3 Website-Building Lessons From the HealthCare.gov Debacle

The federal government's disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov is an embarrassingly perfect example of basically everything you shouldn't do when going live with a website for the first time.
From crashed servers to security snafus, to dozens of bugs and tortoise-like load times, there isn't much the White House didn't screw up. Seriously. Only six people managed to sign up for health insurance on the site's rocky launch day. Not good.
Here are three HealthCare.gov fails and how you can avoid making them when launching your company's website:
1. Fail: Not preparing for an initial rush of website traffic.
Millions of people flooded HealthCare.gov on its first day and many of them were met with disappointing messages like, "please try again later" and "please wait" instead of "apply now." A lack of enough server capacity to handle the onslaught of traffic, combined with error-ridden software code, were mainly to blame.
Solution: Beef up server bandwidth to handle the load.
The more website traffic you anticipate, the more server capacity you should load up on. If you're hosting your own site, start by calculating some estimates of how many people might drop by your website on Day One. CSG Computer Support Group, Inc. offers a basic Server Bandwidth Requirement Calculator to help small businesses determine the web server bandwidth they'll need.
Also estimate how many people will try to do the same thing on your site at the same time and prepare accordingly, Jyoti Bansal, founder of AppDynamics, recently told the Washington Post.
Once your site is up and attracting a steady number of visitors, you might need to scale up with additional web servers. Several popular website cloud hosting services, like Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure automatically scale to meet your website traffic needs.
2. Fail: Exposing users' identifying personal and financial information to security risks. 
On Sept. 27, four days before the federal exchange's launch, Department of Health and Human Services officials were warned of the site's "inherent security risks." Users' birth dates, Social Security numbers and more were low-hanging fruit for identity thieves.
Solution: Complete a thorough security risk assessment. 
Hire a small business cybersecurity specialist to run a risk assessment within 60 to 90 days of going live. Create and strictly abide by security standards, paying special attention to how you collect, store and perhaps even share your users' personal and financial data.
An easier option is to host your online store through a third-party ecommerce service that uses Secure Socket Layer encryption, like Yahoo Small Business. Such vendors handle most aspects of your site's security, from online payments to customer information and beyond.
3. Fail: Not testing site navigation and functionality.
One of the biggest reasons HealthCare.gov bombed out of the gate is that people couldn't use it for what it was supposedly designed to help them do: shop and sign up for health insurance plans. Software glitches, sluggish servers and muddled site structure were mainly to blame. As a result, in the federal exchange's first week, only 1 percent of the 3.7 million people who tried to register were successful, according to the nonpartisan research firm Millward Brown Digital.
Solution: Exhaustively test your website before going live. 
Hire a usability testing company to sniff out your site's weak spots and then improve each one. This critical pre-launch step helps you weed out bum software code and better understand your audience, particularly whether or not they find it easy to get around and use your site.
There are several reliable usability testing services that are relatively inexpensive, including UserTesting.com. Their pricing for small businesses starts at $49 per usability test by a real person. A similar service is Userlytics, which charges $39 to $99 per month, depending on the amount and depth of testing and feedback.

SEO Basics: Keyword Research Made Easy

When it comes to optimizing your website for search engines, knowing the best keywords for your brand is critical. But sometimes the process of researching your keywords can get out of hand.
A keyword, or keyword phrase, is an easy way of referring to the queries people type into the search bars of their favorite engines. As a website owner, you want to know which keywords your customers are searching for so that you can use SEO best practices to optimize your site for them and improve your chances of appearing in the natural search results for these queries.
Say, for instance, that you run a pet-grooming business in Bloomington, Ill. You want your website to appear at the top of Google's list for the keyword phrase "pet grooming Bloomington, Ill."
You might have already read about the importance of things like keyword competition or keyword search volume when conducting your keyword research. But forget all of that for a moment. The only keywords you need to worry about when you're starting out are the keywords your customers are actually typing in to their search engines.
There are a few different ways you can find these keywords:

• Use your customer research knowledge. Nobody knows your market better than you do. Instead of relying on a third-party keyword generating tool, start writing out a list of all the different keyword variations your customers might be searching for. Following our previous example, a pet grooming keyword list might include "pet haircut Bloomington, Ill," "dog grooming Bloomington, Ill" and "pet grooming Ill."
• Look in Google Analytics. If you have Google Analytics installed on your website, log in and head over to the "Traffic Sources" menu. There, you'll be able to separate your organic search visitors and see a list of the keywords they used to get to your website. Unfortunately, a large number of your results will come up as "Not Provided" (thanks to anonymous browsers and Google's proprietary reasons), but add the phrases that you do see to your growing keyword list. You can also find similar information in your Google Webmaster Tools account.
• Leverage Google's "Related Searches". You can also head over to Google and conduct searches for each of the individual keywords you've come up with to this point. Then scroll down to the bottom of the results. There, you should see a separate section where Google lists other keywords that are related to your original phrase. If any of these keywords are relevant to your business, they deserve a place on your keyword list.

Once you have an initial keyword list compiled, you can start thinking about keyword search volume and keyword competition. Head over to the Google Adwords Keyword Planner, which recently replaced the External Keyword Tool. You'll need a Google Adwords account to access the tool, but you should be able create an account without funding it right away. Alternatively, if you prefer to use another keyword tool, such as Wordtracker (plans start at $69 per month) to research search volume, use that one instead.
Once in the Google Adwords Keyword Planner, select the option labeled "Enter or upload keywords to see how they perform" and paste your list into the text box that appears. Modify the targeting options if necessary and then click the "Get search volume" button.
The screen that appears will give you a rough estimate of the average number of monthly searches each keyword receives and how competitive Google thinks the phrase is. There's no hard and fast rule about the minimum number of monthly searches you should aim for, as your threshold will be determined by the size of your audience and the profit margins of your products.
For example, if your market is small and your website only receives an average of 1,000 visitors per month, a keyword with a monthly search volume of 100 visitors could be quite lucrative. But if you're serving a larger market and operate on miniscule profit margins, it might not be worth your time to optimize your site for keywords with less than 3,000 to 5,000 average monthly searches.
Search competition is similarly subjective. If you're in a competitive market, you might not have a choice but to target tough keywords. At the same time, just because a keyword has low competition doesn't mean you should optimize your site for it -- especially if it isn't well-targeted to your customers.
If you're struggling to get started with keyword research, I recommend not worrying too much about either one of these metrics. Start by tailoring your sites to the keyword phrases your visitors are mostly likely to use to find your site, assuming that their Keyword Planner results show at least a few monthly searches. Only after you've cut your teeth on these introductory phrases should you start to worry about metrics-driven keyword research.