So you need your site to do lucratively. You need it to score good search returns and change lots of clicks into actual sales. Well, you aren’t alone – not by miles. You’ll be in the same boat as hundreds of millions of competing companies, who all want their sites to perform the same trick. You will be in straight competition with thousands of web sites that supply exactly the same thing as you do. And yet some sites always seem to come out on top. How?

Remember how profitable people are supposed to show a certain number of recognisable behaviours – the actions of success? Your website ought to be doing identical things. Every successful website has a set of behaviours behind it which delineate it from the crowd. If you intend your web site to perform with the rest of them, you need to know how they operate.

A site alone doesn’t mean money

What’s so amazing about your fence wire that would make a web customer take it from you instead of someone else?

The Internet is really very massive – and it’s stuffed, literally bursting, with people and web sites who vend completely the same service as you. If you accept it according to the odds, as a gamble the net is dead and buried. It’s without hope. There is no way you can create a website for selling a product and just expect trade to come after you.

No – the premier and most important attribute of profitable web sites is this: do everything it takes to get your market through your portal. The best techniques at the moment include geography specific marketing, which laughs at the world wide picture and concentrates on sourcing trade in your hood; and the long tail key phrase, which disregards general searches for your product and focuses on absolutes instead. Both, by whittling your trade down to well honed platforms, guarantee that you’ll attract a steady amount of spending traffic through your site.

Look like what you are

Vending plumbing apprenticeships? Ensure you look right, or you’ll die quickly.

Every site is constructed of bits and bytes.The code mutates often – and if it does not change in rhythm with current search engine “modes” then your web site is going to fall out of favour. Think of the modes in programming as fashions in dress or haircuts. A mullet gives off one sign; a gingham dress another. A search engine “sees” your site by checking out its bytes first. If the programming “looks” obvious, i.e. looks like what it actually is, then your site performs well in results lists.

The aspect of your site is important too. Customers are wary of websites that don’t load or function as they think they will. Whatever you supply, you need to be certain that your website appears and feels in the same way as all modern web sites: or else no-one will hang around long enough to spend money.

Good current sites

Would you like to observe all this ace technique in real life? Look no further than here.

You can identify the marks of good practice immediately. Smooth design, easy navigation and a superbly defined niche product. Unless you are one of the few multinational mega websites, then your web site has to present and function like this one. It has to be clear, obvious, simple and aimed at the users who are likely to take what it sells.

The first tactic of best performing web site is this: be aware of your limits. The net is not the wide open cornucopia of eager custom we all used to imagine it was. It’s a choked, roiling mess of a global marketplace that doesn’t work at all unless you draw your boundaries and operate within them. Our sample web site has done just that – and it’s reaping huge benefits. You could be, too.