An easy to use sales page is a very significant component for any website. Here are certain tips that could help you hold the visitors attention to your sale page:

• Your landing and sale pages must contain relevant data that does not appear misleading to the reader. No matter how you have positioned yourself in the content, you must also ensure that the links are reliable with your position.
• The landing pages must be clean, simple and functional. Your website design should be updated, so that it does not appear old and outworn.
• Avoid any occurrence of outbound links that may lead your visitor to the other site. You must ensure that the visitor remains completely focused on the sale page and not any outward links.
• Sell the benefits of your product or service, not the features. That is what is in it for your prospective customer. A sale page should be user friendly and specify clear details of what you have to offer.
• Most of people don’t have time to read the entire page. They make their decision to read on by going through the first two paragraphs of a page. Thus it becomes relevant to have focused content that can convince the visitor to avail your services.
• You must try to avoid applying Flash in the intro page. They may look pleasing, but tend to divert the visitor from its focus. The everyday surfer has a short span and wants focused information during those few minutes on the page.
• A sale page should give clear instruction to the visitor. It should plainly state where they have to go for making a required purchase.
• You can upload some pictures or charts to add aesthetically pleasing elements to the website. To give a break from the long write ups, pictorial depictions can be quite effective to provide direct messages to the viewer.
• The website content should be compelling. If you’re not very good at writing content or it seems a little bland, then engage a copywriter. You will reap the benefits of doing so.
• Test, test, test and then test some more. There are many technologies out there that enable you to test landing pages, including Google’s Website Optimiser (which is free). The only real way to know whether a landing page is working is to test different variations of it, such as the offer or call to action, the headline, the images or the content itself.

Once you get a visitor on sales page, you should make sure that they have good reasons to stay on the page so that they can convert into actual sales.

Difficult to use CMSs can cost companies a lot of money in hidden costs such as:

• lost productivity in figuring out how to use the CMS
• constant need to retrain staff in complicated backend CMS’s
• cumbersome backend CMS’s can require extensive change management reengineering
• copying & pasting from Word can cause design failures, requiring IT to resolve the issue
• copying & pasting from Word can also cause code bloat, thus affecting performance requiring investigation and time
• most systems need to be ‘hacked’ and manipulated to get found on Google, requiring more time & money from your teams
• SEO components such as page titles and page descriptions, in most CMS’s, need to be changed by HTML developers

When redeveloping a website with a CMS, core functionality should cater for about 80% of your requirements. The rest is just marketing “nice to haves” and should be ignored unless it is critical to running your business.

So what core functionality and features should be present in a CMS?

Here’s a guide of functionality we believe every CMS should consist of:

• Be standards based (W3C compliant), as this helps get found by search engines
• Be easy to use, as this is critical to minimise the change management effort
• Be able to manage all aspects of the site (templates, modules, categories, pages etc)
• Not be proprietary but rather an open system that can be integrated with other systems and developed or enhanced when required
• Roles based security (to have administrators, editors, content managers etc)
• Enable marketing staff to manage SEO components such as page titles, page descriptions, meta data, page URLs etc

More and more businesses get sucked in to the functionality a certain CMS has and thus buying decisions are made based on functionality. The problem with this approach is that once the site has gone live, more money is then spent changing and optimising it to cater for search engines.

Too many CMS’s try to be too much to everyone. They become the Swiss army knife of the web world that has all the functionality you will never need. The reality is that you will only ever use 20%-40% of the functionality anyway!

Companies should instead focus more on the end goal of getting more customers. A website should be an extension of your sales and marketing team. A great website, one that is fully optimised and easy to use, will extend its marketing arm and rake in thousands of new leads every day that are ready to be converted into sales.

Brochureware websites (sites that simply have information about you and cannot be found by search engines) are no longer acceptable. Businesses need to probe the real reason for getting a website, and it should be about what your customers want, not what you think they want. A customer who searches out your site, does so with a specific purpose in mind, and failing to provide for that customer’s wishes will force them to look elsewhere. And when ‘elsewhere’ is a click away, your window to sell is quite small.

Therefore, it’s true to say that websites have become the shop faces of today’s business and to think less of your site could be potentially harmful to your business. Building on that metaphor, your ranking on search engines is similar to acquiring a prominent position for your store. However, unlike bricks & mortar shops, improving your SEO rankings is primarily about strong technical decisions and intelligent utilisation of the CMS… a lot cheaper than prime real estate!

In the end, a solid SEO-aware CMS must achieve two aims:

• Produce SEO-friendly web pages that meet the ‘Google’ technical requirements to increase your search engine rankings.
• Allow for your users to easily add content without the need for intense training and re-training.

Again, by reducing the overall functions of your CMS, a proper SEO-friendly CMS will instead focus on the key technical aspects that Google, Yahoo! Or Bing seek out. By using such a practical CMS, your staff will be able to easily improve your sites rankings and increase the number of customers discovering your business.