The harsh truth is that a lot of them don’t know, they simply feel like they have to have a website because everybody else has one.

A website has become something that one has to have, the “why” isn’t often considered. Before a single minute of time is put into the design, content, colours etc. of a site a business needs to have clearly identified goals for the site.

Before you get a site up and running, ask yourself the following:

• Who are my target audience? Who is this site aimed at?
• What is the purpose of this website? Are you hoping to take orders and process sales? Are you just hoping to get sales leads from potential customers? Or is it just to provide information?
• How will it accomplish these goals? Search Engines? Offline promotion of the site?

More and more people are now turning to the internet to find suppliers of products and services that they require. The number of people who will pick up the phone book is rapidly diminishing and Google is becoming the method of choice for the majority. It is therefore essential to your business that your website shows up in the search engines when a potential customer searches for something you provide.

A lot of small/medium sized business owners have a poor opinion of the web as far as a sales generating tool goes. This is because the vast majority of small/medium business websites are poorly developed, offer little or no relevant information, very rarely maintained or updated and are very rarely optimised for the Search Engines. A website is just something that they think they have to have and not something that could potentially generate a massive Return on Investment.

The silver lining for small/medium businesses is that, if they changed their ways now and got a site designed and optimised preofessionally, there is a great opportunity to move ahead of the field and reap the benefits of the glut of poorly designed sites.

A well designed, well optimised and regularly updated website is a very cost effective marketing and sales tool and as the nature of business moves more and more into the digital realm, the companies that embrace the change will see the benefits.

I gave them a detailed report into the reasons why I felt they were struggling to rank in search engines. Here are 5 quick tips to help make sure your site is ready for search engines, bear in mind these are basic steps and there are a lot more things you can do to improve your search engine rankings.

1. Title Tags - <title>These are title tags</title>
Title tags are in the head of your website and show up in the blue bar at the top of your web browser as well as the title for your site in the search engine results page. Make sure that the keywords you are targeting are in your title tags (but do not stuff every keyword as it will look spammy and decrease potential visitor click through rates)

Far too many business websites are guilty of not utilising their title tags properly and have things like “index”, “Home” or their company name which are not helpful for Search Engine Optimisation purposes.

2. Your Internal Links Are Important Too
When linking to pages on your site from other pages on your site, make sure your internal links are using descriptive keywords. Instead of saying “click here” or “find out more”. Use a keyword relevant to that page “Web Design Services“, etc.

3. Have Good Content
Search engines love good, descriptive content just as much as human visitors do. A lot of business websites are very sparce when it comes to actual content. Service and product pages should be as descriptive as possible and contain their relevant keywords.

4. Keep Your Site Updated
Adding fresh content on a regular basis is a very good way to help increase search engine visibility, things like “Company News” or “Company Blog” are a great addition to business websites and should be kept up to date with regular new content.

5. Get Good Quality Links
A site without links is not going to rank well in the search engines, it is imperitive that you begin building backlinks to your site from relevant sources. Try to think quality over quantity and relevance is a key factor. Steer clear of companies that offer to submit your site to “1000+ search engines” or offer to give your “thousands of links for £99″ they are often very poor quality, rarely relevant to your website’s content and could end up causing more harm than good.

Van Zant Design were recently used to design, launch and manage a Middlesbrough Football Club fansite called Boro Mania. The site is set up to allow the editor and contributors to easily publish news stories and articles and also to allow site visitors the opportunity to comment on each story. To acheive the desired goals we utilised the power of Wordpress, which is usually a blogging platform, with a few modifications to give a “magazine” style theme.

We have also recently began some Search Engine Optimisation on the site and have managed to get it onto the first page of Google for the search term “middlesbrough football” (it is currently, 13/10/08, fluctuating from 4th positon overall to the top of the 2nd page but it will settle down eventually as we continue to promote it.)

The site is only 3 months old and is already getting 10,000+ visitors per month and with Van Zant Design continually working on improving the site it’s rankings will go from strength to strength.

The site has outgrown the current design and requires a more professional, easy to navigate layout with additional features to make the site “stickier” (i.e. to keep web visitors on the site for longer, looking at more pages).

To suit the content of the site and the feel it wants to generate we will be looking at a “magazine” style theme to display featured news posts whilst also listing recent and popular news articles. The look/design of the site will also dramatically change from the current layout as we go for a cleaner, crisper and more professional look.

Stay tuned to this site for updates on the progress.

The site is set up very much like Facebook or Bebo in that users get their own profile page that is fully customizable, they can connect with other users by sending messages or friend requests, post photos or movies, and participate in the discussion forum.

This addition has made The Biker Place a much more community focused site and has contributed heavily to the amount of repeat visitors the site gets on a daily basis.

From this site we will be offering web design services, web consultation, print design services and web marketing. If you are interested in any of these please contact us and we will be happy help.

There a couple of sections to add including a portfolio section, but for now enjoy the site and do let us know if you spot any bugs or errors.