When designing your website, you should be aware of some important elements. These are relevant because of the way search engines work to send you traffic and the fact that you want to have a welcoming, easy to navigate site for prospective customers that will click your link to visit your website and ideally conduct some business there.
Although the theories change, for the most part search engines like to see focus in one niche so that they can index your site and know what kind of ‘targeted’ traffic to send. While it is okay to have multiple business opportunities on the site, they should be at least loosely related. For example with this theory of focus, if your business is affiliate marketing, then affiliate business opportunities would be related to each other no matter what their product or service may be.
To give another maybe more clear analogy, if someone goes to Google and searches for ‘shoes’ or ‘vitamins’ they probably would rather be directed to sites that have shoes or vitamins for sale and wouldn’t really understand why they were being directed to a site that has only affiliate programs. So vice versa is true too – If you search for affiliate programs you probably would be very confused if Google returns sites that sell shoes, right? Obviously if they are looking for something you have to offer, they will be more likely to buy something. So this is why focus is important to indexing.
One way that you can stay focused is to have keywords and phrases that are targeted to your niche that are used in the Meta tags and in the content or information that you add to the site. If your site has a blog then it would be helpful to use the keywords in the title or subject of the blog posts. These same keywords should be used in any advertising you do that directs people to your site.
For this reason it is a good idea to have many, many keywords. Some SEO experts have said in the past to start with 5 keyword phrases and work up to 50 and even 500 in a few years. This way you can rank and get traffic for more phrases not to mention it gives you more leeway in what you can write about to promote those keywords.
An easy to navigate site would likely have some sort of a site map or at least some clear menus that people can clearly see are the way they would find the specific information they are looking for that will hopefully help them make a decision to buy something right then and there. (although come back later works too).
When it comes to ‘bells and whistles’ you want to be mindful of keeping the colors and graphics pleasant and professional looking. You know the one about ‘you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression’. You want to ensure that your potential customer will have confidence enough to enter into a financial transaction from your site.
While graphics seem essential for a well-designed website, you don’t want to have too many distractions like everything flashing and blinking, as this creates a confusing atmosphere that people may run away from.
