Are you making the most of your website?

At the heart of Enterprising Women’s recent networking event, which brought together entrepreneurial women from the EW community, was an invaluable presentation on ‘Making the most of your website’ by Liz White of E-Design Consultancy. It’s not enough nowadays just to have a website – you really need to make the most of it especially as more and more people are using the internet as their main information, communication, entertainment and e-commerce resource. So how do we make our websites really effective? Here’s some tips from our event:

1) Build your website for your customer – not for you.
2) Know who your visitors are by analysing your website statistics.
3) Update your website regularly with new content – this will encourage search engines to visit your site and help to rank your pages higher in search results.
4) Personalise your copy, using ‘you’ instead of ‘they’.
5) Make sure it’s easy to navigate around your site.
6) Make your site accessible to alternative technologies e.g. readable text.
7) Use good quality copy, but try not to duplicate it.
8) Ensure important copy isn’t added to an image or in flash as search engines can’t read this.
9) Be page specific – incorporate keywords in the individual page copy, title, headings and links. Be careful not to overfill your copy with keywords as the quality is still more important.
10) Try to get links to your website added to good quality sites that are highly ranked and that are relevant to your business.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, so if you want to share your ideas, add them to our blog. We’d also love to know what your favourite websites are and why. To learn more about website development, visit the Enterprising Women Resource Centre.