Tips on building a successful company website [kwiqq]

Posted on | March 22, 2009 | No Comments

About the Bloggers

The blog has been created by Raj Anand, Operations Director of Kwiqq – Social Networking Platform and winner of Business Week’s Europe’s Young Entrepreneur 2007, follow Raj on Twitter. The SEO tips are contributed by Vinay who works as Search Analyst for a Brighton based Internet Marketing Agency. Follow Vinay on Twitter.

Building company website

Huge number of websites go online on a daily basis, some better than others. Website in several countries is the first point of contact for any potential customer or investor. Clearly it is vital piece of communication that reflect your brand, company ethos and identity. Here are some of our tips on how today’s company website should look to gather traction.

Build a website and a community (Source)

Strong branding

I occasionally see websites which have a simple text with a wacky font i.e. home made logos. Very disappointing, you have just lost a potential business partner !  Branding needs to look professional, clean and modern. The more you stand out with the logo and design the higher are your chances for success with the brand.

Saying that I wouldn’t recommend you spending too much time on it. I have heard of organisations spending north of £250,000 good example is the 2012 Olympic logo, £400,000 was spent to build the logo. The logo got a  luke warm reception, to say the least.

I would strongly recommend to not take chances and get a professionals onboard for your branding. Make sure to brief them on the logo. Some tips on branding are available on our earlier branding tips.

Good copy

Copy writing for a website is a skill in itself. The temptation could be to include as much rambling as possible, although given the average user’s attention span and time they spend on each website. Its important that the text is minimal with maximum impact.

There are specialist copy writers who have expertise in preparing to the point copy. Less is more on a website and its important that you avoid rambling. Use images where required and divide it into separate tabs or pages where necessary.

Content managed site

When a copywriter and designer finish their wok on the site, its easy to believe that this wouldn’t change for a long time thereafter. Although once the business goes live there are plenty of changes which need to be made. From team members to latest news everything would require to be changed. It’s not economically viable to pay your technical team each time a change is suggested.

Hence its recommended that you use a content managed site. Content managed sites typically have a simple way to build the website structure and a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. So you can modify the content. There are plenty of free content managed software out there a good list is available if you are interested. Often blogging software like WordPress and Movable Type is also used as a CMS too.

Web development is always in Beta

Developing a website is always work in progress, its rare that you get a bug free site from day one. Its also highly likely that things you have planned for the website actually doesn’t work for your end users.

Hence you need to constantly tweak your site. Its therefore common in the industry to have an SLA (Service Level Agreement) with the developers. This gives you a fixed number of hours of developers time. Again this is something you have to agree to in your contract with your developers.

SEO

Special thanks to Vinay for this section.

Majority of users nowadays find websites through search engines. Hence its vital that sites are tweaked to incorporate this black art.
Submit it to Google

Submit your page to Google AddURL . Do not use the tool to suggest individual web pages on your website, as your request will be ignored. One of easiest way to get your website noticed by major search engines is to provide quality & unique content (that users like) and promoting it via Social Media (Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon etc.,)

Create Unique, Accurate Page Titles

Create Unique, Accurate Page Titles – A title tag tells your users and search engines what the topic of page is about. Title can be short and informative and if the title is too long, search engines only display a portion of it their search results.

[Best Practice: "Web Page Title - Category Name - Site Name"]

Add META Tags

Make use of “description” META Tag which gives search engines a summary of what the page is all about and it could be your best opportunity to stand out of the crowd by attracting the users to click. The description of a page gives a user clues about whether the content on the page matches with what he or she is looking for. Keep it creative, informative and do not use generic descriptions or copy-pasting entire content of the page details.

[Best Practice: From DELL UK - "Dell UK provides customised computer technology solutions and services to businesses and home consumers. Visit Dell UK for Laptops, Desktops, Monitors and Printers."]

SEO friendly URLS

Organize the structure of your URLs, ‘friendlier’ URL structure helps users want to link to your content. Users might link to your page using the URL of that pages as the anchor text, if you URL contains relevant words this provides user & search engines with more information about the page than an ID or random parameters would. Search engines are good at crawling all types of URL structures, even the most complex one’s but spend time to make your URLs as simple as possible which helps users and search engines.

[Best Practice: http://www.example.com/articles/article-name-here.htm ]

Navigation Structure

Navigation of a website is very important in helping your visitors quickly find the content they want. The navigation structure also helps search engines understand what the site architecture is and which page it thinks is important.

Eg. Root Page > Related Topic Listing > Specific Topic

Sitemap

A sitemap which displays the structure of your website (usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages) can always come handy to guide users to move location they want to view. This structure also helps Search Engines better understand your site content and reach to pages which cannot be accessed from Home Page.

An XML Sitemap on other hand (which yu can submit through Google’s Webmaster Tool) makes it easier for Google to discover pages on your site and instructs the bots which page of the site needs regular crawling and which doesn’t. Creative a navigation structure that helps user go from general content to more specific content they want on your website. Use text navigation where possible as its easier search engines to crawl and understand your website better.

[Best Practice: Usage of "breadcrumb" navigation - Website > Category > Sub-category > Article Page]

Quality Content

Offering quality content and services should be main motive of any website, create compelling and useful content which would likely influence your website and which users prefer recommending. Visitors know what good contents are and when they are likely to see one they direct other users via Social Media, Blog Posts, E-Mails, Forums, Discussion Groups and other means.

Viral and unique content

Organic and word-of-mouth is what builds site’s reputation with both your users and search engines which always depends on quality of the site content. Create new, fresh and unique contents which keep your existing user base coming back and also bring new visitors.

Science of nofollow and follow sites

Be educated about of “rel=nofollow” links, setting this attribute to any link you place on your website will explain Google and other search engines that certain links on your site shouldn’t be followed or page PR (PageRank) reputation to other pages linked to. If you’re site has a blog with public commenting turned on, links within those comments could pass your reputation to pages that you may not be comfortable recommending for. Most of the blogging & CMS software have them integrated by default, you can also nofollow links on other part of pages on your website on which you aren’t willing to vouch for (Message Boards, Forums where users post public content/links).

Social Media to promote site

Effectively promote your site with new content which will lead to faster discovery by others in same category and bring your recommendations. Make use of Offline & Social Media to promote your site among your close peers. Reach out to community, who relate to your site, opening up communication with these sites & communities could spark ideas for building a good community of resource.

Free tools for SEO

Finally, don’t forget to make use of Free Tools available by Google & other Search Engines which help you understand the engagement of your users and oversee your site statistics – Google Analytics & Google Webmaster Tools.

Pull In Social Media

Vinay’s SEO techniques clearly states that social media strategy plays an important role in the site ranks. Getting a website as good as possible is not enough you need to get people to find your site in the first place. Below tips talk about ways you can get people to know about your site using social tools:

Twitter

Twitter has been in news over the last few months. The early adopters were techies who used it as a quick way to communicate and spread the word. It now being adopted by marketers, sales, recruitment, charities etc and hence going mainstream. All major news papers are talking about it and we strongly believe that it is not a flash in the pan. Twitter is becoming a major discovery tool and a real time search engine. Real time search engine is a different from sites like Google, Yahoo etc. It allows users to get access to data as they happen, in addition it gives access to data as its been thought by users. A good example is news like plane crashes, Mumbai terrorist attacks where things were almost broadcasted live on Twitter.

For a website owner its a great way of recommending parts of site which could be of value to other users. Use it to genuinely help people i.e. make people aware of industry news, ask questions to get people participating and contribute to discussion.

Blog

As its not practical to update your website frequently, generally a blog is used to keep the website fresh. A blog should be used as a journal of what you have done and thinking. General bit of advice, keep the blog helpful for your target audience the more useful content you add the more people would discover your site. If possible showcase a constant stream of latest blogs on your home page. This will not only keep your readers updated but also assist your search engine ranks (more on this below).

Stream of Blogs on home page

There are several free blogging software available the post popular of them is wordpress. You can also use blogs which are external to your site i.e. SaaS (Software as a Service). My favourite example at the moment is Tumblr. Although there are other popular examples in this category. Namely blogger.com and typepad.com, both been used by many high profile blogs.

Flickr for photos

The more social website you are on, the easier it becomes to discover you. Flickr is one of the most popular sites amongst photographers, it hosts more than 3 billion images. I recommend you upload images of staff, office events, team etc to Flickr.

This allows potential clients to see your team and company culture. Company openness is the demand and a trend in the industry. It can also be a fantastic experience for your staff, who feels recognised for their work. Make sure to tag the images with your company name and everybody in the picture, obviously with their permission.

ShareThis widget

Its almost a trend to include all the possible site sharing sites, the web has to offer i.e. Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twitter etc, to a webpage. I’m unable to find statistics on the usefulness of the tool. I for certain don’t use these widgets, instead prefer my browser plugins to bookmark items or directly on these sites.

Again its horses for courses situation, I don’t want to generalise hence if it works for you include the Share This widget to your site. The more you share the more you will be discovered.

Video footage

I encourage companies to add videos to their website. Video has a unique ability to explain things is the simplest possible way. Get videos of your product, events and snippets of staff discussions. This gives an outsider a quick peak into your company culture.

There are several video players out there, I would recommend using Vimeo or YouTube. Both have fantastic players and good enough audience to spread the word. Make sure you tag your videos like you would on Flickr, also add a suitable title and description to your video.

About your staff

Every website should have a about us page, where you mention your team members. Encourage your staff to be on social media websites i.e. Twitter, blogs, Facebook etc. Some staff members will be reluctant and it is understandable.

I would advice the company to include their Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook profile. Inevitably this could be against some company policies.
Web-o-sphere

Raj-o-sphere

Highly recommend you to be on various social networks even if you don’t use it. This will ensure that your brand name is available to you at a later date. It also helps your to be identities and not confused with others. There in inevitably be a few social networks you will regularly use. For those networks you use daily, build something called a Webopshere (coined by me) on your site i.e. places they can connect with you.

User profiles to grow user loyalty

This section highlights an emerging trend, it is something you should consider if you are planning to take your web usage to the next level. Inevitably your web usage and loyalty would increase using this technique:

Facebook Connect

Users are increasingly becoming cautious of the number of times they have to Sign up to a new social network. Facebook connect allows users to sign-in to your site without registering. Users can then update their details and register properly on your site.

When you allow users to make a post via facebook in effect you are getting their names and making them a fan of your product or service. A good example of login using Facebook is Techrunch and a good example of using Facebook connect for a web application is BrightKite.com

Moderation of content

This is more relevant to companies who are concerned about the user generated content, which goes on their site. I would recommend you use a administrator moderation tool.

Administrator moderation tool

This would provide you with a stream of data coming out of the network. Try and keep an eye on the activity. Any item which is flagged by a user should be seen as a priority and removed within 24-48 hours. Understandably an overhead, but will increase the new communities confidence in the ecosystem you have created.

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