The Site Map – Important or Not?

Have you ever visited a web site and noticed the "Site Map" button jammed somewhere near the bottom of the page? Ever click on it? Probably not. So, why do sites have site maps?

The Site Map – Very Important

In the old days of the net [about three years ago], experts proclaimed every site should have a site map. From their ivory tower, they proclaimed the site map as the extraordinary method to assure potential customers could easily navigate the site and find what they needed. Once they found it, they would buy it and you would be rich, rich, rich!

As is typical with such universally accepted proclamations, this one was wrong. Anyone remotely paying attention to server statistics realized very few people were visiting site maps. The proclamation stopped being shouted and evolved into criticisms of sites which still have site maps. These criticisms, of course, also miss the mark.

HTML site maps are archaic. Visitors to your site will almost never use them. You may even forget you have one. You will certainly forget to update it as often as you should. Still, the site map is a critical component of the site.

The first thing to realize is there is a specific purpose for having a site map. The purpose is to make it is as simple as possible for search engine robots to crawl your site. The more pages indexed by the search engines, the better off you are.

To create a site map, just make a page with the meta tag of "site map". Add hyperlinked text to each fulcrum page of the site. A fulcrum page is simply a gateway page to a particular section of the site. For example, you may have a centralized article page with links to each article. The centralized article page is a fulcrum page and should be included on the site map. Once completed, make sure that every page you want included in the search engine has a hyperlinked text headline on at least one of the fulcrum pages.

A quick word about Google. Google has a new xml feature you can use for a site map. You can use it or forgo it as you see fit. Still, make sure to make an html site map for the other search engines.

Once you have the site map page up, don’t wait for the search engine robots to find it. Publish the link in an article byline or blog as soon as possible. Within a week or so, you should see pages from your site being added to the search engine indexes. This is true for Google even if you don’t use the xml site map tool.

How Important Is Website Design?

In this article I will be writing about Website Design, how it affects sales, and how it compares in importance to other aspects of Website Management. Lets list the different aspects of owning or managing a Website.

Domain Name: How important is the domain name you choose for your Website? Many people say it is not important at all, yet I have number one listings in Google, Yahoo, and MSN for the key phrases that exactly match my domain name. It matters a lot.

You need a domain name that matches keywords and phrases you will also use in your Website that people are searching for. Many people think their company name should be their domain name. If you have a lot of money for advertising to make your company name something people search for, I agree with you. If you do not have that ad budget, then you need a generic domain name that is a phrase people already search for.

Web Hosting: How important is choosing the right Web Hosting Service for your Website? Again, this is important in many ways. You need your Website to load fast. If your Website loads slow, people will leave without buying anything. You also need to choose a Web Hosting Service that gives good tech support. There are a lot more things to consider when choosing a good Web Hosting Service, but make sure you rate this high on your list of things that are important to your Website.

Web Design: How important is Website Design? Your Website needs to look professional and trustworthy in order to create buyer confidence. A poorly designed Website will cost you sales. However, and this is the part that web designers will hate me for, it is not as important as many of the other aspects of Website ownership and management.

Many web designers know nothing about search engine optimization, picking a good domain name, hosting, Website promotion, or other issues. They only know design. That is a good thing in my opinion, but they should let their customers know they are a designer and cannot help their Website be competitive in the marketplace. Yes, there are some designers that know more than just design, but many do not. Keep this in mind.

A beautiful Website that gets no traffic and makes no money might as well be an ugly Website. An ugly Website that has traffic and makes money gets more beautiful by the dollar.

Search Engine Optimization: How important is SEO to my Website? Extremely important! Again, many web designers do not know how to properly optimize a Website for the search engines. It is important to have someone who specializes in SEO to go over your Website and make sure it is ready to get crawled and indexed by the search engines.

There was a time when SEO was all-inclusive with link building, Website promotion, search engine marketing, etc. Times have changed somewhat and the search engines have become more complicated, so now many people specialize in certain aspects of SEO.

I define SEO as coding the Website properly, writing text that contains the proper amount and correct keywords and phrases, search engine submissions, and some link building techniques.

Search Engine Marketing: What is SEM and how important is this to my Website? Search Engine Marketing by my own definition is marketing your Website through Google Adwords, MSN AdCenter, and other keyword purchasing programs as well as purchasing links, ads, and sponsored listings.

Again, many people are specializing in an area they have success with these days. I am very good at SEO, but I have limited experience with SEM. Therefore, I can make your Website ready to be crawled, do link building, and write text that helps you attract good search engine rank and traffic, but I would not be the guy you would hire to manage your Adwords program.

Website Promotion: Yet another category with a relationship to SEO and SEM. How important is this category? In my opinion it tops the list. What is Website Promotion? This category includes Article Marketing, Press Releases, Link Popularity, Buying Traffic, Blogging, Forum Posting and more.

Why do I consider it more important? First, none of the things mentioned here can stand-alone. You need to consider all of the different aspects as important. However, search engines change constantly. Depending on search engines for all or most of your traffic and sales is putting your life in Google’s hands basically since they account for 60% of all searches now.

If you are comfortable with one company having that much control over how well you do on the web, then ignore Website promotion and just do SEO and SEM. You need traffic from many different sources if you want to be successful. That way if one source dies out, you are not affected nearly as much as someone who only had one or a few sources of traffic would be.

Focus on getting traffic from every source you can. Post comments in Blogs and Forums related to your topic. That means actually join the forums or blogs and actually get involved in the conversations there and post quality comments. Be helpful to people at the forums and blogs. Ask questions. No one will mind that a link in your SIG line goes to your Website is you are a real participant. If they do object at that point, find a new place to join.

Start your own Blog. You can put up two if you really want to benefit from Blogging. A Blog within your domain name or on a subdomain can help you add fresh content to your website more often. That helps with the SEO. You can build a Blog on another domain name and promote links to pages within your Website and benefit from a little link popularity while also giving customers another way to find your Website. Doorway pages used to be the way to go. Blogs on their own domain name have replaced doorway pages as the way to go.

Article Marketing means writing articles and submitting them to article directories, writing quality articles and offering them to topic-relative high-traffic Websites as exclusive content, and press releases are a great source of traffic that builds link popularity as well. The traffic you get from people who read your article are many more times likely to convert to a sale than the traffic you get from search engines.

I will get new customers and signups due to this article you are reading right now. Article Marketing and Website Promotion work very well.

I hope this article has helped you to understand that owning or managing a Website is about a lot more than just getting a domain name, designing a Website, and picking a host. “If you build it, they will come” does not apply to Websites.

5 Important Website Writing & Design Conventions.

5 Important Website Writing & Design Conventions.

Word Count:

1038

Summary:

Your presentation is every bit as important as your content. The best content in the world won't ever be read if the presentation is so bad that nobody stays long enough to read it. If you maximize your website usability, your visitors stay longer, read more, and you make more sales.

Keywords:

web design, website design, writing for the web

Article Body:

This article outlines the five most important conventions for writing and designing your webpages.

Your presentation is every bit as important as your content. The best content in the world won't ever be read if the presentation is so bad that nobody stays long enough to read it. If you maximize your website usability, your visitors stay longer, read more, and you make more sales.

If the purpose of your web site is to educate your readers and/or lead them to a specific action, (like buying something) then you should seriously consider following these design and writing conventions...

1. Start Each Page With Your Most Important Content.
2. Use Meaningful Link Text to Provide Information.
3. Write Scannable Pages.
4. Use Simple Website Designs.
5. Use Clear, Consistent Website Navigation.

1. Start Each Page With Your Most Important Content.
People are impatient; they will scan your page quickly and leave as soon as they get bored. Put your best, most important content near the top of the page.

Design your layout so that nothing pushes your most important content down past the "page fold". That is your "Prime Real Estate" -- don't waste it. Large logos, unnecessary graphics, ambiguous headlines.... all these things are a waste of your must valuable space.

Begin each page with a summary or a short list of page contents. Be specific, and place the newest items at the top of the list or in a "What's New" section.

2. Use Meaningful Link Text to Provide Information.
Web surfers decide in seconds whether or not your page is worth reading. When you use bland, content-neutral words for your link text, you miss an important opportunity to provide information. (Also - visually impaired web users often instruct their computer to read the link text aloud, "Click here" won't help them.)

The words used in your anchor text should suggest what the reader will find when they click on the link, and help them decide to click or not.

* Bad: To learn about icebergs, click here.
* Better: Icebergs
* Best: Where icebergs come from.

You can make your links even more informative by following them with a blurb:

Blurbs: Short Previews of Web Pages
A "Blurb" is a short paragraph that gives a preview of the page at the other end of a link. You are reading a blurb now. If a blurb helps a reader decide to click the link, then it works.

3. Write Scannable Pages.
Offline, books and magazine articles are designed for sequential reading: You start at the beginning and read to the end.

Online text is not necessarily sequential - it relies upon smaller chunks of text, which the reader often does not read in order. So each page of your website must make sense to a visitor who did not see the preceding page, or just arrived from a search engine.

Meaningful, informative headers & subheadings, bulleted lists, and bold keywords all help readers scan the page quickly and easily.

4. Use Simple Website Designs.
Your visitors didn't come to see your fancy graphics. They came to find information about prices or availability, they're looking for contact information or directions, or maybe they just want some technical details...

Unless your website is about cool graphic effects, I can guarantee that your visitors don't really care about your spinning logo or dancing unicorns, or even whether or not your menu buttons blink or change background images on a mouse-over.

Web-savvy visitors have 'trained' themselves to ignore ads. Anything that flashes, shimmers, blinks or dances around will not get the attention that it deserves.

The more such things you put on your page, the harder your reader will have to work in order to find what they want. Too much of that and they are gone, never to return. Use images wisely. Every image on your page slows it down, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot....
* Use smaller images whenever possible.
* For large collections of images, use an index with thumbnails that they can click if they want to see the image full-size.
* Use an image editor to reduce the file size of your images

See our "Using images in your webpages" section for more about all that ~ http://blt-web.com/web_design/using_images.html

5. Use clear, Consistent Website Navigation.
Next to pages that take forever to load (and pop-ups), the biggest complaint that surfers have is difficult to understand and/or inconsistent website navigation...
* Use the same menu on all your pages.
* Use a logical link hierarchy, with related items together.
* Be perfectly clear with your link titles & descriptions.
* Use text links whenever possible.
* If you must use image links, use the alt="link destination" element.

A website with more than ten or fifteen pages may not need a link from every page to every other page... you can link to each section from each page, but give each section its own "Table Of Contents".

Every page should have a link to the home page and to the site map. (If you have less than ten pages, you may omit a site map, but your home page should have a text link to every page for search engines.)

See our "Menu Design Tips" page for more information ~ http://blt-web.com/web_design/menu_design.html

Following these 5 simple guidelines will help your website be a success. With faster-loading pages and easier-to-find information, people will read more of your content and are more likely to take the action that you want them to.

To Your Success!
Tim

Additional Reading:
http://www.smbtn.com/books/gb57.pdf ~ Writing and Editing Like a Pro Entrepreneurs Guidebook #57, from Small Business Town

http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/ ~ Writing for the Web, Research on how users read on the Web and how authors should write their Web pages.

http://www.sun.com/980713/webwriting/ ~ Writing for the Web, by Jakob Nielsen, distinguished engineer; PJ Schemenaur, technical editor; and Jonathan Fox, editor-in-chief, www.sun.com

Good Web Design Is So Important

The utter importance of good design is difficult to overstate. Design can and will make or break a website. While this little fact may seem self-evident to many people, it is a surprisingly easy fact to overlook, especially at a time when free web design software or templates are available to anyone with passing interest. Such tools are great for encouraging more people to use the Internet and develop new skills, however, if you are looking to establish a 'serious' presence for you or your organization you will be best served by finding someone with the education, tools, and talent that go into good design.

The look and feel of your website is a reflection of your entire business. The more professional your website navigates, reads, and looks, the more professional your organization will appear to the person doing the navigating, reading, and looking. If the navigation is needlessly confusing, the look 'off' or immature, or the content lousy, the conversion from visitor to customer is far less likely to take place.

There is an abundance of literature on the web regarding what constitutes good design, and why good design is so important. An excellent place to go, however, for views and information on good web design is to the designers themselves. Online forums are not good for everything, but web designers use them a lot, and much of what follows on good design is based upon forum posts from web designers on just this topic.

One web designer pointed out that it takes around 50 milliseconds for a visitor to decide whether or not they like a website. This seems like a rather short amount of time, and it is. However, it does not seem so far fetched when we consider our own viewing and browsing habits. Generally, we know the information, service, or product we seek; the more obviously, reliably, and aesthetically these can be delivered the more likely we are to use the website accessed instead of searching for another, 'better' one.

With so many websites popping up on any Google search most of us maintain a low threshold for abandoning a particular website for another, potentially better one, down the list. In other words, good design means good first impressions. The longer the colors, format, content, structure, etc. can keep a visitor at the website, the better your chances that they will find what they need, buy, bookmark, or come back. Another web designer put it like this, "Presenting the right information to your audience in an easy to find, read and understandable fashion so that they can find what they need fast." Good design is important because it not only gives your website a better chance of success, but also because it makes life so much easier and pleasant for those of us who spend any amount of time on the web.

It should also be said that good design is not simply a functional characteristic toward which one should strive. The design says something about your organizations attitude and image. "Design", as one designer put it, "is what articulates your marketing message." In other words, the relationship between marketing and design is similar to that of thought and message. A marketing plan is impotent until implemented through design. Regardless of the quality of your product or service, it is the design which first must communicate the value of the product or service in question to the consumer.

These are but the main reasons good design is so important; there are more. When setting about to put your presence on the web take some time and find a designer or design that is 'right' for you. While good design is important, it is also important to remember that what constitutes 'good design' is relative. Each company and organization must cultivate and project its own unique brand and image. In general, good web design is able to do this in original and functional ways that translate a website's image into a company's success.