When the Internet was fairly new, entrepreneurs would throw up a website that provided some contact info. Then they might add some information about their services, rates, clients, etc. That helped to reduce the number of questions that customers would ask. Instead you could send them to your website. So it was basically an online brochure

Today a website is much more important even for ‘offline’ businesses (typical brick and mortar businesses). Customers search for local businesses using Google and other search engines, much more than yellow pages these days. Will they find you?

Google and other search engines use the content on your website to determine when to send people to you. When people tell me ‘I want to be on the first page of Google’, I often ask them ‘Ok, but for what keyword phrases?’ You need to spend some time discovering the keywords that people are typing in to search for your business. And then put these keywords in your content which doesn’t always happen naturally.

For example if you are in the document serving business, do people type in ‘process servers’, ‘document server’, ”affidavit or ‘I need a restraining order’?

Getting found on Google is much more than just putting up a website and submitting your site to them. Google uses a series of criteria to determine how to rank your site. It also uses ‘backlinks’ which are links that other sites have that point to your site. These can be considered ‘votes’ for your site, and the more popular the other site is that links to you, the better you will be ranked as well. You can get links yourself by posting articles that contain your link to EzineArticles.com for example.

To set up an inexpensive website that you can easily maintain yourself, as well as building email lists, shopping carts or membership sites, please see our internet consulting services.

When someone signs up for a free or paid membership you usually send them to a thank you page. When someone buys one of your products this is known as a conversion. You should create a unique thank you page for each membership level, product, etc. When you use a membership system based on Wordpress, which is known as a content management system (CMS) they usually use templates to create a web page. This means the header, footer and sidebar are often shared across the pages. This makes it easy to edit. You make a change in the footer file and it affects all pages instantly.

The problem is when you want to put a script for tracking conversions on a single page because the code usually needs to go in the footer near the closing ‘body’ tag. So you can use this script to check which page you’re on, and only include the script for specific pages. Here’s what I did for one of my sites:

<?php
if (is_page(‘thanks-for-joining’))
{ include (“conversion_free.html”); }
elseif (is_page(‘thanks-for-joining-silver-level-membership’))
{ include (“conversion_silver.html”); }
?>

You also have to create an html file and include the conversion script from that Google provides. Create one file for each conversion page and ftp it to the directory where your theme is. The ‘include’ statement will look in the current theme’s directory for the html files.

Good luck! Let me know if you have any questions!

To set up an inexpensive website that you can easily maintain yourself, as well as building email lists, shopping carts or membership sites, please see our internet consulting services.