Brand Builders Part 25: Is Your Website Working for You?
You really can’t imagine just how important your website is to building your business. Now, I often hear from people saying, “Oh, well, yeah, we used to have a website that we really cared about, but everything social media now”. No, no, no, no. Social media is an ongoing channel to put your messages out. It’s like TV or radio or newspaper back in the day, billboards even. No, no, no, your website is home base. It’s where your fans hang out in the club. It’s the place where people go, so you cannot ignore it, and switch to the new shiny thing of social media, you’ve got to maintain your website.
And here’s the biggest thing. If you aren’t following the search engine optimization rules of Google and the other search engines, then your website’s going to start dropping like a rock on the rankings. And so, you need to be at the top of those lists. So, you need to stay on top of your website, you need to make sure you’re regularly monitoring it, updating it keeping that content fresh, and following all the rules. I mean, everything from having the right redirects, to making sure your domain name is properly set up, to making sure you have the right page titles, page headers, sub heads, the percentage of the key word or phrase in the body copy, alt image text for the pictures.
How crazy is it that, as powerful as Google is, it can’t see pictures? It only knows the picture is what you name it. And so if you name the picture, Jmg_1124, because that’s what it was named when you took the picture with your camera, then Google doesn’t know what that picture is. If it’s a picture of a red truck, you need to say red truck, especially if your target audience is busy searching for red trucks. You want to be able to make a match, right? So, if you’re not sure what to do, let me know, but there are plenty of free resources out there to give good evaluation of your website as it stands now. It’ll tell you where the problems and the challenges are. It’ll give you a whole bunch of steps to go get it fixed, and some things you need to do on an ongoing basis to better use your website to build a better brand.
