Successful Website Components Checklist.

For online success, a website must be attractive, easy to understand, and simple to navigate.

But if that's all it takes, then why aren't more people successful on the web?

The answer to that is that most websites are missing one or more of the critical components that help make a website successful.

With very few exceptions, the most successful websites all have the same features and components. This article will give you a 'checklist' of the critical features that almost all successful websites share.

Successful Websites have an Effective Home Page
Your Home Page is the most important page of your entire website. First impressions have a tremendous impact on how people will perceive your website.

Your most important information should be near the top, it should tell a visitor exactly what your website is about and give them reason to explore the rest of the website.

An effective home page will catch and hold the attention of everyone who visits. Web surfers are extremely impatient and you have only a few seconds to convince a visitor not to leave. Make sure that what you offer is immediately obvious to first-time visitors.

Successful Websites have Good Content
Does your website offer useful content that people want?

Your website content must be relevant to your target audience and regularly updated. Why should anybody come back if there is nothing new to see?

Search engines are the same way - if you update regularly, the search 'bots will crawl more aggressively and you'll enjoy a better ranking. Update your site often to keep them coming back for more!

No matter what your topic is, make your titles and headings clear and easy to understand, and avoid slang or technical terms. Make sure that your website content maintains a clear and consistent focus, and that this focus is instantly obvious from your titles and headings.

You'll want at least a couple hundred words on an average page -- both as content for your visitors and as an opportunity to place your important keywords and phrases for the search engines.

Make sure you proofread before you upload! It's also a good idea to get someone else to read it if possible... better for your friend to find that faux pas than to leave it online for the whole world to see.

Successful Websites have Good Search Engine Ranking
Just submitting your website to search engines is not enough to get visitors from them. To increase traffic you have to increase your website ranking.

Your content must be optimized as well as you possibly can... if you can afford to hire a SEO company, then great! If not, then you can still make a good stab at it by yourself.

Just maintaining your focus, sprinkling your keywords throughout your text in a natural way, placing them in headers, meta tags, in-site links and page titles will go a long way towards getting a better page ranking.

Be wary of those so-called "web promotion" services that will charge you just to submit your website to search engines. You can do that yourself, to the ones that matter, in an afternoon.

Getting in is the easy part -- all you need to get indexed by the search engines is a link from a website that is getting crawled regularly. The 'bot will follow that link, find your website, and index it. (That's their job)

Successful Websites have Good Website Navigation
Website navigation menus should be easy to understand and the same on every page of your entire website. Confusing, inconstant navigation is the number one reason why people leave a website!

When someone finds your website from a search they can enter your website on any page. From there, they must be able to easily figure out what it's about, where they are, and how to get to any other page.

Successful Websites have a Good Internal Search Feature
The larger your website, the more you need a good in-site search feature to help your visitors find exactly what they are looking for as quickly as possible. You can get a decent free one from google.com or freefind.com

At the very least, and if your website is only about twenty pages total, offer your visitors a simple site map that clearly leads to each section and/or every page of your website.

Successful Websites have Good Credibility
If you have no credibility, people won't trust you and they certainly aren't going to buy anything! Developing a rapport with your visitors is vital to the long-term success of your website.

Only make promises if you can fulfill them, only make claims if you have the facts or statistics to back them up.

If you write product reviews, by all means emphasize the positives, but make sure to also talk about the negative aspects too. Your visitors will appreciate your candor and your credibility will go up.

Use personal testimonials and real, concrete examples. The more real information you give your visitors, the more secure they're going to feel about buying from you.

Always offer a guarantee. A 100%, no hassle money-back guarantee of satisfaction can help ease anxiety and reduce 'buyers remorse' - which leads to a much better conversion rate.

If you are not willing to back a product to the hilt, you might want to re-assess the decision to promote it.

The lack of the face-to-face component in e-commerce can only be overcome by making personal and business information available and easy to find.

People want to know who they are dealing with, so always have an 'About Us' and a 'Contact Us' page, and have your Privacy Policy, disclaimers and other legal information easy to find as well.

Successful Websites have a Good Shopping Cart System
If you sell your own product but only have a few items, you can use PayPal and do fine. But if you sell more than a few items, an easy-to-use shopping cart system is a must.

You should also give your customers as many payment options as you possibly can, including all off-line options for those who aren't yet willing to trust the web with their credit card information.

A good shopping cart system will take all major credit cards, it will allow people to easily add and remove items, and will move them through the system with as few clicks as possible.

The best cart systems also offer many different payment options and can deal with different currencies for international orders.

If you only promote affiliate products then they collect payments, but make sure that they use a good, secure system or you may be loosing commissions to the 'abandoned cart' syndrome.

Successful Websites make Good Use of Feedback Forms
A simple 'mailto:' link, which opens up a blank mail message, is not versatile enough.

Forms allow you to gather information from your visitors and ask them what they like or don't like. Be creative with your forms and they can be a great source of leads for you!

Successful Websites have a Growing Mailing List
Most successful sites collect e-mail addresses for their newsletter. To get a steady influx of new addresses you can offer a free report, an e-book, contest entry, samples or free updates.... basically anything that has a perceived value but that costs you as little as possible.

The important point is that when they sign up, they are giving you permission to send email to them. Use that permission to stay in contact and offer new products, updates or whatever is appropriate for your website.

Successful Websites Often Offer a Freebie
Offering something to your visitors for free is a great way to establish your website as a resource where people can come and find the information that they want. It also helps you get new subscribers, referrals, links from other websites, etc.

The best part is that it dosen't have to cost you anything except the time it took to put it together and make it available for download.

It can be nothing more than a free ebook with information that your target audience will find useful, or a short daily email with a daily joke, daily quote, stock quote, diet tip, whatever.

One good example of this is the comics.com website. They offer free daily mailings of popular comics, (I get the Dilbert strip :) with unobtrusive links to merchandise, and every so often they send out a newsletter with all their specials, comic collections, comics industry news and such.

Successful Websites use many types of Advertising
If you build it they will come -- NOT. You have to shout it from the rooftops and announce to the world that your website is now open and ready to cater to them!

Find related websites and swap links and/or newsletter ads with them. Advertise on online classified ad websites. Buy text links on popular websites and PPC links on google and yahoo. Write articles and get them published in article directories (see last issue). Submit your website to DMOZ and any other human-edited directory you can find, write an article for wikipedia.org that has a link to your website....

If your business has an off-line component, put your URL on your business cards, your letterhead, the front door, your car, and place it in any and all ads that you run. Do a press release, and get on radio or television if possible.

Analyze your advertising results. Track all the traffic from different sources and see what works best for your website.

Successful Webmasters Analyze Their Website Traffic
Your host's traffic stats, tracking software or ad tracking services can show you the who, what, when, where and how of the visitors to your website.

You can use this information to check the effectiveness of different advertising methods, find out what pages get the most (and least) visitors, time on-site, entry and exit pages, what OS and browsers they use, even something about their demographics.

All that information comes in handy when you are figuring out ways to improve your average visitor time-on-site and conversion rates, as well as what keywords are working to bring new visitors and what keywords aren't.

As I stated at the beginning, virtually all successful websites have all of the above components firmly integrated into their pages. The most glaring exception is probably Google, their homepage is designed to do only one thing: To start a web search.

Google is the exception that proves the rule - they started as a search service and that's what they do best, so they can get away with a homepage that looks like that.

But for the rest of us, we can only build a successful website by using all of the tools at our disposal.

  Related Tools & Resources:

Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability - article by Jakob Nielsen. A little old, but still valid.

FreeFind - good free internal search option.

PayPal Merchant System

Free Customized Feedback Form Wizard - create a feedback form for your website

onestat.com - advanced traffic analysis software and a free counter for measuring visitor behavior

YMLP.com - Free and low-cost mailing list manager

To Your Success!
Tim

By Tim Brown © 2006. About the author: Tim is the webmaster at http://BLT-Web.com, where webmasters can find free tools, advice, tips and other useful resources designed to help them build a successful website.

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