? (people do forget that one, believe or not!) If you have delivery vehicles, put it on your vehicle!. If you run newspaper ads, is it in the ad?

If doing a campaign, you can use billboards containing your website to create high visiblity (might be how you got to boogersite.com).

You can also use such items as affiliates and other mechanisms to create inbound links to your website - warning: make sure if you go this route you use reputable organizations because the last thing you want is to get banned by the search engines. Yes, the search engines have rules and if you do not follow those rules you run the risk of getting banned. So when picking the right website company, make sure they follow best practices to keep you out of trouble!

There are many more, but the above is a good start ...

The second area of developing a website that is often underestimated is the effectiveness of the website. This should be a no-brainer. It doesn't matter how beautiful or 'trendy' your website looks - if your website is not effective then when people do come to your website, they will immediately "bounce". Do you know what that means?

Have you polled your customers about what they think of your website? Does it meet their needs? Does it service them or does it service you? (you’re probably thinking "what?!" – but just think about that for a moment). As part of the process of designing your website, make sure you map out not only what your goals are for the website, but whether those goals are serving your customers and potential customers rather than your ego. Have you asked your employees what they think of your website? Your employees can be a great source of self-evaluation.

So while picking your nose is not serious, picking the right website company is!