It can be difficult generating a buzz for a business website, but without other websites actively linking to yours, it can be a slow road to achieving the traffic and search engine rankings that come from a strong internet profile.

You can encourage this by adding unique, fresh, relevant, timely and informative content to your website. Depending on the nature of your business, you could achieve this through regular articles, blog posts, photo galleries, whitepapers, knowledge bases or user-generated opinion.

Through useful content comes respect as an industry leader, and people like to quote leaders.

Tracking your business referrals is not something you can decide to do later. By the time you want to use the information, you need to have at least a year of historical data behind you.

Consider asking your visitors to tell you how they found you when they fill out an enquiry or order form on your website. Even though your sales procedures might include asking for this information, it can be helpful to know the same from those who did not end up purchasing from you.

Never put a barrier between your business and your customer.

When you accept orders through your website, provide as many payment options as is practical for the way you run your business. If you accept credit cards, also consider allowing your customer to call through their credit card details. Don’t forget bank transfers (direct deposits,) which save your merchant fee costs. And, depending on your target market, you might explore PayPal, or consider accepting cheques or money orders.

And, no, there is no risk in displaying your bank account details (BSB and account number) during an order process — the worst someone can do is put money into your account!

If you allow a customer to enter their credit card details into your website (even if you are not charging it at that time,) you should have that page, as well as the page that follows, in a secure (encrypted) area.

Your web host will be able to sell you an SSL certificate that is licensed by a company that most web browsers trust, and your web designer will be able to apply it to your website.

Keep in mind that you have varying options when purchasing an SSL certificate, but it is important to keep in mind that even the cheapest certificate will encrypt the data (the important part.) The more you pay, the more features they will have that verify the legitimacy of the company operating that secure page, and the more trustworthy you will appear to your visitors.

Do everything you can to increase your level of trust, and you will have fewer customers abandoning the sales process.

Your business has a backup strategy for its workstations, email, servers, etc. (Right?)

If your website has dynamic content (such as a blog or a shopping cart,) you need to ensure you have a backup of this data, too. You certainly don’t want to lose years of vital customer details because your website tripped and fell. Your web hosting provider most likely has backups, but you never want to rely on a single third party for something as critical as backups.

Discuss with your web developer options for backing up your website data to your office.