Content is King! I cannot repeat this enough. Your need the right content presented in the right way, to make prospective clients and customers want to explore your site for the first time, make a purchase, and more importantly come back later for more. My goal with this article is to offer up some advice based on practical experience on how to give 'em what they want.

So what is the right content? Ideally this material should explain and express your main message right up front. The material that you include on your website should:

- Take into consideration the way people absorb information. - Make it easy for visitors to find out who you are and what you are offering. - Be friendly and informal, concise in length, and have clear organization. - Help develop the critical one-to-one relationship with customers and clients.

Feed Them What They're Hungry For

Half the battle with developing content for a business site is identifying what online shoppers want and determining the best way for providing it. Studies show people "read" web pages far differently than they do traditional print. Instead of reading in the traditional method they instead browse, or flip through the pages by clicking on the links until they find what they want. Since people do not take a lot of time on any one page the best rule is to keep it simple.

People who are searching on the Web for their next purchase are often in a state of hurried distraction. They are not in the mood to read a dozen pages of beautifully written prose describing your life story, why you got started, or who the hero is that motivated you to come out your doldrums in the first place. What a shopper is likely thinking is this:

"I really do not have the time to read all of this. I am on my lunch break. I have to be back at my desk in ten minutes and I am not supposed to be surfing the Web anyway."

"Why is this page taking so long to load?! I do not have time to wait on this. I think I'll back out and click on that other link I saw."

Do not make anyone wait to find out who you are and what you do! Remember you have ten seconds or less to answer their primary questions:

- Who are you? - What is your main message? - What do you have to offer me? - Why should I trust you, pay attention to you, explore the rest of your site?...

When it comes to your Web pages, it pays to put the most important elements up front first: Who you are, what you are offering, how you are different, and how much it costs, and how you can be contacted. Do not even try to fit every item in your inventory on the first page of your site. Even if you could you probably would not want to. Not only does it cause the page to load slower, it also looks cluttered making things harder to find. As I mentioned in my previous article the idea is to keep it simple. If it is at all possible work at designing you Web pages to place everything "above the fold" even if you have to break one big page into several smaller pages. Take my word on this when I say it works. More smaller pages are better not just for customer usability but also for ranking better in the search engines. I promise to cover more on this topic later in another article.

Make Them Want To Click

Make the links easy to read and in an obvious location. Placing a row of links across the top of your home page, each pointing to an important part of your site is a great idea. I also put the same links using slightly different descriptive words on the left side of my pages as well. One site that does this very well is EverydayHealthMatters.com. They have seamlessly incorporated all the critical page elements in a fast loading, visually appealing, easy to navigate format. Check them out to get some idea of what I am talking about.

One other advantage of placing your sites main topics near the top of the page in a series of links is it improves your chances of being better ranked on the search engines. The more of your key words you can work into these links the better your results may be.

The last thing I want to discuss is determining whether to make your site searchable. A search box is a great way to include content on a Web page. A search box is a simple text entry field that allows a visitor to enter a word or phrase, clicking "Go" and a script checks the index of your sites content for any files that contain the terms. The script then displays the results in the browser window.

At what point do you make your site searchable? It does not make sense if your site has only ten pages of content. Add search only if you have enough content or items to warrant searching. My personal measuring stick is when I have more than one hundred items to manage. It is really up to you and what you think you can handle. Since I routinely work on 5 - 10 sites my time is limited. If you are going to confine your efforts to one site then perhaps you can manage several hundred items. Keep in mind that the search function usually requires someone with knowledge of computer programming, as well as someone to compile an index of the documents on a website so a script can search can perform.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of good content. Just remember to offer it to your visitors in manageable bites they can swallow and digest quickly. Do this consistently and your chances of online success will greatly increase. Chuck Lunsford is a moderately successful Internet Marketing practitioner with 10-plus years of do it yourself website design software experience. Visit JustGoDoItYourself.com and learn to do just about any diy home repair and improvement projects. For a private consult contact Chuck at 239-340-2297