As fellow entrepreneurs, Linda and I are often meeting with friends and colleagues looking for the best way to get started with a new website. And the great news is, today’s tools for building websites are remarkable equalizers. Here are a few of our favorite tips and tools, written with entrepreneurs in mind. If you’re a large corporation in a competitive space, your “to-do” list will be more complex. However, many general principles apply across sites of all sizes.

Be Findable
The easiest way to be findable as an entrepreneur on a limited budget is to use tools designed from the ground up to be easily read by search engines such as Google. WordPress is a great choice here. You can start with a freebie version and customize things along the way as you have budget and time. Yes, there are other similar tools – although comparing them is a job for another article. Trust us when we say that few platforms have a vibrant community of coders and designers that support them like WordPress, so among other advantages, it’s simply going to be easier to find people to help you when you adopt a mainstream platform.

Keep Your Design Simple
Because we’re a little biased toward making sure you’re findable, we’re going to encourage you to focus on content and moving forward with the simplest design possible. Save your energy for the content. Custom design is awesome and great, and we love our design friends and we want you to keep them busy! We also want you to get started as efficiently as possible, to which end you may consider starting with a ready-made WordPress theme. More than a simple template, themes allow you to customize many aspects of a site formerly left to true coders.

Did We Mention Content?
Being findable is all about having content on your site that your target audience will be searching for. This requires understanding the language of your target audience, as well as having some volume of content that fits that audience. Building your site in a framework such as WordPress encourages blogging/content generation, and blogging naturally adds a diversity of keywords and keyphrases to your site. Even blogging once a week is enough to make a difference, and as you add new content, you’ll find that your site is found for a wider variety of searches – without having to pay to show up in search. There’s a lot of nuances we’re skipping here, but none of them matter if you’re not generating content in the first place. Writing is your secret weapon. If it’s not your bag, hire a copywriter to interview you and write articles. It’ll be the best investment you’ve ever made.

Include A Call to Action
What’s a call to action, you might ask? Just conjure up an old Billy Mays ad: “Call Now!” “Order in the next 15 minutes, and get a second one a free!” etc. If you’re bothering to attract someone to your site, you need to know what you want them to do when they get there. That’s your call to action. Make it clear. Make it big. Make it bold. Just like Billy.

Measure!
When you’re starting out, it’s tempting to say that you’ll know when this is all working because the phone will ring. While true, that’s a lagging indicator that doesn’t provide sufficient feedback to guide systematic improvements to your site. To gather that data, there are two free tools every site needs: Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. There are others, but if you’re only going to do two, start with these.

In addition to installing those tools (start collecting data now, even if you don’t plan on using it right away) we recommend measuring a couple more things:

• Track phone calls. Eliminate guessing. Know exactly which phone calls came from the web. One of our favorites tools for phone tracking is Mongoose Metrics, which scales nicely from a single phone number designed to track all web leads, to enterprise class solutions with staggering numbers of unique phone numbers and sophisticated tracking that integrates with other systems like Google Analytics and Google AdWords.
• Use contact forms. Avoid using simple email/mailto links like the plague. Use a contact form to collect information – just enough information and no more. In the early days, chances are you would prefer to follow up and ask a few more questions than risk losing the lead because the form scared a prospect away. And if at all possible, make sure the contact form flows automatically into some sort of customer database / CRM tool. With tools like salesforce.com this is cheap and easy even for small organizations. And it’s a lot easier to implement when you’re still small. Do it now.

While this list may not sound very “SEOy”, that’s the ironic thing about how Search Engine Optimization has evolved. It used to be about title tags and such, but these days those tactics are often just the cost of entry. It you want to turn your website into Your Online Sales Engine, you’ll need more than the “traditional” SEO tactics – you’ll eventually need to build a system like the one we’ve outlined here.

Keep us posted on your progress – we can’t wait to hear your results!!

Tags: Entrepreneurship, Google, SEO, WordPress