• Be clear and specific with the purpose and goals of your website.
• If a web designer doesn’t understand Google and search engine opitmisation then they aren’t a web developer. (Simply placing meta tags on a website is not search engine optimising)
• Web developers aren’t graphic designers.
• Graphic designers aren’t web developers (don’t tell them that).

 Golden Rules of Website Development

The first rule of any website should be "what do I what to achieve?" with this website. Be specific, do you want people to find you and learn about you? (similar to a Yellow Pages advertisement), do you want to build a database?, do you want to sell products to customers online? Be clear and be specific. Once you know what you want to achieve then your website can easily be built for that purpose.

The second rule when building a website is SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing). These are probably the two most important acronyms for your website. SEO and SEM are all about search engines and most specifically Google.

 SEO -  this is when your listings appear organically or naturally in the higher rankings of Google.  I’m sure Google have some compelling facts about this, but if you aren’t in the first three pages of Google then you aren’t going to be seen. Achieving natural rankings is a skill and an artform and certainly not a science because Google and other search engines keep changing their algorithms. However there are some simple tricks to improve your rankings within Google.

SEM - this is where you bid to have your ads placed against specific keywords that are typed. E.g. Plumbing, City XYZ. Your ad will appear but you only ever pay when somebody clicks on your ad. Hence pay per click. The absolute beauty of this model is you manage and control the amount you are prepared to bid for a word. You control the amount you spend in any given month.  With the back end system Success Metrics provides you can specifically track how many clicks it takes to achieve your desired conversion rate. Try doing that with Yellow Pages! The obvious benefit of this is that if you know how much you have to spend to get desired results you will probably want to advertise on Google more. Typically with this scenario you are only limited by the amount of people searching in your category. Most businesses continue to increase their monthly spend because they can accurately track the exact costs of direct sales from their website. 

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