WordPress Website Basics: Best Practices for Developing a Strong, Lead-generating Website
When developing a website for your business, there are WordPress website basics that need to be followed that will help ensure your website is successful, provides a great user experience, and generates leads. This expert article covers some of the most important items that contribute to a strong, high-performing website.
WordPress Website Basics: Website Hosting
Website hosting is a big deal. Choose a website hosting company that is big enough to have redundant servers (in case there’s an outage); 24/7 tech support; and strong cybersecurity. A word to the wise: do NOT host your website with your website developer. You don’t want your website on a server in someone’s basement or at a co-location hosting facility where your developer has to drive across town to fix an outage.
WordPress Website Basics: Design Templates
There are 1000s of pre-programmed WordPress website design templates that can be modified with your logo, colors, branding & content. Unless you are Coca-Cola, there is no need to develop a custom-designed website. Custom designed websites cost a fortune, and they often have LESS design capabilities than a pre-programmed website design template.
WordPress Website Basics: Search Engine Optimization
I’ve said this a multitude of times and I’ll say it again: If you don’t bother to apply SEO to your website, you might as well not bother with a website. The typical SEO process involves determining the essence of a website page, applying a high-ranking keyword phrase to each individual page on the back end of the site. You also must incorporate that targeted keyword phrase to the on-page content a site visitor will see. For more information on this critically important aspect of developing a website, read our expert article: SEO Basics for Websites
WordPress Website Basics: Meaningful Page Content
The Google algorithm is still the algorithm you need to please to rise in the search rankings. When you’re developing content for your website, you must create website pages with meaningful content. That content also must be well written & properly optimized with SEO. We often see websites with pages that don’t say much and aren’t optimized for a targeted keyword phrase. Those pages will actually HURT your website’s ability to rank in the searches. The minimum length for content is 300 words. Anything less than that, and Google will not consider your page to have substantial content.
WordPress Website Basics: Blogging
One of the top ranking factors from Google is to add fresh new content to your website every month. At a minimum, you need to develop & post 1 new blog article on some aspect of your product or service offerings each month. To be frank, we see many companies making BIG mistakes in their blogging program. To learn more about how to create and deploy a successful business blogging program, access our guide: Business Blogging Basics
WordPress Website Basics: Photos & Visual “Chunking” of Content
When people see a website page with line after line of gray text and nothing that breaks it up, most folks’ eyes glaze over. All website pages should feature photos, colored headlines & subheads, and other design elements that help break up the text. When you visually “chunk” content into smaller elements, your site visitors are more likely to stay on the page longer learning about your product, service, or company. Site visitors also are more likely to absorb your key selling messages when you break them up with color, type size changes, and other design elements.
Designing a website that truly helps your business takes time, thought & strategy. But it’s well worth it to deploy best practices for WordPress websites. When you incorporate best practices and Google’s stated ranking factors into your website, you rise in the rankings. When you rise in the search rankings, you generate more site visitors, and ultimately, more leads.
