You need your Web site to attract prospects, generate qualified leads and promote your brand. That means you must constantly tune your Web site to make sure it’s hitting all the right notes with customers and prospects. Here’s a quick checklist of five things you should have on your Web site, and five to avoid.

 What to Include on your Web Site

1.  Detailed Product & Service Information - Your customers and prospects want to see up-to-date and comprehensive products and services information. That’s why they are visiting your site: to find out if you can meet their needs.
2. Offers and Landing Pages - Your Web site visitors crave information that will help them do their jobs. Therefore, your job is to offer white papers, articles, Webinar invitations and other valuable content. Sprinkle offers on relevant pages throughout your Web site and send prospects to specific landing pages that describe the offer in more detail and capture prospect information so you can create a lead for your sales team.
3. Basic Search Engine Optimization - Almost every site can benefit from basic SEO techniques to help drive more qualified traffic from search engines for specific keyword searches. Make use of page titles, description meta tags, keywords in page copy, site maps and simple HTML pages to make your Web pages more search engine friendly.
4. Consistent Page Design - Keep your visitors on track and avoid confusion by adhering to a consistent page design. Navigation menus should appear in the same place on every page, usually across the top or down the side, or both if your site has multiple levels of hierarchy. A popular and user friendly design is to use a wider column for the main content and a narrower column for secondary or related content. Make sure your headings, font size and typeface are consistent too.
5. Contact Features - Because one of the primary goals of your Web site is to capture lead information, you must make it easy for prospects to contact you. A good idea is to have a phone number and email address on every page, plus a link in the navigation menu to a Contact Us page. Landing pages should include forms as well as phone numbers and e-mail addresses to give users multiple options for contacting you. 

What to Avoid on your Web Site

1. Flash Intro Pages - Most companies have realized that a Flash intro page is at odds with goals of your Web site, but if you haven’t gotten the memo yet, here it is: don’t use a Flash Intro page to your Web site. Visitors find them annoying, even if you have a ‘skip intro’ button, and will often abandon your site. Search engines ignore them, so intro pages don’t help your SEO efforts. When visitors land on your home page, they want to find a clear path to useful content. Give it to them straight.
2. JavaScript Navigation - Search engines have trouble following navigation programmed in JavaScript. It’s better to have straight HTML navigation links. If you do have JavaScript navigation and can’t devote the time and resources to rebuilding it, repeat your navigation as HTML links in the footer or on the side so that search engines can find and index your pages more easily.
3. Lengthy Registration Forms - It’s important to have forms on your landing pages to capture prospect contact information, but long forms with many required fields will lead to high drop off rates and fewer leads. Ask only for the minimal amount of information on a form that will enable you to contact a prospect again and begin a sales dialog. Often it’s enough to capture name, company, e-mail and phone number. You can flesh out the prospect’s record as you begin to communicate back and forth.
4. Out of Date Content - Companies that include old content or have not freshened up content can damage their reputation and raise doubts among their customers and prospects. Make sure product pages are current. If you post press releases, be sure to have some up-to-date news. Your most recent e-newsletter shouldn’t be a year old. You need to keep producing content and news to give the impression that your company is vibrant and growing and help with your search engine rankings.
5. Bad Writing - Confusing, dense and error-prone writing can completely turn off customers and prospects. Think about your audience’s point of view. Write in a way that shows “what’s in it for them.” Avoid using jargon. Be straightforward and conversational. If possible, use professional writers or editors to write or review copy to make sure it flows well, is understandable, and is free of grammar and usage mistakes.