This week we will give you 5 top tips for a successful website

What are the main factors behind a successful website? Marnata Marketing Creative Director, gives his top 5 tips…

1. Get the home page right.

This is the most important page. People generally decide within 5 seconds if they want to stay on your site, based purely on the home page design.

DON’T try and say everything on the home page. This is the most common mistake I see. You have plenty of opportunity throughout the rest of the site to explain what you do, so don’t feel you have to say it all on the front cover.

2. Keep the navigation simple.
Try and rationalise all of your products or services into a few broad simple choices. Your user needs to be able to navigate easily through the site without getting lost or overwhelmed with links.

3. Search engine optimisation.
It is vital that your site is on page 1 of Google BUT it must be for the right keywords. Make sure you spend time researching the most relevant keywords for you.

You need to think about the best ways to convert Google positioning into sales. An intelligent SEO strategy can transform the conversion rate of a website.

Your website, and especially your home page, must correlate strongly and immediately with your targeted list of keywords.

Landing pages must be clearly thought out to promote your USPs and explain what you do in relation to your targeted keywords.

4. Web Design, Images, Video and Copy.
Don’t use pre-designed templates and don’t use a web programmer to design your website. Good web design requires an experienced graphic designer.
A graphic designer will know how to brand your website correctly and ensure your key messages are intelligently communicated.
Quality images and intelligent copy are paramount. Make the copy as concise as possible and try to engage your audience rather than just talk about yourself.

Try and commission your own photography rather than use stock imagery.

Video is becoming more and more important online. A good video can describe your products or services much more effectively than reams of text with a few still images.

5. Social Media Marketing.
It is increasingly important to embrace social media within your online marketing strategy.

When it’s done well, social media can create a more engaging and personal form of communicating with your audience. It also allows you to reward loyal ‘fans’ of your company with exclusive offers or news.

For service businesses, a common tactic is to give away interesting or useful information and then attract an audience for it on sites such as Blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. If users like this information, they will then read it, comment on it and hopefully share it with their contacts.

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Want to know what is SEO and how it works? We’ve made this simple SEO guide for you.

One of the biggest questions that we get from our clients here at Marnata Marketing Solutions is – what is SEO and how does it work? For businesses that are just starting to build their website or going through a website redesign, search engine optimisation or SEO can feel a bit intimidating. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Even if you do not have an experienced in-house SEO associate, you can still start making some positive changes that will help you improve your search engine optimization. With a little SEO knowledge under your belt, you can be on your way to improving your brand’s search engine ranking in no time.

Below, we’ll provide an answer to the million dollar question – what is SEO and how it works? We’ll also cover some of the basics of SEO so that you can better understand how it impacts your business and what you need to do to be in good shape.

If you’re here, you’re probably wondering what is SEO and how it works. Let’s dig deeper.

What is SEO and How It Works

SEO is an acronym that stands for search engine optimization, which is the process of optimizing your website to get organic, or un-paid, traffic from the search engine results page.

In other words, SEO involves making certain changes to your website design and content that make your site more attractive to a search engine. You do this in hopes that the search engine will display your website as a top result on the search engine results page.

Though search engine optimization can get quite complex when it comes to all the different factors that impact your ranking, the basic process is not as difficult to understand.

Search engines want to provide the best service for their users. This means delivering results on the search engine pages that are not only high quality but also relevant to what the searcher is looking for.

In order to do this, search engines will scan, or crawl, different websites to better understand what the site is about. This helps them deliver more relevant results to those who are searching for certain topics or keywords.

Similarly, the search engines will scan the site to determine how easy it is to navigate and read, rewarding user-friendly sites with higher rankings on the search engine results page.

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