One of the biggest mistakes people make when creating an online business is jumping right to their website and haphazardly created pages, posts, or what have you. It’s really important to make a plan about the organization of your website. One great way to do that is to set up a framework of sorts. This is simply a template of common objects that should be included on every website. Then, when you are ready to create your website, you automatically create the objects that are contained within your framework.
So let’s start with a very rudimentary framework. Many websites will contain the following as a bare minimum:
- Home Page or Getting Started Page
- About Me or About Us Page
- Privacy Policy
The home page is the gateway into your website so it’s important to really make this shine. Search engines measure how long people stay on a website and if they are exiting from your home page (yes, the do know this) then that is not good at all for your rankings. Google refers to this as your bounce rate and it is an important measurement.
About page (About Me or About Us) is meant to help people reading your site figure out what you or your company’s background is. It really does get read so you want to talk you company/product/service up. Don’t make things up for the sake of filling the page but make it count. If you see that people are exiting from your about page, it is time to rehash it.
If you interact in any way with Google, and if you have a website that is an almost given, you will need to a have a privacy page. It will reflect quite poorly on your rankings if this does not exist. By the way, most people will not read this. I can count with my fingers on just one of my hands the number of times I’ve seen this page appear in my logs and I have a lot of sites. Plus, I would use all of my fingers on that one hand. So you get the picture. This one is completely for Google. But don’t skip it.
You Will Need To Add More
There’s a pretty good chance that if all you did was create the framework, your bounce rates are going to be extremely high. Besides, without any other pages or posts, you wouldn’t know how to measure those rates because it would be the end of the line for your readers and they would exit those pages anyway. So at some point you’ll need to add more content. And the content is super important because it affects your bounce rates as well. Give them what they want to read and you’ll have a reader for life. This happens often enough and all of a sudden, your site becomes an authority site with the search engines. Once that happens, there’s no turning back!
Take It Up A Notch
I’ve given you a very high level overview of getting your website organized. But now you probably want to get going on it and actually do it. You could certainly try it on your own but why not use something that has been already created for you. Plus, this will give you a more in depth analysis of what to actually include on those pages. Click on the button below to read all about it!
