Five Lessons Learned from Web Publishing

You probably already have a corporate Web site, but it might betime to do a refresh. Having created many Web sites over the years─some for myself, somefor professional publishing organizations─I thought I would take a few moments and puttogether five important principles that I?ve learned from the school of hardknocks.

1. If you gate yoursite, your traffic will drop.

The New York Times found this out the hard way with its TimesSelect subscription-only service, and had to drop the gate and let everyone in.Today, the name of the game is clicks and eyeballs, and while some people (like The Wall Street Journal) can get away with charging admission, you are better offbeing open and letting the world come browse. Certainly, you still need toprotect client-confidential areas, but if you are trying to put up a site andyou want visitors, take down those gates!

2. Authoritative deep linking is key.

You want content, and lots of it, and links that come onto yoursite and bring visitors directly to your expertise and authoritative knowledge.In the early days of the Web, we had lawsuits to try to stop deep linking (inother words, site A has a link to a specific page deep within site B). Now, itis just the opposite, and the best way to get Google juice is to have lots ofthese deep links coming onto your site.

Encourage this, don’t mess up theselinks with any site redesign, and you will benefit greatly. I have a page ofWeb-conferencing links on strom.com that I have maintained for more than 10years, and it has lots of inbound links and as a result ranks high on Google.

3. Make your home page dynamic, but don?t overload thelinks.

Driving organic search is what everyone is after these days, andsometimes it takes over from putting out a dynamic home page. Resist this, andrealize that your home page still needs to look uncluttered for humans, too. Thereare sites that try to cram as many links as possible on their home pages, andthen have a completely flat site underneath?no sections, no organization, justa mass of content that defies human comprehension, all in the service of theSearch Gods.

Make your home page pleasant, simple, direct─and by all means, changeit often. The search engines will find you, have no fear. But first people haveto find your stuff the old-fashioned way.

4. Newspapers need unique "hyper-local"content for their Web sites.

Newspapers still, for the most part, haven?t figured out the Web.The more successful ones know that they have to offer content that is moreunique than what they offer in print for specific neighborhoods, particulardemographics and particular purposes beyond selling cars and homes. The morehyper-local they become, the better the job they will do at combating theclassified-killers like eBay, Craigslist, and Facebook.

Keep this in mind whendesigning newsworthy sections on your site: Focus on your niche and yourspecific audience, and deliver exactly what they need. Archive all your pressreleases so your customers can find them because they, not the press, are goingto be linking to them and e-mailing them to their friends.

5. The site design should empower, not emasculate yourreaders, by putting internal search as a priority.

How often do you hear your Web editors say, I can?t find anythingon my site? Well, if they work there and live with their content and they can?tfind it, how do they expect outsiders to? I have been involved in plenty of Website redesigns where making improvements to the search box was last or nearly laston the priority scale. Search comes first. Don?t expect Google to index yoursite; spend the dough and make search the best it can possibly be. If yourvisitors can?t find it, they won?t stick around.

These are all simple concepts to grasp, although not so simple toimplement. But they will improve your Web sites dramatically, and I guaranteethat they will bring you lots more traffic in the coming months.