There are tons of information in Internet. Why visitors would like to go to other website and not stay on your website? There are many reasons in behind. This article will show you five common mistakes that make visitor leave your website and go to others.

1. Not state clear what product/service provided in your website.

If your website is an online shop, state clear what types of product you sell. If your shop sell different types of product, make a clear and easy-navigation menu for your visitor.

Visitors are busy and always have other choices to go. If they don’t know what is it about, they will leave immediately and will not come back. So, state clear the products you sell in the home page or landing page.

2. Products overload
Put too much products on the web page. Visitors are busy and they don’t filter your information one by one, step by step. Visitors always look for instant information that match their query.

Don’t put everything on one single page. You should separate out the most important product from others. Only put the most important products on your homepage and provides some links to other related products.

3. Complicated ordering process
If you add one more step into the ordering process, visitors have one more chance to quit the ordering process. Visitors won’t spend time to fill in information and make many click to buy something.

You should keep the ordering process as simple as possible.
This is a good reference.
- Check out page,
- Select Payment Method,
- Fillin Shipping info,
- Confirm page

4. Not update
Only latest and update information is valuable. If visitors find your information is out-dated and they will leave. Ensure the information is update and no broken links. You should also check the date of your copyright statement. Is it still 2008 or 2009? Have you post the latest news of your company?

5. No contact information
In some case, visitors likes to have direct communication with a human being. If they cannot find a way to talk with you, they may feel worry. Provides email address and phone number can build customer’s confidence. If they have any question, they can find you via email or phone.

1. Use web safe colors, so that your design is shown as you want
You can check the web safe color here
http://www.permadi.com/tutorial/websafecolor/

2. Test your web pages in different types and versions of web browsers
You may test it with
http://browsershots.org/

3. Keep graphics files small.
This is a tools for image optimization
http://www.sitereportcard.com/imagereducer.php

4. Ensure your website display well with different types of screen resolution
http://www.yournew.com/resolution_test.cfm

5. Make your webpage load faster. Don’t put too much graphics or other objects
You can test your webpage speed here
http://www.selfseo.com/website_speed_test.php

Domain name is one of the key for the success of online business. It is the name that others can find/refer to in Internet. You should pick a domain name that can match your business. There are many factors you should consider before registering a domain name.

1. Extension
The domain name extension gives visitors an impression where you are and where is your target market. If you pick a .co.uk or .com.au, you shows visitors that you are come from UK or Australia. If the visitor come from Canada, they may skip your website as you are far away from them.

You should first think about where is your target customer. If you only target on your local market, you should pick a country-specific domain name. This can definitely help your online business for local market. However, if your customers come from worldwide, you should pick a .com domain name.

2. Add Keywords
Adding keywords into your domain name may help search engines in ranking your website. The easiest way is to combine one descriptive word with a keyword to form your domain name.

For example, if you’re running a online business for selling second hand mobile phone. You may choose cheapmobile, cheapphone, secondhandmobile for your domain.

3. Avoid Long Name
Short names is always better. It is hard to find a good short domain name. As mentioned above, you may consider to combine two or three words to form your domain name. Domain name with two words is always easier to remember.

4. Double Check
Try to search your domain name with Google in different combinations or variations. If you combines two words to form your domain name, try to search if there is a domain with a hyphen in between two words. For example, if you want cheapphone, you should also search if some already register cheap-phone.

Another issue you should consider is the plural form. You should if someone already got the plural forms of your domain. If you find something similar, you should think again whether you go ahead with your choice or you pick another domain name instead.
If you go ahead with your choice, your customers may get confused with those variations.

5. Registration
Find a famous domain name registration company with good reputation. Most web hosting companies also help their client to register the domain name. You may ask them to help for registration. You should pay attention on the following two issues.

- Some domain name registration company is the agent only and they just get the customer and then pass the information to another company to process. They only take the margin and provide nothing to you.

- Check and ensure the registration is under your name or your company name. Some agent or web hosting company register the domain under their names. You may get trouble if you want to take back your ownership.

1. Choose the Right Blog Software
WordPress, Blogger, or MovableType are the three most common choice for the bloggers. The installation process is simple and they provides an easy-to-use interface to manage your blog. You can setup different sub-pages, categories, feeds, user in your blog. Most important, there are different types of plugins provided which can further extends the functionality of your blog. These plugins can make your blog to cope with search engine optimization, work with different social media site, provides search feature, add Adsense code into your blog, etc.

With a right blog software, you can have a well-organized blog which can be crawled by search engine easily.

2. Provide RSS feed button
Provide an RSS feed button on your blog, your reader don’t have to remember to come back and they can get updated content from your blog easily. RSS feed is one of the way to make sure your readers don’t forget about you.

RSS feed is ready in the blog software. The thing you need to do is to encourage your readers to subscribe your RSS feed. You may make the RSS button bigger or you can put a simple sentence at the end of your post to encourage the subscription.

3. Related Articles List
At the end of your post, you should suggest a list of related articles. It can help your reader to find further related information and also keep them stay longer in your blog. Related articles can project an image that you are the expert in the related field.

Related Articles List is also important for the search engine spiders. Search engine spiders can easily crawl your blog via the link provided and you also include some related keywords in your post too.

4. Provide Social Media Buttons
Readers can make use of the social media buttons to share your post in their Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Delicious, etc.
Readers help you to spread your article or post to different famous website and share with others. This can definitely helps you to generate new traffic.

In your website, you should have a page called “Contact Us” or “Contact Our Company”. It lists out all the contact information of your company, likes Address, Email, Phone, Fax. But, do you have a contact form for customers to make their enquiry directly from the webpage?

It is important to have a contact form for customers to contact your company. Customers fill the form and click the submit button, their enquiry/comment can deliver to your company. They don’t need to to open their email program or leave their computer to make a phone call. The contact form can greatly encourage customers to contact your company.

A contact form can encourage customer to make enquiry. But, a poor design form will only stop customer from using it.
Here are the tips for a good contact form.

Title
State clearly the title of the contact form and separate the contact form from other elements in the page.

Instruction
An instruction should be given at the top of the form. This is especially important if your have a complicated form.

Submit/Cancel Button
Submit and Cancel button should be placed at the bottom of the form. It is common and standard to put them at the bottom. If you want to put them some place else, think again and ensure the customers know where is your buttons.

Label All Fields
Label should be given on the left or top of the fields.

Require/Optional Fields
State clear which fields are required. These can help customer to fill the form easily.
But, don’t use too many required fields without explanation as it will hurt customer’s trust.
- Use an asterisk and the word “required” to mark them
- Make the background color of the fields different
- Group the required fields together into one section.

Default Option
For those multiple choice question, default option can helps customer to fill the form.

Avoid Large Number of Fields
Keep the form as simple as possible. No one is willing to spend time to fill in web form. Remember that the form is to provide a quick and easy way to contact your company.

Better Organization for Long Form
If you have a long form, you may consider to group the fields into different section with sub-heading. Another workaround is to split the form into multiple page.

No Duplicate Information
Don’t ask customer to fill the same information twice, especially in multiple page form.

Error Message
For any input error, you should provide short and clear message where is the problem.
It is better if you can validate all the form fields and show the error message in one dialog.
It is really annoying if there are three validation popup for three input errors.

After Submission
After form submission, the page should state the form is submitted and what the customer will expect.
- Will they receive email acknowledgement?
- When they will receive a reply?

Twitter is a free social media and micro blogging tool that let users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s followers. In other words, someone can follow you and receive your tweets. Twitter communications can be viewed and updated on the Web, through desktop application, or via mobile devices. It is a convenient communication channel which can be updated in anytime, anywhere.

There are 3 major usage of twitter for business.

Marketing Channel
You can build a twitter for your company and make use of the tweets to deliver your business message. By using Twitter as a marketing channel, you can post your company news, press releases, promotion events in the twitter. Your message can be delivered to the followers then.

Personal Touch with your Client
Let your employees build a twitter and tweets in person. Compared to the marketing channel above, this can give your follower a feeling of real humans. It is natural for your employees to express personal opinion or feeling. They can express their own feelings on the latest news, your company, etc. Employees can post questions for quick answers and answer questions to establish credibility. These can improve the connection between your company and client.

Inside your Company
Twitter is a good communication tool. It can be used to share the company internal news, project status, etc among staffs. It’s just like a notice board and users can even express their view on it.

How to Get People to Follow You?
1. Follow them. It’s common to follow people who follow you. If you follow others, others may follow you also.
2. Add Twitter to your website, contact page.
3. Add your Twitter feed to your blog.

Facebook is a social networking website. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal status to notify friends about themselves. Users can also join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. It is a hugh online community which has over hundred million visitors. There are countless prospects which may interest to buy your products/services. However, the Terms of Use of Facebook stated that you can only have ONE account and it must be in your own REAL name. Not your business name, a fake name, pen name, etc. How you can promote your business in Facebook? Facebook page is the answer.

What is a Facebook Page?

Quote from Facebook
“Create a presence that looks and behaves like user profiles to connect and engage with your customers and amplify your voice to their friends. A Facebook Page is a public profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users. Create one in a few minutes with our simple interface.”

Facebook does provide a place for you to represent your business, and that is Facebook Pages.

How the Facebook Page helps your business?

User in facebook can become a fan of your page. Any news/status updated will be feed/shown into the user facebook. You can provide latest information to your fan. User can interact with your facebook page and express their view about your page.

You can spread the word even further with Facebook Ads. You can built your ad with your own graphic and text. Facebook also allow you to specify the target audience.

How to create Facebook Page?

First, prepare the following items.
- Name of your page
- Profile picture
- other infos, like address, product photos
These are the basic, you can add others likes video.

Of course, you need to be a user in facebook before creating a page.

Steps to create Facebook Page

1. Start creating the Facebook Page

2. Choose your category
- Local
- Brand, Product or Organization
- Artist, Band or Public Figure

3. Type your business name

4. Check the box to agree the Terms and sign with your name.

5. Done. Your page is ready.

6. You can change the profile picture, fillin info, upload photos, etc. It is exactly the same as your Facebook.

7. When the page is ready. You need to publish it. To make the Page public, click on the link that says “Publish this page”

Where to find further information about Facebook Page

http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages

There are thousand million of web site in the Internet. It is not easy to make your website popular. You also need to spend time and continuous efforts to promote your website. Following are the four basic steps that you must takes.

1. Keywords
Write a list of keywords that you want your website to be found in search engines. You should check against the popularity and competitiveness of those keywords. Some keywords may have high searching rate in search engines but it may returns million of search result. Some keywords may have lower searching rate but it has fewer competitors. You should select those keywords which fit your needs.

Make sure the keywords can be found in the content of your website, but also the page title and the meta tags.

2. Useful and Unique Content
Try to provide useful and unique contents in your website. This is important as people are looking information in the Internet. If the information you provided is unique and you are the only source in the internet, people must visit your website to get the information. This unique contents may be a ebook or a report published by you.

3. Building Link
There are many ways to build the link. You can participate to the community forum, or post comment to other’s blog. You may also make use of the social media to build the link, for example digg.com, facebook or twitter.

4. Update Regularly
Keep posting new information to make your website fresh. This can encourage visitor to re-visit your website.

1. Disk Space

Disk space is depends on the size of your web site. So, have a look on your web site folder and see how much disk space it takes up on your computer. You should always get more space than what is taken up on your computer. For example, if your web folder is 200MB, you should probably get 250-300MB of disc space. This extra space allowed you to further expand your web site and put more materials there. Remember that you need to think about what kind of materials you planed to add later. If what you plan to add is some flash animation or some audio/video file, you’d better to get some more buffers.

2. Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the amount of data transfer that your web site can use. If you plan on having a massively popular site with a large amount of files, then you should have a high bandwidth. For casual web sites, bandwidth is not as big a factor. Again, consider cost and try to have more bandwidth than you need, not less. It is also important to check the bandwidth for local and overseas.

3. Web Site Speed

Web site speed is seldom taken into consideration. Web site speed is a really important factor. If your web host has a very slow speed for all of its web sites, then you may not want to go with that host. People wonU+00A1U+00A6t stay around at a page forever. If you want many people to visit your site, having a fast speed is very helpful. You should check with the web hosting company and ask them to provide a list of their sites. You can then try to access to see the response of these sites.

4. Database / Programming Language support

Database and Programming Language support are important if you plan to have a dynamic web site and interact with your customers. Currently, most web hosting provides support for database and programming language, but there are great variety on database and programming language. You should check and pick the one you plan to use.

5. Technical Support

Technical support is one of the important factors you need to consider. But how you can know their services level? You can test by sending them an email with some questions or just make a phone to their support hotlines. If they respond quickly, this is a good sign. If they cannot provide you answers, you’d better find another one.

6. FTP Access

You need an FTP program to transfer files to the server. You should seek for an unlimited and unrestricted FTP access, otherwise it will troublesome to maintain your web site.

7. Control Panel

Most hosting companies will provide a web based control panel for you to maintain your web site. You should look for one with an easy-to-use interface.

8. Statistics Data

A good stats program is handy if you want to keep an eye on how many visitors you are getting, where they are coming from, referrers, top entry and exit pages and so on. Some companies offer excellent stats programs as standard while others offer basic stats but you have to pay extra for advanced statistics. You should ask the company what kind of statistics information they could provide.

9. Stability

Stability is most important. If your web site cannot operate smoothly, it just like you closes your shop. To understand the service provided by the web hosting company, you can study from the following dimension:

- Install firewall to protect against virus and hackers

- Plugged with uninterrupted power supply

- How many server hosted and their physical locations

- How frequent the backup is. Daily or weekly?

- Machine uptime. The more uptime they guarantee the better. 99% uptime is the minimum acceptable standard.

Domain name is your corporate identity in the web. The best approach is to choose the domain name that match exactly with your company name. Of course, you can pick the one different from your company name.

There are many choices to choose the top-level domain name, like .com, .biz or .net. You are suggested to choose .com as it is the most acceptable and recognizable domain. People can easily identified the .com web site is owned by a company. .biz and .net may bring confusion to your customers.

If your business is localized or you want to emphasis where your company located, you can add the corresponding country code, like .uk or .au

Don’t pick those free hosting web site, like geocities.com. This kind of free domain only reduces your company reliability.

Beside the mentioned points, you have two important factors need to consider when getting your domain name.

1. Copyright

You need to ensure that your domain name do not breach copyright or infringe trademarks. Even if you can get the domain name now, you may be sued later if you violate the copyright law.

2. Own your domain name

If you use a web designer or third party for your domain names, ensure they are registered in your name. That is your domain name is owned under your name, not the web designer, web hosting company or other third party. Ensure you have a signed agreement with the company that they will release all the details (including password) to you. If you move your web site to another hosting company, you need to have a domain password to proceed for the change. However the domain password is normally kept by the party who help you register the domain name. Be sure you can get back the domain password from them.