The 7 Most Important Features of a Modern Website

For most small businesses the purpose of their website is to sell their goods and services. Unlike big businesses, small businesses cannot usually afford the luxury of having a website purely for intangibles like brand awareness. A modern website for small business needs to earn its keep.
With that in mind, here are the 7 most important features of a modern website for small business:

1. Function before Beauty

Many small business websites we see get this one wrong. They focus on design and graphics, often at the expense of functionality. A modern website needs to attract visitors (traffic) to be functional. Without this simple premise, any website (even a good looking one) is nothing more than useless Internet clutter that only ever gets visited by the owner and his or her mother! When it comes to effective modern website design, always put function before beauty.

2. Quality Content

If the content of your website is good, the search engines will like it, your visitors will like it, and those same visitors will tell others about it. If your content is poor, your website will do nothing to enhance your business and will be nothing more than a liability. If you want a modern website, make sure your web content is of very high quality – something that is of value in its own right.

3. On-Page Search Engine Optimisation

It never ceases to amaze me just how many small business websites have had little or no on-page search engine optimisation (SEO) work done whatsoever. On-page SEO is about making sure that the content of your website is structured effectively and that it contains all the right words in all the right places. To do this requires meticulous keyword research (for which there is no substitute). It also astounds me that many ‘web designers’ often admit to small business owners that they know little or nothing about SEO. And still more ‘web designers’ charge extra for SEO services. That is like buying a new car, only to be told the engine is an optional extra! So do yourself a huge favour – if your web designer doesn’t understand the very latest SEO techniques, get a different web designer and a modern website!

4. Off-Page Search Engine Optimisation

Off-page search engine optimisation is about building inbound links to your website. It is without doubt, one of the single most important factors in your website’s success. Off-page SEO is something that should be done in part by your web designer and partly by you on an ongoing basis. If you don’t make the time for off-page SEO your website is a wasted resource. If you want a modern website, off-page SEO is a must.

5. Regular Fresh Content

Google in particluar adores fresh, new, original, high quality web content. It rewards those who provide it with higher search engine listings. One of the easiest ways to satisfy Google’s thirst for fresh content is by blogging. So if your business doesn’t have a blog, consider getting one. All modern websites have fresh, new, original, high quality web content added regularly.

6. Call(s) to Action

If your sales team didn’t ‘ask for the order’ you would soon pick them up on it. A modern website should be the same. It should have at least one call-to-action on every page. This is a really simple one and something that is missed by countless small business websites.

7. Things to Avoid

It is not the mid-90s anymore. Web design and search engines have moved on a lot since then. Now there are several things that should be avoided at all costs in a modern website for a small business:

• Flash – Search engines cannot read Flash files and smartphones usually cannot display them – modern websites don’t use Flash.
  Text only in images – The worst website I ever saw had made all the text on every page into images. Search engines cannot ‘see’ images, so to them, every page was blank! In a modern website, text should be text.
• Cloaking – In simple terms, if you show one thing to human visitors and another to search engines, you are cloaking. This will at best damage your search engine listings and at worst get your site banned by the search engines. This one is a no-brainer – it has no place in a modern website, so don’t do it.
• Spamming/Keyword Stuffing – This is where you use an particular word or phrase far more often than you would normally in an attempt to manipulate the search engines. It may have worked back in the 90s, but today the search engines are far too sophisticated to fall for it, so don’t do it.
• Hidden text – There is no question about it; if Google in particular catches you doing this, it will ban your website from it’s search engine results pages – permanently. This is because hidden text is a blatant attempt to manipulate the search engines. Be warned, they can spot hidden text very easily, so don’t do it.

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