Search engine marketing consultation services for small to medium-size businesses.
Overall Principles of Site Architecture
and Website Development
"Site design often has different functions: branding, direct sales, customer retention, trust, communication, and online visibility. A site must be persuasive enough to sell a product or service. Product photos must communicate the product's look and feel. The site must be trustworthy. By making a site search-friendly early in the design process, everybody wins -- customers, search engines, and site owners."Sheri Thurow, Director of Grantastics Design
This training pulls together recommendations for developing a site with both a marketing and organic search engine optimization focus.
This introduction spells out the Overall Principles and gives a little shorthand presentation at the end of the basic elements. In the documents that follow, I’ve broken down each of these Overall Principles into individual documents for ease of use.
To begin with, a website selling a product or service should answer the three basic questions a person is asking when they go to a site:
- Purpose: What is this site about, what's being offered? What is the product/service?
- Benefit: How or why will it meet my needs, benefit me?
- Call To Action: How can I get it?
Everything else is just fleshing out the answers to these three focal points for the customer and getting traffic from search engines by focusing on relevant targeted keyword phrases that searchers will use to get their needs met.
Let’s think together about what principles can guide the development.
1. A Website is a marketing and sales medium, an extended Sales Process. Measure every decision about the Website by answering the question, "How does this move forward the sales process."
2. We are creating for users (potential customers) and for search engines. The Website is like a 4-legged chair.
- User friendly.
- Search engine friendly.
- Sales and marketing friendly.
- Development friendly.
3. Research on user orientation shows that people look for text first and that good copy sells. Therefore, we want a balance of text and graphics where graphics are in service of the text and the Sales Process. Text is king.
4. Simple, clean, uncluttered site is needed so users can easily see what our product is, how it can benefit them, and how they can purchase it. The whole site is a Sales Process leading to a Call To Action that must be clearly seen.
5. Navigation must be glaringly obvious to users and contribute to the Call To Action.
6. Keyword phrase optimization for Search Engine ranking results needs to be organic to the site, considered an essential element of the total development of the site.
7. Website structure and content is focused on the customer, the targeted audiences. We need to write and design the site using the words that our audience uses. The site must satisfy the target audience's needs, not the egos of an artist, a copywriter, or a group of programmers, or a search engine marketer (SEM).
We want to enter the mind of the searcher. We need to understand the searcher's intent and create a site based on that intent.
Based on the above principles, here is a shorthand list of orienting questions to consider for every decision about the Website. Tape it on everyone’s computer.
1. How does this decision contribute to the Sales Process?
2. Does this contribute to 4-fold friendliness?
3. Is the text being treated as king?
4. How does this contribute to a visually clean?
5. Is there obvious navigation contributing to the Sales Process and Call To Action?
6. Is this helping the organic optimization of targeted keyword phrases?
7. Am I into the mind of the searcher?
Follow this navigation to the individual documents. It will be at the bottom of each section.
