If you are a serious Internet Entrepreneur, your website should be a direct reflection of you and your business. Creating a professional website takes a great deal of time and effort. The seven most important elements for online success, as there is much more to take into consideration than design, are:

1.Have a professional looking website:

If you are serious about creating a successful business which will stand the test of time, then you need to have your own “virtual presence”.

Your website is the most important sales tool you have. A professional website should be pleasing to the eyes, well organised, easy to navigate and load quickly.

2.Effective Content:

Your words are the entire foundation of your business. Whether it is your website, sales letters or advertisements, words play a major role in determining your success. The following details must be kept in mind while content writing:

Attention - Use a powerful headline that demands attention
Interest - Intrigue and create curiosity
Detail - Provide details about your product or service
Action - Call for action, phone, email, visit office or dynamic contact form.

3.Traffic Drivers:

Create a steady stream of traffic to your website. Give your visitors a reason to visit and continue to visit in the future. Blend your content in with the focus of your website and update it on a regular basis.

4. Search Engine Optimisation:

Design the website to rank high in the Search Engines. This involves much more than just including META tags. KEYWORDS, TITLE, IMAGE ALT tags, Text and the overall design, all play an important role in determining how your website will rank.

5.Reliance:

The visitors should know who you are. Provide complete information with respect to your company including, address, phone number and email addresses to request information and support.

Also, inform the visitors about their privacy through pages like Privacy Statement, Privacy Policy etc and let your visitors know how will their personal information collected through the website will be secured or used.

6. Gain Confidence:

Gain your visitors trust by displaying customer testimonials. This will help in boosting the potential customers’ confidence in you and your products or services.

7. Patience:

Be realistic in terms of your expectations. Online business can bring you a considerable income, but it needs investment of time and effort from you.

A professional website specifically designed to sell is one of the most important factors in determining your success. Take your time and make sure you’re looking at the complete picture before you begin as the success depends on it.

Important Tips for a fast loading web site

1. Optimise your HTML code
Make sure that your site doesn’t have any unwanted tags or broken links and that the code allows for quick load times. Errors on your web pages can slow down your website and so its essential that your website is error free!

2. Keep the use of graphics, images and Flash to a minimum.
These are the major contributors to the size of your web page so any reduction can only help, for example try using background colors and fills instead of heavy images. In editors like fireworks and flash you can see the various options in the preview panel to reduce the sizes. See how popular web sites like google and yahoo have pages that are very small in size and thus load in seconds.

3. Stick to simple designs
Most fast loading sites have very simple designs. Take the hint! Complicated designs will slow down your pages.

4. Spread out your content neatly
In case you find yourself having very long pages of content, break them down into separate logical sections and thus bring down the sizes of the individual pages.

5. Use Text Links instead of graphic buttons
Basically try to make use of text links as much as possible as they are easier to maintain. Use CSS Styles for text links to make them as attractive as buttons.

6. Use Server Side Include (SSI) files
SSI files once called from the web server reside in its cache so on subsequent requests they load faster. Use them whereever possible.

7. Use Div tags instead of Tables
Using Div tags instead of tables for your design is what you need to do for better load time and total control over your layout. It also ensures that it is scalable to allow for future design changes.

Effective Table Design: In case you must use tables use them wisely and sparingly. Design using nested tables instead of using cell merges and splits. Use separate tables where ever possible.

8. Check your W3C standard validity and Load time regularly
To maintain an excellent website you must give thought to how to improve your website on an almost daily basis! Maintain an error free website and tweek it regularly. Do remember to check your Load time and W3C code and CSS validity regularly.

So what are Meta titles, descriptions, keywords etc?

It really is not as complicated as you might think. Let’s start by asking a very simple question will adding Meta titles, keywords, tags, descriptions make your site shoot up the serach engines to the top?

Easy to answer this, no! However don’t give up on them as they do hold importance to search engine rankings and SEO optimisation. The correct Meta titles and keywords will help the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo index your site and understand what your site is offering.

Let’s look at the different functions

1) Meta Title:
This is what it says on the tin, the title! Have a look at the website in the very top left hand corner of the browser window and you will see the Meta title.
What is best to put here? Our advice is simple, put exactly what the content on the page is about.
It should contain keywords, but don’t over complicate this as the title tag will be the first thing on your page.

If we look at the James Blake Internet site (www.jamesblakeinternet.com) at the top of the page you will see
Web Design UK / Website Development / SEO Company UK / Professional website design company

2) Meta description:
This is the part that tells us about the company.
Firstly and most importantly this is a real chance for you to engage and interest the consumer as it might be the first thing they read about your company. Don’t bore them with a load of keywords, the idea is that they will click and visit your site.

Each page should have a description and the key is to tell the audience exactly what’s on the page, ie a summary. This will increase the likelihood of people clicking through.

The description you provide for your page has to convince the person that you are providing exactly what they are looking for. If a user comes to your site and the Title and Description Tags don’t accurately match the content they actually find, you are less likely to be considered a reputable source of information.

The description for a website should be no more than 250 characters
Again let’s look at www.Jamesblakeinternet.com

James Blake Internet Services is a professional web design & development and SEO Company in London UK, We provide Services including shopping carts website …

3) Meta keywords:
Finally the content itself on your pages ! To increase the ranking and occurrence probability on a search engine, words relating to the website /company or business are added to the website.
For example lets look at James Blake site again on the home page content and highlight some of the keywords that relate to our business.

James Blake Internet Services is a leading provider of internet solutions for business of all sizes, offering professional online services from web design and development to complete interactive e-marketing.

Finally
Please remember that whilst useful, Meta tags are not a magic formula and in need to be used in part of a whole SEO strategy not in isolation.

Please feel free to call us on 0845 475 1302 for more information