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Each page of your website contains elements that contribute to it’s overall success.  They must complement each other in achieving your goal — a call to action on the part of visitors. Home page is the main portal, and therefore deserves extra attention.

Home page of Attraction Web Design site

Maximize the value of each website page
Every page of your website contains elements that contribute to it’s overall success.  They must complement each other in achieving your goal — a call to action on the part of visitors.

Avoid Splash pages
Some sites start with a “front page” or “landing page” containing merely a brief video or static image, along with an “Enter” link.  In most cases, this is unnecessary and requires surfers to click again to get to the information they came for.  This can be frustrating to people and a page like this contains very little information for the search engine tigers to chew on!  Skip this and get to the point right away…

Home (index) page
The home page is by far the most important part of any site.  It is the main doorway to your organization by which the vast majority of visitors will arrive at.  First impression is key to help them decide to view internal pages.  You have 3 to 7 seconds to capture attention and convince visitors to stay, so the initial appearance, site title and headline should draw them into reading a brief introduction to your company. 

   • Official company logo – use similar colors and design as printed materials
   • Website title or company name – state your topic or name of organization
   • Main Headline – grab attention with a question or solution to a problem
   • Text – at least one or two paragraphs of introduction to your company and what you can do for your customers (or members).  Squeeze in as many “search terms” as possible without making copy hard to understand.
   • Images – one or more photos or graphics should reinforce the text and be a visual representation of how the site will help visitors
   • Slideshow or video – if a picture is worth 1,000 words, moving pictures could be worth a million!  Use your very best images to tell your story
   • Contact information – all pages should make it easy for visitors to request more information, but it is imperative that a phone number, email address or mailing address be visible to people ready to contact you based on their first glance at your site!
   • Current info – update home page regularly with a news item or mention a recent event to prove to visitors that your site is actually current.
   • Bullet lists – to avoid overwhelming visitors with lengthy text, use concise lists of features, benefits, samples or reasons for people to delve deeper into the site.   
   • Newsletter sign-up – Opt-in area for eBulletin, free gift, or membership to capture contact information for additional marketing opportunities.

All of these features should drive visitors toward a specific “Call to Action”. Failure to convert potential customers into sales leads is mostly due to homepages lacking primary and secondary calls to action. It may be a link that states, “Contact us for details” or “Tell us your situation and we will set up a conference call.”  Guide web users along your sales process to convert more of them into customers.  Read more tips!

To link or not to link, that is the question!  In general, the more the merrier, however some links can harm your site’s “reputation” if they are in a bad neighborhood.

Avoid questionable link building strategies
Be careful!  If you see a link building opportunity that appears suspicious, ignore it. You could be wasting your time or even risk having your site penalized for significant periods of time by search engines. It’s up to you to verify legitimacy and value of any agreements. 

“White Hat” SEO practices refer to safe, honest and trustworthy methods of obtaining links.  “Black Hat” practices are unscrupulous site design or link-building methods with the purpose of cheating or tricking search engines.  Examples of these “bad guys” are excessive use of keywords on a page or sites designed purely to list links.

Post links everywhere you can think of
Include your web address in any online information about yourself.  Your fraternal organization, church, college alumni association, civic association, sports or activity club, networking group, support circle, may allow you to post a personal profile where you can add a link or even brief advertisement.  Ask friends to link from their MySpace page!

Submit yourself to awards sites
Find sites that offer to post your link as a “site of the day” or any other reason.  One place to start is http://CoolSiteoftheDay.com, which ranks highly in search engines.

Use affiliate programs to get linked
If you have a product, start your own affiliate program and email related sites who’d like to add another stream of income.  Not only might you earn cash yourself, but each affiliate gladly provides another inbound link to help you climb higher in Google and Yahoo!  http://Clickbank.com is an easy way to use a system already in place (for digitally delivered products only).  Join for $50 and affiliates post a banner or text link to automatically receive credit for customers who purchase through their links.

Publish in other people’s newsletters
Offer to write articles for eZines or email newsletters of associates (and even competitors) in your industry.  Anyone publishing regular materials needs content, so your “payment” may be a link to your site, along with a one-sentence description.

Internal page links
Even internal links (within your site) can help.  This includes anchor links within a page to jump from one area to another.

From SEO-guy.com:  “Anchors are used to reference specific locations on a page from other locations on that same page. These “on page links” are yet another place to get your main keywords in and boost that “on page” density.

An example is “back to the top” at the end of a page. Except as smart optimizers, we use our keywords instead of phrases like “back to top”. Here is an example:
At top of page I place my anchor: a name=”seo”
Farther down,  I put SEO (instead of “TOP”)
I’ve now created a same page link containing my keyword and thus increased my density as well as received added weight by virtue of it being an anchor.”

Relative value of links
As with the entire “Google formula” for calculating rankings, the value of links has it’s own complicated formula.  Anchor text, relevancy of the other site, page rank of the other site, number of links per page and the other factors play a role.  Even the words [or search terms] in text surrounding a link affects it’s quality in the eyes of Google. 
Just remember that all links are not created equal!

Sending articles and press releases to the internet can bring traffic in two ways.  First, a good article will lead readers to your site for more information.  Also, when articles are posted at various internet directories, the embedded links to your site improve it’s quality rating with Google.

Article Writing and Syndication
Writing articles is a popular method of generating links, if your content is appealing to visitors and to webmasters. One good article could create many links and significant traffic to your website.

Write articles and submit them to syndication websites such as GoArticles, AcmeArticles and ArticleDashboard.com.  You should include a brief bio and links to your site with each article submitted.  When others are searching for content for their own site, they might use yours, which includes the link to your site.  There is no cost and you can often choose your own anchor text (keywords) and pages to link.

You can join several of these article directories and submit the same article to each, simply logging in after you’ve created your account with each.  Post as many as you have time for.  Others include http://ArticleMarketer.com,  http://Add-Articles.com.

Prepare material for other websites
Similar to writing articles, in this case you are directly supplying content to a related website, with your “payment” in the form of links to your site and possibly enhancements such as “partner” status.  Everyone wants good unique content, so others may find it in their interest to publish your work.  Approach webmasters or look for announcements on related websites.

Press Releases
Press releases can drive interested traffic to your website and some PR wires allow authors to include website links. Some services charge and others offer free options. If you pay, your releases are made available to a larger market.  http://PRLeap.com and http://PRWeb.com are two popular examples.  More marketing tools are available at http://www.attractweb.com/products.php