Sales Literature and Sell Sheets

Getting the Most Out of Your Website

Jim Schakenbach
Managing Partner, SCT Group Inc.
www.sctgrp.com


Are you one of those companies that struggled to get a website up, then wiped the sweat from your collective brow, said “Whew! THAT’S done”, and then checked it off your To Do list? If so, you could be missing a major opportunity to not only provide potential customers with a comprehensive view of your company, but gain better visibility in the marketplace as well.

I can just hear the shock and disbelief from some of you. What? We’re not done? Our site’s finished, posted, and registered, what more do we need to do? The answer is both simple and difficult – update. As often and as much as you can. The Web is all about content these days. Regardless of the niceties and finer points of search engine differentiation, virtually all of their algorithms are now content-based. In short, content is king.

The Web is full of dusty, dark, and broken sites, left at the side of the road by their owners for want of updated content. As they gradually decay, these sites are ignored by both search engines and viewers, who recognize stale and outdated content when they see it. But it doesn’t have to be this way. All it takes is simply touching your site on a regular basis. That can mean doing nothing more than updating your press release section, listing your trade show appearances, even posting new white papers or articles. Regular activity on your site indicates to the world that it’s an important part of your company operations.

Design for ease and functionality.
Here’s a scenario we see all too often: The CEO wants a flashy, sexy site, full of the latest bells and whistles so the company can “look good”. Unfortunately, these kinds of sites tend to be next to impossible to revise easily. As a result, they don’t get updated regularly and so they sit there, dead in the water, slowly sinking out of view.

This can be easily prevented by designing your site so that the text is easy to revise and sections that include technical or sales data requiring frequent updating can be freshened quickly and with a minimum of fuss. In many cases, this means posting a lot of your information in PDF form so that viewers can download pages for viewing and printing using commonly available software like Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. Conversely, these files are easy to upload as well, making site updates a snap.

Make your pages easy to find.
Because content is king, you want to make sure you have as much pertinent data on your site as possible. In addition to making sure that each page is keyworded, you want to pay attention to the headline and body copy on each page so that each contains as many important, searchable words as possible. This makes every page valuable to search engines and capable of being found. Many companies simply keyword and describe their home pages, but that means the rest of their site is not optimized for searches, handicapping them right from the start.

So, with just a little more effort, including regular content updates and more in-depth page-coding, you can turn your web site into the high-powered marketing communications tool you’ve always wanted it to be.

©2007 SCT Group, Inc.
sctgrp.com



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