1. What is the primary message you wish to convey to your visitors?
2. What are the major objectives for the website?
3. What are your specific short-term and long-term goals for the website?
4. What are your target audiences and what message do you want to convey to them?
5. Are you a local, regional or an international business?
6. Do you want to target a specific geographical locations?
7. Who are your primary competitors, both actual competitors and online?
8. What are your USP (Unique Selling Points)?
9. What are the key reasons that customers choose your company? (i.e. price, information, niche, quality, speed, expertise, sole provider)
10. What websites do you like and why?
11. What websites don’t you like and why?
12. What you like and dislike about your competitor websites?
13. What adjectives come to mind to describe the user’s perception of your new website?
14. Do you wish to alter the brand of your current site on your new website?
15. What are the primary actions users will perform on your new website?
16. What action you would like your target user to perform before leaving your website?
17. What are the top three call to actions that should be on offer on your website
18. What website links would you like to make available to the user on every page?
19. Will the new website use existing copy and images or do you need to produce new ones?
20. What are the major topics, products, services and themes for your website.

Make sure you fully understand your needs and expectations for your new website. We hope this helps you kick-start your web project or online business venture. Don’t forget you SEO and online marketing to get those all important online leads.

What has changed in Google

Google made a number of changes to document classification and page indexation processes. Main objective: To detect spam- and duplicate content and to make it harder for poor on-page content to rank highly.
· Google redesigned their document-level classifier, which can now better analyses individual web pages. This will enable Google to detect duplicate content across your website and also detect ‘template’ copy pages, where your text copy is the same for each page with only minor keyword changes.
· The changes primarily affect sites that copy other website’s content and sites with low levels of original content.

Our Advice

The Google changes will mainly affect content farms, sites that syndicate content and sites, which use the same copy template for each page with only minor keyword variations. I believe the changes will also affect sites with generally low levels of content and sites, which have pages using the same intro and exit paragraphs. I have not seen any adverse changes to rankings across my client base, but I noticed some small drops for site with low levels of content.

We recommend the following:

• Don’t copy other website’s content.
• Only publish unique and highly relevant copy on your website and blog.
• Avoid automatic aggregation of third party content.
• Don’t copy news and other third party material (blogs, news, tweets etc) – rewrite:
• Comment on news stories rather than publish an exact copy.
• Don’t link to the original content.
• Don’t use the same copy template to publish different content pages.
• Just changing a few keywords won’t be enough to make your pages unique.

As you all know, we have always taken the line that good SEO starts with highly relevant, unique and well structured website content. None of the above should affect your site, but please keep the changes in mind when creating new content pages.

You can follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/netleadz. I will tweet SEO, managed online marketing, web-based lead generation, online reputation management and other relevant topics.

Would you ignore up to 80% of your target audience?

Let’s just forget about Search Engine Optimisation as a separate subject for a moment. Let’s assume for now that we are not even looking at a website or a business. Let’s assume you are a musician, an artist, a writer or film maker for argument sake. Whatever art you do, would you seriously consider to ignore a channel that potentially reaches 80% of your target audience. No, you would not, an neither should any sensible business out there!

Target the right audience!

Businesses, small website owners, marketing managers and other key business decision makers often forget on simple fact: A website optimised for Search Engines is also a website optimised for your target audience and potential business customers.

To be found by your target audience, you need to be visible on-line this means that you also need high rankings in Search Engines. To achieve high Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERP) for your target search terms, your website content and your inbound link infrastructure needs to be highly relevant to the search terms you want to rank for.

Equally your potential prospect audience, searching for products and services via Search Engines, will want to find highly relevant websites. By optimising your site you achieve both, higher SERPs for your website and a highly relevant website for your target audience and business prospects.

SEO is not optional, it is as simple than that. Consult SEO Experts

1. Identify Your Target Audience

What is it that you are offering? What is your unique selling point (USP)? Who is going to be interested in your offering? What kind of  information, products and services are search engine users searching for? You will be surprised by how much you will be able to identify by investing in some research. A quick way of understanding demand and target audience, can often be search term research and analysis.

2. Uncover Your Competitors

Once you understand your target audience and what kind of things they are looking for on the web you can start looking for your competitors. How many other companies and websites are in the same space? How crowded is the marketplace for what you want to offer or sell? The good news is that in the online world, competitors are not hiding. They want to be found and they want to be visible. You can uncover most of your serious competitors by searching for your business keywords on popular search engines and see who is getting listed on page one. Beware online competitors might not have the same offering as you, but by occupying top search ranking positions they prevent you getting access to your target audience.

3. Develop A Clear Business Model

You know your target audience, your identified keywords and your main competitor for your chosen products and services. How are you going to make your money? What makes your visitors part with their cash or how are you going monetise your visitors in other ways? There are many business models you could follow. In addition to selling products or services online you could develop innovative subscription models, capture data and leads, implement affiliate schemes or just build email lists, which you can monetise. Whatever you business model, make sure it is unique, clear for users to understand, compelling and good value. A well structured online business plan will help you focus and succeed.

4. Align Your Website With Your Business Needs

Produce a site that fits your immediate requirements but build it so it is scaleable for your future business needs too.  If you are planning on selling products locally you require a shopping cart and a  reliable online payment system.  However if you are planning on selling products globally, you will require features such as multi-currency, localisation and advanced security. If you have to add and edit high volumes of  content you will require a suitable content management system (CMS).  Draw up a road map of what you need to start with and what you think you will need inside the next three years.  A typical life cycle of a website is three years.

5. Optimise Your Website

The Internet is cluttered with websites that do not have any visitors and no visibility. It is estimated that last year alone over 47 million new websites were created. Your success will largely depend on how visible your online business will be and how you’re going to attract visitors to your website.  It is paramount that you optimise your website for your target audience and your target keywords. This can be done for new and existing websites and there are plenty of search engine optimisation companies out there eager to help.

6. Increase Your Online Visibility

Search engine optimisation is a must. However it is not the only way to increase your websites visibility and site traffic. If you have the budget you can try PPC to  generate instant visits to your site.  Social media, blogs and organic link building are equally valid but often lower cost methods to drive traffic to your site. Expert Marketers can help you with email- and viral marketing techniques.  Anything to get the word out and bring visitors to your site

7. Reassure Your Visitors

When you’re setting up a new site  it’s essential that you stand out from the crowd and communicate to your visitors what your site is all about. If visitors find your site useful, trustworthy and your site satisfies their needs or solves their problems they are more likely to buy or subscribe.  Make sure you are clear on what you are offering otherwise your hard earned visitors will bounce.

8. Convert Visitors

Call-To-Action, Call-To-Action, Call-To-Action. Encourage your visitors to do what makes your online business successful. Get them to buy, subscribe, register, download and participate. Whatever it takes but make sure your visitors convert into sales, leads or enquiries.  Make it easy for them to buy, make it clear where to register and encourage them to consume more content until they convert.

9. Retain Visitors

New customer acquisition is more expensive than existing customer retention. The internet is no different. Recycling exiting website traffic is less expensive than generating new traffic. Make sure you give your visitors and customers reasons to come back to your site. Use of CRM tools, publishing of unique interesting content, free tools, email based  promotions and offers will give visitors a reason to come back to your site.

10. Measure Your Success (Or Your Failure)

Web analytics can help you to gain insight into your site traffic. Where are your visitors coming from? How are visitors responding to your site and your content? Why are visitors exiting the site before being converted into business?  There are lots of packages to choose from – some paid, some free. Google Analytics is a very  good package to use if you’re just starting out.

If you get most of the above right, your web-based business will be successful. Don’t despair, nothing is ever perfect from day one and online marketing techniques are evolving permanently. Consult an managed online marketing company for some of the specialist areas.