Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
~ Sun Tzu (Author – The Art of War)
A corollary to this quote could be that if you do not seize opportunities, you will stagnate. Apply it to the web, and its reality comes to the fore. If you are a business startup looking to garner early success, you just can’t rule out the need for an online presence – a website. But, with the continuous evolution of the dynamic web scenario, the above basic requirement becomes just a necessity. To achieve unrivaled success via your website, there are 6 key elements that you cannot afford to overlook. Here we take a look at the following three:
This tool is the small business’ abacus. It provides a one-stop performance analysis of your website, all at the hands of a single individual. While it may sound quite complicated, Google Analytics is totally worth the effort invested in understanding and leveraging it. For example, it lets you set goals for your website like page visits that can help you build strategies for traffic conversion.
You can analyze user traffic across devices, media types likes ads and videos, and web entities like social tools and websites. With Traffic Sources, you can determine the origin of your visitor traffic, while the Visitor Flow tool lets you trace the route that visitors take to reach you. This helps you extend your services at the earliest possible checkpoint. The extent of depth to which Google Analytics take you is evident from the fact that you can even determine how a certain user cross-section interacts with your website pages, leading to better results.
Businesses report that up to 30% of their customer acquisition budget has been reduced due to the use of Google Analytics – that’s quite lucrative!
Okay! You have your website up and running. But, what if it isn’t exactly like what Google wanted. You certainly don’t want Google flagging it off as unfavorable and lowering your website ranking. Webmaster Tools is a service that lets you check on your website’s health from a search engine’s point-of-view via detailed stats about traffic and search patterns. It offer a bird’s eye view of how your website is crawled and indexed by Google.
An array of spanking new link reporting tools provide access to comprehensive data that can be displayed, classified or downloaded. This data is composed of internal and external links that get traffic to your site. You can understand which exact search queries lead visitors to your website and the route they take. With Webmaster Tools you can specify sitemaps for your website and also the frequency of their change. Specifying the appearance of indexed URLs is also possible.
3. Content Management Systems
Gone are the days when the slightest update to your website content required you to run to your website designer and hosting company. With the advent of CMS (Content Management Systems) like WordPress, you can now tinker with your website content without breaking a sweat. And, it pays rich dividends to have fresh stuff up on your website to improve your website ranking.
This is part 1 of our list of the six most critical website elements that any business cannot risk ignoring. The next blog will talk about three more critical elements for any business website. Want to add to this list, or share a few pearls of wisdom and experience? Feel free to drop in and comment. We are all ears!
