Top 10 tips for making the most of your website - Part 2

Here are the remaining five tips for making the most of your website.

6 Get other sites to link to it

Links between websites are a fundamental part of the web. If another website provides something that would be useful to your customers then adding a link is a way for you to add value to the information you are providing on your website. What's even better is if you have other websites linking to yours. This is useful in two ways - it provides other routes for potential customers to find you and Google will rank you more highly if you have lots of incoming links. The reasoning behind this is that if you have lots of sites linking to you then your site must be worth pushing higher up the search results.

But don't get carried away and sign up to all sorts of link exchange schemes - the best links are those that are relevant to your site and don't require a link back. What's more if you have a link from a site which is very low quality this could actually do you harm rather than good. We all get emails asking us to exchange links, don't we? Don't just sign up to everything that comes your way - look carefully at the site in question before agreeing to anything, and if it looks like it's part of a link exchange scheme rather than an individual website owner approaching you personally then steer well clear.

7 Monitor its performance

How do you know how well your website is performing if you don't monitor it? There are several ways in which you can track its performance. Firstly, you need some kind of web statistics, giving you information about visits to your site. Your web hosting package should provide some kind of statistics as standard (if it doesn't it might be time to find a new host), but even better than that is Google Analytics. This is a free web stats service that Google offers. All you need to do is set up an account with Google and paste a bit of code onto every page of your website (your friendly web designer can help you with that). Once this is in place Google will be able to give you all sorts of interesting figures about visitors to your website.

It's not just about how many people visit your site, it's about what they do once they're on your site. You want to know how many enquiries you get through your website and how many of them buy from you. Here are a few ideas about how you can keep track of that:

• Set up some goals in your Google Analytics account - enquiries through your enquiry form (you've got one of those, right?), purchases if you've got a webshop.
• Keep a note of how many enquiries you get through your website - if you don't know (they may have picked up the phone or just sent an email) try to remember to ask and keep a note of it.
• Keep a record of how many of those enquirers turn into customers

8 Fix the bits that aren't working

So, now you're tracking your site's performance you should begin to get a picture of problem areas on the site. Goal funnels are great for this. If you've got a shopping cart system, you set up a goal funnel showing the different stages from when someone puts something in their shopping basket to when they have completed the purchase - check what Google tells you about the funnel regularly to see if you get customers regularly leaving the process at a specific point. If you do there could be a problem with the site - is there something that is confusing your customers? Check it out and do what you can to fix it. Remember, something that seems obvious to you isn't necessarily so clear to your potential customers.

9 Get a Facebook Page

A Facebook Page is a great way to promote your business. Your page is separate to your personal profile, allows you to post information about what you're up to and other relevant info and attracts followers who 'Like' the page. And what's more it's completely free. It can be a very affective way for spreading news about your business and to promote special offers etc. Here's how it works:

1. You set up a Facebook page and enter your business details, logo etc.
2. You suggest the page to your Facebook friends and they can choose to follow it by pressing the 'Like' button.
3. Then every time you post something new on your wall your followers will see it in their News Feed.
4. And what's more if your follower comments on your post or says they like it, all their friends will see it as well - spreading the word even further.

So, if you post regular updates on your Facebook page and include a link through to the relevant section of your website, you can use the page to drive traffic to your site.

You can see our own Facebook page here: Webfooted Designs on Facebook.

10 Include useful information

Your website includes details about your business - who you are, what you do/sell, how it benefits your customers. But have you considered including some articles giving useful information related to what you do? How-to guides, top tips, frequently asked questions etc. The sort of thing that could answer some of the questions that people interested in your type of service/product might have.

Why would you want to do this? Well, it will work for you in several ways:

1. You will be demonstrating your expertise, which helps convince potential customers that you're the company/person to go with - after all you really do sound like you know what your doing.
2. Articles are a brilliant opportunity to include those all-important keywords (see Tip 3). Just think about it - an article on a particular subject will naturally be full of keywords. This is fantastic for the search engines.
3. By adding articles to your site regularly you'll be keeping the site up-to-date (see Tip 5). The articles will add new pages to the site for Google to come back and index.

Time to recommend using a blog again. If you're going to be adding new articles to your site on a regular basis, you're going to need a way to organise them - a blog provides an excellent way to do this, so our advice is to use this as a tool to save you time.

There we go, our Top 10 tips for making the most of your website. Has it given you some ideas on how you can do more with your own site? We hope you've found them useful.