So you’ve spent 10 hours of design and coding into your new web site. It looks great. All the content is there, everything is ready to go. You official ‘launch’ your website and beginning checking the stat tracker every 10 minutes hoping to see thousands of visitors pour in. But to your surprise, no one is coming.. Not a single visitor in the first week? Has your web site failed?

Some of the top reasons your web site my fail are:

No one can find it - You must properly optimize your website for search engines using important keywords that people will use to find your site.

You have no call to action - When someone finds your website they don’t know what to do with it. Your site needs to have a specific reason or purpose for being. Whether it’s selling a product, providing a service, or entertainment…people need to know what they can get from your site.

Visually unappealing - If your site is ugly people won’t return. There is a lot of competition out there for design. You really need something unique (even though my blog skin isn’t unique I at least fixed it up with a cool shark logo in the header).

So those are the top three reasons your website won’t make it. Seems pretty darn obvious doesn’t it? Then how come so many people don’t fix it. When building a website, you have to build it for the non internet savvy users. People who don’t even know what a link is. The vast majority of internet users are not webmasters like us.

On a side note, I want to win this sick monitor John Chow is giving away, so here’s my entry:

John Chow dot Com, a blog that helps you make money is giving away a 24″ wide screen LCD monitor! To enter, you just have to write about it. This is my entry. Now give me the monitor! The contest is sponsored by BluFur, who wants to let you know that they’re hosting Canada and the rest of the world.