A Successful Website

How do you measure the success of a website?

The updated Sea Explorers’ Institute website in Kolkata, India, has been live for just over a year now. Here is the visitor behavior I have observed over the past year:

1. People from all over India (and the world) are discovering this organization online through searches.
2. Once visitors land on the website, they spend 4.52 minutes on average browsing the site.
3. Visitors engage with the organization via the website, asking questions, offering to volunteer and commenting about their experience with SEI.

When SEI asked me what I thought of their site’s performance, I shared all the statistics I had. And then I said that none of this mattered.

What ultimately mattered was, were they getting the results they wanted and expected from this website? Their answer was “yes.”

How Will People Find Your Website?

Just because you create a website doesn’t mean people will come visit it!

How will people know that you have a website? And how will they know how to get to it? Here are some questions to consider:

1. How will you promote your website?
2. Why would someone want to visit your website?
3. What words or phrases would a person use when searching online for what you offer?
4. Where and how do you advertise? Why is this?
5. Do you want people to visit your website more than once? Why?

Your answers are the first step towards figuring out how to attract the appropriate people to your website.

Before You Create Your Website

Before you create your website, here are five big questions to consider:

1. What is the purpose of your website?
2. Who is your primary audience?
3. What is the main impression you want a visitor to get from your website?
4. What do you want visitors to do, once they visit your site?
5. How will you know when your website is successful? How will you measure success?

Having answers to these questions will help you design and build a website that fits your needs.

Search Engine Optimization: 5 Simple Steps

To optimize your website for search engines, be sure to do these five simple things:

1. Page title: use keywords and phrases to create descriptive titles for every page on your website.
2. Page content: make sure the page content matches the title, and use keywords and phrases as much as possible when you write the content.
3. Embedded links: within the page text, hyperlink keywords and phrases to lead to other pages with more details. This gives more weight to the hyperlinked keywords and phrases.
4. In-links: ask other organizations related to yours to link to your Web pages. Links from “authority sites” increase the credibility of your Web page.
5. Description tags: provide a one sentence summary of the Web page in this field.

Doing these five things will significantly increase the chances of people discovering your website online. More importantly, the relevant Web page will be displayed in search results, based on the keywords and phrases used.