Top Five Website Mistakes that Online Entrepreneurs Make

The Internet has changed the world as we know it. Everyone who is anyone knows that today’s most successful businesses work hard to establish and maintain an online presence. There is no doubt about it – there is money to be made on the World Wide Web. The problem is that many online entrepreneurs make five deadly website mistakes that can cost their online businesses serious profits in the long run. If you don’t want to fall for the common pitfalls of running a website, keep the following advice in mind.

Top Website Mistake #1: Ignoring the Value of Organic Traffic

There are two main ways you can drive traffic to your website. One way is to pay for each click to your site using a pay-per-click service like Google Adwords. The problem is that paying for each website visitor your site receives can add up to some serious dollars. The alternative is to Search Engine Optimize your site so that it is ranked in the top of the searches. Being ranked in the top of the search engines drives free organic traffic to the pages of your site. There’s no doubt about it, one of the biggest SEO mistakes that website owners make is ignoring the value of SEO and the organic website traffic that comes with it. If you don’t want to waste hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars a month, you need to make sure your site is properly optimized for top search engine rankings.

Top Website Mistake #2: Too Much Website Clutter

The aesthetics of a site are very important to the image the site portrays. If you have too many banner ads and other flash messages plastered across your site, your visitors are likely going to be overwhelmed. Instead of sending the right message or making a sale, chances are your visitors are going to become frustrated and leave before they even have a chance to see what it is your site is really offering. If you want to avoid this website mistake, make sure your site is clean, effective and easy to navigate.

Top Website Mistake #3: Pages that Are Too Long

Plenty of research has been done on what website visitors like and what they don’t like. One of the biggest website mistakes that site owners make is thinking that “bigger is better” in terms of content. The truth is that website visitors prefer to read shorter website pages. If your message is long or you have a large number of products you are selling, break the site down into smaller pages with less text and fewer images. A long page is likely to lose your visitor’s attention (thereby losing sales and profit).

Top Website Mistake #4: Not Researching Your Hosting Company

Your web host plays a crucial role in the success of your business. If the company you decide to work with isn’t reliable and their servers are constantly going down, it means your website will constantly be going down as well. Whenever your site is down the website downtime equates to lost profits. Make sure you research a web host before you invest time and money into getting your site set up and running on their servers. Look for sites that offer 99.9 percent uptime and other useful tools such as SEO features and traffic reports and analysis.

Top Website Mistake #5: Not Using a Website Monitoring Service

If you aren’t using a website monitoring service then you really don’t know how much downtime your website is experiencing. Website downtime equates to lost profits. If the downtime your site is experiencing is significant enough, it will not only cut into the profits that your site is generating but can also have a negative impact on the image of your company. After all, who wants to do business with a site that isn’t available when you visit it? One of the biggest website mistakes a site owner can make is not keeping an eye on the website’s downtime or performance issues. The best way to avoid this mistake is to utilize the services of a reputable website monitoring service. A website monitoring service can immediately alert you if your site goes down and can notify you of slowdowns and other performance issues your website may be having.