P3C Technologies specializes in helping homes and small businesses with their technology needs, including building websites! For every website we build, there is a checklist of activities we go through and advice we give to clients about how to bring attention to the site and how to maintain it. This article is a summary of just some of the typical activities and recommendations we give to our clients for building and maintaining killer small business websites:
1. Choosing a domain name: find a domain name that is short, sweet and to the point.
2. Make sure you buy a domain name with a reputable domain registrar that is well known and reasonably priced.
3. Use a content management system: you do not need to know programming languages or utilize tools like Dreamweaver or other more advanced web site creation software to build a website. There are content management applications out there that basically provide a website in a box with tons of room for customization. If you are willing to spend the time researching the community behind those content management systems, you can build an exceptional web site at a very low cost. Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal are just a few examples with major online communities that provide great templates and functionality available online for free.
4. Register with location-based services that let you list your business to be found for free. How will your business be found? Yelp and Google Places are just two of the spots where you can register your business to be found. Google Places lets you create a profile for your business listing contact information, your market you serve, services offered, post video, ad materials, even coupons and specials. All this is available to you for free! This is required homework if you want to be found online.
5. Content is king. Start writing your content for your visitors now. If you are not blogging, I guarantee your competitors are. Content is what search engines respect. Forget about how to register your site with the search engines and just get to creating content. The search engines will find you if you are creating good content. If you are not creating content, a search engine is sending your potential customers to another site that has content for what they are looking for.
6. Use keywords for your content that will be a draw. Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find what people are searching for in relation to your topic or article, and see how many search for that topic based on keyword combinations you can come up with.
7. Link your blog to FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn. We wrote a blog article and how-to guide about this strategy in the past. You should own your content. Use your blog to host the content so you can keep it where it belongs, and then share it on social networks by linking your blog to social media and have the sharing done automatically.
8. Monitor your website using Google Analytics. If you are not doing this today, you are missing out on a wealth of free information about how traffic is getting to your site, what your best articles are, and how many visitors you get in a day, week, month!