Before you begin planning a strong online presence with your own website, make sure to understand how you define the success of your business. Goal setting is the absolute first step towards achieving business success.

Here are some goals you might have for you website:

« Provide information

Providing your current or potential customers with valid info is an important factor which acts as a catalyst in converting visitors to customers and also retaining existing customers. If your customers or potential customers are asking for your website and you don't have one, then it is a serious situation that will effect the branding of your company. You first goal in a situation like this will be to create a website that represents your brand in the right manner and increases your brand value. Your primary objective should ideally be to tell your existing or prospective customers about your site through mailers, adds or search engines. A site to meet this goal could be a simple site with information on your business, what makes you different from your competition your product gallery and contact details.

« Generate new leads

If this is your goal, your website will be part of your advertising strategy. You will want to provide information, but also solicit responses. Search engine placement will be more important and you will need to incorporate search engine optimization concepts into your design content architecture and site implementation. Search engine optimization means designing your site in such a way that you come up higher on search engine search results. Search engine placement is a long term goal and requires commitment to building content (text that people want to read) and quality links to your site. Success would be the acquisition of new leads or customers through the website.

« Converting Visitors to Customers

If this is your goal, then you need to think beyond just generating traffic. What if your website receives millions of visitors a day and hardly anyone buys?. It is really important factor to understand what the client is looking for and ensure that he gets it when he visits your website. Your search engine ranking for a keyword could be adversely affected for a particular keyword if you have a lot of visitors visiting your website and closing the browser after spending less then 4 seconds on your website. Research is clear that the user experience is the most important factor in determining your web success. Understand user behavior trends on your website and fine tuning the site accordingly will help converting Visitors to er testing is the key to improving the user experience. We can help.

« Sell products Online

If you want to open an online store, there are several things to think about. The first is if your product is suited to selling online. Products that are usually impulse buys (like tabloids at the supermarket) or don't ship well (like fresh produce) obviously wouldn't do well online. Consumer items like books and consumer electronics are highly saturated markets that would be hard to break into. Since the Internet makes it very easy to compare prices, selling mainstream retail items may be hard. Selling unique items like handcrafted gifts or self-published books would be a better choice.

Search engine placement will also be important because most of your customers will find you this way. Since search engines search for words, it is important to provide content for them to find. For instance, if you sell gadgets, write up some information about them. Tell the customer why your gadgets are the best, but also tell them how to use their gadgets...you get the idea. This may sound silly...why would they want to know about gadgets history? But there is always some information your customers might want to know. For instance, Aurora Silk sells natural dyes, so we put up tutorials on how to use natural dyes, which natural dyes give which colors, and frequently asked questions about natural dyes. This provides value to the customer who may not know how to use the natural dyes or may want to know more about them. Additionally, if someone finds the tutorials through the search engine, they may want to buy natural dyes as well, and then we get a new customer. And—here's the strategic part—to search engines, the site looks like it is all about natural dyes, so when someone searches for “natural dyes” it is in the top 10 results.

Success for an e-commerce site is when you are getting orders and making money. This can take a while because it is dependant on search engines which are slow in adding new pages and updating them. You won't get rich quick—but if you are patient and think of it in terms of a long-term investment, you will succeed. There are many people selling online, and the money spent online is always increasing.

« Recruitment Support

Hiring the best employee means a whole lot more than marking off items on a checklist. It takes planning, prioritizing and the ability to spot potential. It is important that you hire the right candidate for the right job keeping in mind factors like Competition, Training cost, Customer retention which could choke your business. Its important that a potential candidate is able to find your Job available and needs to be convinced of the fact that your company is the one that he/she was searching for, Your web site helps you do exactly the same it not only helps you find customers but also helps communicate with your potential staff. A potential candidate will be able to find a lot of info about your company through your website including but not just limited to your products, size of the firm, work culture, job benifits... just to name a few. It is very important that the candidate visits your website gets sold there and then attend the interview.

« Provide information to the public

Many people like to start sites about their hobbies or a public interest issue. Sometimes these can provide revenue through selling advertising space or through affiliate links. Affiliates are sites that have links to other sites that sell products, and the original site gets a percentage of each sale resulting from following the link. This is a long-term project and search engine placement is crucial. Success would be having lots of traffic and getting good conversion rates on affiliate links if you have them.