Website tips, what works

What are you doing to make your website work for you? Here is a couple of tips I’ve picked up along the way, and we’ve implemented ourselves…

1) Get a website champion – someone who is really living the website, thinking about it in the shower, staying on top of what’s out there and going on. Let them try to become the leading website for your industry.

2) Use search friendly websites and blogs; does your developer know how to make a friendly website for search engines? What about your blog?

3) Outsource the development of your website, but don’t give up on point 1, you need your own internal website champion; they don’t need to know how it all works, but they need to have a vision;

4) Utilize both on-site and off-site blogs or other social networking tools (twitter, etc). A blog on your website is great, and essential, but you also need other reputable sources – so create an off-site blog. Get your staff into blogging on their own sites. If they’re professional related, consider sponsoring their own private blogs (i.e. pay for them to have their own domain name through a company like WordPress.com).

5) Create a regular posting schedule for both your regular website content and your blogs. Set calendar reminders, rotating staff schedules, whatever is appropriate, but keep content fresh and current. It doesn’t have to be multiple posts per day — just whatever you set yourself to, try and keep it regular. Once every other week is even fine, if you can maintain it.

6) Relevant, relevant, relevant — keep your posts relevant to your readers. Don’t post for the sake of posting, although you want to keep to some form of a schedule; but when you say something, have something to say. One trick is to get one-ahead. Use the advance publish tools to let you post for the following week – always post next weeks blog, and you’ll always have some grace room.