Multimedia and Web services: Design, development, web content and promotion for your online success.

P.O Box 7966, Pittsburgh, PA 15216 • 412.567.6930 • Email us.

Grab their Attention. Get them in.
Give them useful information. Gain a customer.

Make your headline a magnet. Nearly every visitor to your page will read your headline. Use active verbs and statements beginning with How, When, or Why to pique interest.

Begin with a short, to the point, accurate summary. Start your article with a meaningful description. While nobody is making you summarize your content on your own site, there are good reasons why article sites require article descriptions.

Your visitors are busy people. Article descriptions show that you respect your visitors' time, and they'll appreciate that.

Make your first paragraph count. Your headline and description have gotten them to begin reading, but your opening paragraph is the great decider. Will they read on or hit the "Back" button? A strong opening paragraph will confirm their decision to explore your site further and, down a very short road, become your online or brick-and-mortar customers!

Content is King.
• Be Original. Make your site original. Google and other search engines "filter out" web sites that consist primarily of material found elsewhere on the Web. Such sites are not "penalized" by a lower ranking; rather, they are filtered from search results completely.
  
  Even if you have permission to use the non-original content, it still can get your site banned. If, for example, your affiliate marketing or ecommerce web site copies verbatim product description pages from your suppliers' web sites, you can find yourself banned from Yahoo! and Google, even if the material is used with your suppliers' blessing!
• Be informative. Although people visit websites for many reasons, the bottom line is information. They may want to learn more about a contractor they are thinking of hiring to replace their windows. They may want to see a restaurant's menu or have a look at the rooms at the hotel they'll be staying in next week in Daytona Beach.
  
  While people visit entertainment sites to see a performance or download a video clip or an MP3, these visitors, too, seek information.
  
  For this reason, a band's homepage, for example, should prominently display the group's upcoming concert schedule. The same is true of a comedian's, dance troupe, or theater group's website.
  
• Watch your language. Most people who visit your web page, you are your web page wouldn't know you if they saw you in the grocery. They don't know if your watch is a Rolex or something you picked up for $2.00 at Dollar General. All they know about you is what they see on your site.
  
  This makes it all the more important that your website look professional in its design, yes, but also in its use of language. I know many intelligent, educated people who are experts in their fields but who can't distinguish there from their or they're, who do not know "it's" from "its," and use "affect" when they mean "effect" and vice versa. A business web site can be informal or conversational, but grammatical errors should be avoided.

If I saw this sign hanging from the ceiling of a store I walked into at the mall, there's about a 99% chance I'd turn right around and walk out. Wouldn't you?

This applies to all business websites: Your visitors may use the information on your site to make a buying decision or even to make an online purchase, but they do not come to your website wanting to hear you sell to them.

If I saw the sign above on the left hanging from the ceiling of a store I walked into at the mall, you can be 100% sure that I'd turn right around and walk out. Don't you think you'd do the same?

How many times have you visited a website that literally tries to close the sale before even greeting you, so to speak? As stupid as it would be to treat a potential customer this way in person, it is even more ridiculous in the online world.

Your website is an extension of your brick and mortar business. You do not practice overbearing sales techniques in your retail store. It is even more important that your website also avoid overselling. Give your visitors useful information and they may buy from you. Sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, and they'll run like the dickens.

The second reason that content is king relates to search engine positioning. Search is the way the vast majority of your visitors find web sites. You know the drill: open Google, type in "widget" and, presto, up come 37,100,000 listings.

Why does content matter to search engines? Quite simply, search engines are websites just like yours and mine. Like all website owners, search engines have to compete for visitors. And to attract and keep visitors, they need to provide accurate and useful results.

Search engines do not rank website popularity like Neilsen ranks TV shows or Gallup ranks political candidates. Google does not rank sites in relation to the number of visitors sites receive. Rather, they use top-secret algorithms to determine websites' relevance to their visitors' search terms.

To do this, they compare websites' content with the search terms used. They also check whether the content is original to the website or appears elsewhere on the Web. Sarch engines can and do penalize sites for unoriginal content. (Search engines also place great importance on a site's linking structure. Although we consider link structure to be the designer's problem to resolve and not the client's, we cover this issue in more detail on our Website Promotion page and in FAQ's about Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing.)

How search engines index the World Wide Web. Given the billions of sites on the Web, search engines cannot send employees to count words on websites. Instead, they send computer files, known as spiders or bots, to inspect webpages.

Search engine spiders have limited capabilities. They can't see images or videos and cannot hear audio files. Nor can they make sense out of Flash files, Javascripts, or, as of this writing, interactive Web 2.0 content. In its webmaster pages, Google suggests that the best way to see your web site as a spider sees it is to view the site in a text browser such as Lynx.

If you use multimedia and interactive content, and I hope you do make appropriate use of these technologies, include such content within spider-readable pages. Having said all that, I need to add the following: The times they are a-changing. And Google is changing with them. You'll find more about Google and its forthcoming "Universal Search" approach on our Website Promotion page.

OK. Here it is in a nutshell, then:

To enhance your search engine ranking, your site should have relevant, well-written, original text content.

If you use content that is invisible to search engines, make sure that the same content also appears on your site in text form, if you want your site to appear on search engine results pages for searches on terms related to that content. Again, see our Website Promotion page for more information.

Of course, your website has to appeal to visitors as well as to search engine spiders. Make your website human-friendly:
• Write catchy headlines.
• Use frequent summaries and descriptions.
• Use short paragraphs.
• Leave lots of white space on the page. White space, along with short paragraphs, improves readability and focuses attention on your content.
• Prominently display your contact information. The Web has a pretty bad reputation, and much of it has been well-earned. In the back of every visitor's mind, and sometimes pretty close to the front of their mind, is a voice saying, "O. K., now why should I believe you? Giving a visitor several ways to contact you goes a long way towards softening that distrust.
• Don't make your visitors wait. Because they won't wait. People expect to find what they're looking for on your website quickly, and for your webpages to open in a couple of seconds. For example, multimedia content can be a great addition to your site, but add it in a way that respects the slightly less than half the Internet users in the United States who access the Web via a dial-up connecton.

Whether you need updated content for an existing website or the design and implementaton of a new site, with or without an audio-video presentation or an animated character like the one below, give us a call for a free, no-obligation consultation.

Click the triangle on the video console to hear me.

Contact Prestige Web Solutions:

Prestige Web Solutions, LLC
P.O. Box 7966
Pittsburgh, PA 15216
Telephone: 412-499-3071
Fax: 412-499-3141

Click to call David toll-free!

Email: info@prestigewebsolutions.com

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