If you are reading this, you’ve seen our recently re-launched website. To the user, it appears pretty and organized with a lot of content. What you don’t see are the months of planning and coding, the weeks of content development and the hours our team put in to taking this site live. These are elements that are easy to overlook and even easier not to plan for, but make up most of the trouble when launching a digital presence.
It’s the small items that add up in a big way. Things such as keywords, category titles, article tags and content placement are some of the small details that allow you to rank well in Google, become discovered by new customers and increase the number of leads you receive.
Tags and keywords often wind up being afterthoughts, but are critically important to a site’s success.
Of course, all of those details can be a waste of time if the site doesn’t feature an appropriate architecture. Keywords are only helpful when they are used properly. Check out the URL of this blog post and you’ll notice it has the title in it. This isn’t by accident or convenience, it is a critical part of a properly structured website. By having the title and a few keywords in the URL, your blog posts are more likely to attract traffic than a URL that looks like www.site.com/article=?3425847#.
Finally, these details must reinforce a central focus, which is truly important to your digital presence: a clear communication of who you are and what you do. This is often very difficult for organizations to nail down succinctly. It is a process that needs to be data driven rather than emotional.
Notice the Businesses, Organizations & Nonprofits and Authors & Thought Leaders links in our navigation. These categories represent the basic areas we serve. There was a lot of healthy debate about this, which is common in strong organizations. It is hard for professionals to focus on the big picture and not focus on the exceptions to the rules, rather than the rules in general. There were plenty of reasons to add this or that to our service areas, but taking a step back and really looking at who your customers are is critical to ensure your website is a success.
I hope you take a look around and let me know what you think of our new site. A lot of work went in to coordinating the details while focusing on the big picture. We’re going to be using this platform a lot in the future to test new digital theories and conduct technical experiments. I encourage you to keep checking back to see what we’re up to; you never know what our latest techniques and research might reveal.