Can we ask you a personal question?

Is your site sexy?  Does it get your Audience fired up and paying attention?

If not, then you’re about to learn some dirty little secrets to make this happen…

Consider these some secret elements if you want to do website design the right way.

Secret #1: Reveal Your True Intentions

The #1 secret to having a sexy site (a site that attracts your Audience) is clarity.  If a Visitor to a site can tell what the site is about immediately then the site is ‘sexy’.  You’ve aroused their curiosity.  How naughty…

Let’s jump inside the head of the Visitor…  

They’re surfing the net, acquiring info.  They also have digital A.D.D., so if they don’t immediately like what they see they’re going to look somewhere else.  

It’s as if they’re driving down the freeway at 65 miles an hour and they glance at a billboard.  If they billboard doesn’t instantly tell them how the Brand on the billboard can help them they’ll simply shift their eyes back to the road.

Your site, especially your Homepage, should follow this billboard principle…  

Do Visitors instantly ‘get’ what your site is all about?  

Remember that people are selfish and want to know ‘what’s in it for me?’.  If your site can’t quickly communicate who you are (what type of Brand), what Treasures (products or services) you’ve got and what their next step is (such as to sign up for your Free Treat so you can correspond with them) then the Visitor will bail and go somewhere else.

Secret #2: Make ‘Em Stick Around

A great site will retain it’s Visitors.  

Google has a metric they use to measure sites called Bounce Rate.  

A site with a low bounce rate means Visitors to a particular site like what they see and stick around.  They don’t ‘bounce’ and go somewhere else.  That means you want to have a low bounce rate.  You can do this by creating a cool place full of helpful info that hooks your Audience into wanting to stick around.

A second metric Google uses is ‘average time on site’.  Google figures the longer someone stays on your site, the higher the quality must be.

Let me give you an example…

Imagine you google ‘dog training’ and you click on a search result.  Then you’re taken to a site that says ‘Server Not Found’.  In other words, the site is basically blank.  Or you click the dog training site and you find content about time shares in Detroit.  Since this was not the content you were looking for you’d immediately leave.

Therefore a good site is one that delivers value for the intended Audience.  

Its a site that has thought about the Audience Experience and delivers exceptional quality.  This means the site instantly communicates what the Brand is, how it can benefit their Audience and what action site Visitors should do next.

Secret #3: Romance Google

Let’s go a little deeper into Audience Experience and how to romance Google.  Google is looking out for their Audience (all the folks who use Google and trust their search results).  That means when you give your Audience an amazing experience Google rewards you!

There are a few more things, aside from Bounce Rate and Average Time on Site, that please the big G.

These include:

Page Load Time - How long does your Website’s pages take to load?  Large images or a slow server can force the site to load slowly.  The average site Visitor will wait about 3 seconds for a site to load.  

Longer than that they’ll leave.  

Ideally your site should load in less than a second.

Mobile Ready - More than half (if not more) of your Audience will visit your site form their mobile device.  If your site isn’t mobile ready then it will be very hard to view on a phone or tablet.  

If you’ve ever visited a site where a popup shows up and is too big for the screen, making it impossible for you to turn the pop up off and read the site’s content, then you know how annoying non-mobile ready sites can be.

Clear Navigation  - A great site makes it very easy to get around in.  Pages should be clearly labeled and easy to find.

SEO Optimized - You have probably heard the acronym S.E.O. before.  

This stands for Search Engine Optimization.  

What does this mean?  Basically Google is simply a bunch of code Code is made up of words and symbols.  If you don’t embed the words that represent what your content and site are about Google will have no idea.  They’re all-knowing, but not that all-knowing! 

SEO helps Google determine what your site is about so they can send people who are searching for your topics your way.  

SEO works in two primary ways: 

1. Google looks at what words are on your site.  The culmination of words helps them determine what they think your site is about.
2. Google looks at what other sites are linking to your site (these links form other sites are called ‘backlinks’.)  The topics of those sites, and the keywords those sites use to link to yours gives Google more clues to what your site is about.

Links to Social Media Channels - Remember how we said your site should be your Brand’s ‘hub’?  

Like the center of a wheel, your site should have links that act like spokes and reach out to your Social Media Channels.  This makes it easy for your Audience to follow you on their favorite Channels.  It also creates backlinks to those channels so they have a higher likelihood of showing in search results.

Consistently Published Content - When you are consistently posting fresh content you’re telling Google you are putting energy into your site.  Google doesn’t want to recommend its Audience visit a site that hasn’t had fresh content added for 7 years.  They want to know your site is important to you and kept up!

Enough Content - Your site doesn’t need to have a million pages on it like Huffington Post.  But is does need a handful or so pages that will give Google a decent idea of what your site is about.  

They need pages that have consistent data on them.  In other words, if you only have one page on your site with a blog post about ‘herding cats’ then Google would assume your site is about cats.  But you might add other posts about goldfish, dogs and gerbils.  Now Google would assume you have pet centered blog.  

The more info you give Google, the more they can help you!   

What Makes A Site ‘Unsexy’?  

Any site that gives a crummy Audience Experience.  These sites are ugly to look at, unclear as to what the Brand does, they load slow and offer outdated or improper information.  

If you want to have a world-class site you simply need to create an exceptional experience for your Audience.  Doing this will put you in the top 5% of your niche.  Most business owners put very little thought into their sites, but as a Visionary you now know better!