Seven Essentials Every Website Needs

Featured article by Calvin Paige, Independent Technology Author

There will come a time when your website needs to be updated. Perhaps it is running slowly, or it looks a little old-fashioned. Maybe it was designed for free by someone who wasn’t quite at the top of their game. It could be that you did it yourself and although you now have more skills in the web designing sector, you just don’t have the time to do anything about it.

Whatever your reason for wanting to update your website it’s a good idea to do it every few years; it keeps your business looking fresh and interesting and shows customers that you pay attention to what is happening in the world by changing your website to reflect current trends. There are some elements of a website that are absolutely essential, so when you do create a new one (or hire a web designer to do it for you), these should not be forgotten.

Contact Information

Of course, contact information should be on your website; it is often the reason that people go to your site in the first place – they want to find your contact details or double check the ones they already have for you. Therefore, having a contact page is vital. If you miss this page out, not only will people find it difficult to get in touch, but your company will look untrustworthy. People will wonder why you have not included your details on the site and this can be extremely off-putting.

Having a contact page is essential, but something that many companies forget when designing a website is that they can put their contact details – at least a phone number and email address – on every single page of their website. Keep it unobtrusive in the corner of the page but have it there nonetheless. If a potential customer can see your contact details and do not need to defer from the product page to get in touch with you, they are more likely to do so.

A Blog

Everything you do online comes down to content. If you want to rank well on Google, for example, you need to have fresh, interesting content. If you want to find followers on social media like Facebook and Twitter, you need to have engaging content. A blog can solve this problem, giving you good content for your website that will also boost your SEO rankings and your social media posts.

For the maximum benefit, your blog needs to be part of your website rather than a separate entity using a platform such as Blogger. If you aren’t sure how to integrate your blog with your site, then an expert will be able to help you here. However, if you’re creating a new website, this is the perfect opportunity to add a blog if there wasn’t one before.

There are many benefits to having a blog. The first is the SEO help mentioned earlier, but a blog is also an ideal channel for communication. Not only can you receive and respond to comments, but you can post your blog content on social media for likes and comments there too. If the content is shared to a wider audience, then you will quickly gain a bigger following, particularly if your content is interesting and informative, and that will equate to more sales and bigger profits.

A blog is also a good way to show that your company is an expert in your particular industry. Connecting with your customers in this way and showing how much you know about your sector will convince people to come to you rather than anyone else when they have a problem, query, or need to buy something that you provide. If you can make your name the first that comes to mind when people need what you have, you’ll easily find more sales are taking place.

A Sitemap

A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your site so that you can see how everything is organized and how it all fits together. It’s useful for you and the web designer, but it also works well to inform search engines about what your website does, how often it is updated, how relevant each URL is compared to others and so on.

Without a sitemap, you may find that you don’t rank as well as you would otherwise do because the search engine crawlers can’t get to each page of your site easily. It could also be a problem because you can’t ensure that each page links to the right place without manually testing them all, a task that could take many hours to complete. It’s true that creating a sitemap can also be a time consuming and intensive job, but with a visual sitemap generator you can seriously reduce the amount of time it takes and ensure that there are no errors that could affect how well your site does online.

SEO

We have mentioned SEO already in terms of your blog, but there is more to it than that which is why having a well-thought-out and actionable SEO strategy is something else that is vital when creating a new website.

If a customer already knows your company’s name, they can search for your website, and you will probably come at the top of the search engine listings. Therefore, you don’t actually need to optimize your name (although it should appear on your website, of course), but rather you do need to optimize the other relevant keywords that people might use to search for you online. You will need to work out which generic terms your customers might use to search for you, or for the product or service that you sell.

That means that these keywords and key phrases need to be on your website. They can be in the metadata, on the web pages themselves, and running through your blog. There are a number of ways that you can determine what these keywords are including specialist web pages that will give you all the information you need. Bear in mind. However, some of these will require payment. Otherwise, you can think about the search terms that you would use and start with those words and phrases.

Geographic Information

Having the right geographic information in your website not only allows people to find you if they need to visit you in person, but it is another useful way of helping out with SEO as well, depending on the kind of business you run.

If you offer services, then having your geographical data within the metadata pages on your website will help people find you faster. For example, if you run a plumbing company people are likely to search for “plumbers in X” where X is your town or city. If that information is already in your details, you will come up in search results.

This may not be so helpful if you sell products and can ship around the world, of course; you don’t want to be restricted in this matter. This is why it pays to think about what information you need to include on your site before you launch. It’s far easier to add to a website than it is to take away as traces always remain and it could hamper your efforts for some time to come.

Customer Testimonials

Trust is enormously important in business, and if a customer is thinking about using you for the first time, they will need to see some evidence that you can do what you promise you can and that your goods and services live up to the descriptions you give of them. Customer testimonials can help with this.

It’s important when you are adding testimonials to your website to get the customer’s permission to use their words and their name. Anonymous reviews will be looked on with suspicion so if the customer would prefer that you didn’t name them it’s best to find someone else to help you. Any feedback that positively refers to your company can help boost potential business, as people will see actual results of customers using your services.

A Portfolio

If you run the kind of business that means you can take before and after photos (perhaps a landscaper, car valet service, or a home decorator, for example) or you make things like an artist or a kitchen designer then make sure that you have a portfolio section on your website so that people can see how good you are. They will be much more willing to use you if they can see proof of what you can do.

You could even include videos of how you work to show them how clean and tidy you leave things or how much effort you put into the job at hand.

If you don’t have any images or videos of your work yet because you have only just started, make sure you still include something on these pages. A photograph of a shiny, clean, professional looking truck can make a good impression.