If your business has a good web presence, you'll probably have several pages on your own website, plus pages on other tangent websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and possibly specialized sites for your products, or more. Throughout all of this, you'll have links connecting everything. Here are some important points to keep in mind for best effectiveness:
1) Where is your 'point of action'?
Ultimately, the purpose of all your web activity is to grow your business, and that means conversion - conversion of web users into customers/clients/donors/etc. Somewhere in your company's presence on the web, you'll need a core "point of action" (POA). That's where web users become customers. If your product is a web-based service or digital product that can be delivered through the web, then that POA will be where they register, make payment online, and/or download the product. If your business is about an in-person experience, such as a restaurant, physical retail shop, amusement park, etc. then the POA will be where you give them the final information they need to take action - contact information, maps, ability to make reservations, purchase tickets, etc.
In any case, you need to identify where, online, your POA is or should be. Why not several? For one thing, changes in policy or information can become very error-prone and inefficient when there are several POA's. In addition, your customers need one simple place they know to go, can remember, and can share with others. Instead of recreating POA's everywhere, what you'll want is one POA and many 'tendrils' or 'roots' that exist throughout many places on the web, which all lead back to your POA. This creates many places you can be found, searched, or stumbled upon, but which all bring them back to the POA. Lastly, every backlink you can get to your POA page increases the ranking of that page in search engines, so you want to focus the structure. I like to think of this as your 'marketing tree'. You want your tree to grow as many roots as possible, and go as far as possible, but have one 'trunk'.
The best place for your POA is on your main website, or the main website you've made for a particular product (if you're doing that). First, you need to be able to control the process completely - it's look, functionality, security issues, etc. so you don't want that on a social media site or someplace where you can't access the code (even if you yourself aren't going to be coding). Secondly, the web address of your POA needs to be SIMPLE and easily memorable.
2) What kind of 'flow' are you creating?
With your POA in place and all your roots branching out to other sites, you need to think about how you're linking them all together. The 'flow' of your tree is the general direction most users will take if they land on any given site or page and follow the links. Certainly, the overall flow of your tree should be from the roots to the trunk, or, from all of the sites on which you have a presence (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, various blogs, sister sites, etc) toward your main homepage - specifically, your POA.
This doesn't mean no links at all can go the other way, but you'll need to consider this: what is the purpose your presence on any given site? In some cases, you'll want to use a site to build a community and keep in touch with your customer base. In other cases, you may only be present on that site so that you're in one more spot where you can be found in a search or to generate more links back home. This will depend greatly on the kind of business you have, the kind of product you have, and whether you have other means of customer relations. If there is some special functionality to a tangent site which you need and use for your customer relations, lead development, or outreach, then you'll want to encourage someone on your main website to go to that tangent site and 'sign up' or 'follow' you. But if you're not centrally using the functions of that site but only there for another point of contact, then you'll probably just want links going from it to your homepage/POA, and not going the other way.
3) What is the user experience?
Think about what experience a completely unfamiliar person would have on coming across any given page your company is on. Why are they likely there? What are they interested in? What will they likely click on next? If you consider someone who came directly to your homepage first, ask yourself if looking at that page, would they be drawn away from your POA or toward it? If they came upon some tangent site first, would they be encouraged to come to your POA?
Also, think in terms of 'number of clicks' to the POA. Try to streamline the experience from 'hook' to 'action' - or, from the thing that drew their interest, to the action you'd like to ask them to take. The fewer the clicks between these two, the easier it will be for the person to convert into a customer. Note, you'll have to balance this concern against #1 in which we explained that several POA's all over the place can be counterproductive. If you put a POA everywhere, right next to the 'hook' then you've reduced the number of clicks to zero. But this can be handled with things like cells which reference one central code, or having the first step of the process in multiple places, but when it moves to the second step it all comes back to one. Elegance and efficiency are important, but second to what gets the sale and is easiest for the potential customer.
You should also consider whether you are creating an ethical user experience. If your links are deceptive, lead places they didn't appear to, try to 'trap' the user into something, etc. then you're more likely to make people angry at you than convert them to a customer. In all business relations, online and off, those who treat others as they wish to be treated are generally more successful in the long run because they will have built a base of people who come to trust and like them, and become advocates.
4) What kind of links do you put, and where?
This is a subtle but important point. There are different kinds of links. Some links change the window someone is currently in (this is usually the default). Other links open a new tab or window. Which you use will depend on whether or not you want the person to be completely taken away from a site, or whether you want the site they were on to remain in their consideration.
Generally speaking, any links leaving your main website (and certainly the POA page on your website, if you must have them) should be the kind that open a new tab/window. Meanwhile, links going to your POA should be the kind that change the current window. You may have a company blog with entries that make reference to other sites maintained by other individuals or companies. These should always be links that open a new tab/window. Incidentally, to make a link do this, go into the code and add target="_blank" just after the last " of the http address and before the closing > symbol. Or, just ask your tech person to 'make it open a new window'.
Hope this has been helpful!
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