The sum total of your online business is not content. Make no mistake about it, content is still important when you provide crucial information, but it’s just one thing that can be optimised on your site. Everyone talks about keyword optimisation within your content and therefore some believe it is the only important part of optimisation.

That is what we are really talking about here – website development optimisation. Don’t just focus on the content. The search engine robots will be looking for keywords throughout the page, not just within the content. Here are a number of options for developing the website and enhancing sales potential.

The site should be more than just an entry point into the online world. It is your operational base and should give a lot of data about your organisation. Use site stats to help you improve how you run your business.

What You Should Look For:

A number of different statistics can help you improve the way that search engines look at your site. Each one can tell you something useful about how your business is currently doing.

1. Page views – Do you know many people look at each individual page? You can check page views on a monthly basis to see what portion of your website development is the most popular. You might find that certain pages are more popular during certain months due to seasonal offers. You can also learn what items are doing well and which ones are dragging down the bottom line.

2. Unique visitors – Your site may get many visitors each day, but they could be the same person coming back more than once. Unique visitors are visiting for the first time. The more unique visits you get the more potential customers you are coming in contact with.

3. Links – For example, outbound links. If someone clicks on your Digg icon to bookmark one of your articles or blog posts, you can find that out as long as you have the right software set up on each page of your site. Posted ads can also be analysed to see who clicks them. If you use Google AdWords, your stats can be tracked enabling you to receive money.

4.Sales – Track how much your shopping cart takes in per month. See when sales go down or up and see how many people used the shopping cart but didn’t make the sale. To help you predict the future of your business, compare statistics appropriately and identify buying trends.

5. Keyword analysis – Each page can be dedicated to one or two keywords. Look at each page to see how well these keywords are doing for you. Using a different page for different keywords also allows you to know which ones are under-performing for you so you can try a new tactic.

Google Analytics is a free program that you can use to measure these and other website stats. With so much information, you can dominate your niche if you’re willing to invest the time and effort.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an accomplished Executive Virtual Assistant Service which helps companies of all sizes reach their commercial targets. Want to get more information about online business building success strategies that really work? Contact VMF today!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 4:45 am and is filed under Online Business, Promotion and Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.