There are some common but fatal mistakes that new website owners make all the time that doom them to eternal failure. These mistakes mean that no matter how hard they work on their websites, online businesses success will always be elusive. Even if they do all the other stuff perfectly, like getting the ideal web hosting plan.
a) Ignoring SEO
Over 80 per cent of the traffic most websites receive still comes directly from search results. It should therefore be pretty obvious that no website owner can afford to ignore optimizing their sites for search engines. Yet websites are still being launched every day where the owners have no idea how to optimize their sites so that prospects can find them more easily via leading search engines. It means that the person behind the website is paying no attention to the largest single source of hot qualified prospects for their new business and website. Most do not even bother to start with simple things like a simple research of the most popular keywords their prospects would use on search engines to find them and incorporating those keywords into their domain name where possible. Good SEO has the potential of giving any website huge results and exploding traffic to the point where your web hosting plan may suddenly become obsolete because of too much traffic.
b) Failing to harvest email addresses from their website traffic
Webmasters usually work very hard to generate traffic to their websites. Study after study has proved again and again that it takes several visits to a website before a prospect is ready to buy. Which means that if you do not have a system in place to harvest email addresses of visitors to your site then you have no way of keeping in touch with them so that when they are ready to purchase you are the first to come to mind? This is nothing short of leaving money on the table. Now why would anybody want all that work of getting visitors to their site to go to waste by not engaging in permission-based email marketing? This is a costly mistake that not only costs many new websites a small fortune in lost revenue but dramatically reduces their chances of ever making their sites financially viable and getting out of the situation where they have to keep digging into their pockets to finance their web hosting years after launching.
c) Having websites that are NOT mobile friendly
There has been a colossal growth in recent years of the number of people accessing the World Wide Web using mobile devices. In fact this figure of mobile users is set too surpass those who access the web through traditional means like Personal Computers by a huge margin in the next few years. Still many websites are NOT mobile friendly and cannot be accessed by mobile devices without the site being distorted. This is a glowingly common gaffe by many owners of new websites even as many web hosting plans are paying increasing attention to mobile traffic these days.
d) Failing to update their sites regularly
There are many good reasons to keep your website updated regularly. It gives your regular visitors a reason to come back again and again. It is also extremely important for SEO reasons. Sites that are regularly updated tend to rank better with search engines and therefore receive much more valuable traffic directly from search results. Why then would any webmaster want to make the mistake of failing to have a system in place that ensures their site is regularly updated?
e) Emphasizing web design over online marketing
Most folks believe that as long as their websites are very attractively designed they will be successful and will attract enough visitors and prospects who can then be turned into paying customers. This is NOT true and emphasizing web design (as important as it is) over the marketing of your site is a big mistake. That is why you see sites that are so “heavily” designed that they take way too long to load. This has a negative direct impact over visitors to the site who are bound to be impatient and will therefore seek information elsewhere. Also, search engines greatly emphasize user friendly issues like how fast your site loads when ranking sites in search results.
f) Failing to research on the competition
There is plenty that a new website can learn from scouting the competition. Indeed all the information you gather from such research will always be invaluable and extremely useful. Yet many owners of new websites have no idea what the competition are doing and more importantly why they are successful.
Conclusion
Avoiding these 6 common mistakes can make a huge difference to any website and will dramatically increase their chances of success.
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