Five Ways to Increase the Power of Your Web Site
By Melissa Donovan
Nowadays, everyone has a web site. The competition is fierce, so having a more effective website, with better search engine ranking is essential to success. By implementing efficient design and functional content, you can keep visitors interested. Keywords and regular updates will help your search engine rating, and proper navigation will make your site user friendly and attractive to searchers. Here are five simple ways that you can increase the effectiveness of your website:
Design
Sites that are weighed down by images take too long to load, and many potential visitors will navigate away from your page before they even see it. If it doesn’t load within a few seconds, you need to rethink your byte size. Keep images, including backgrounds, to a bare minimum and make sure they are optimized for web display. This also applies to new technologies such as flashy widgets and animations, many of which do not translate well for users who are running older systems or software. While artistic sites that feature films or graphic art reap the benefits of cutting edge web technology, most business sites will suffer trying to wow customers this way.
Colors, fonts, and other design elements also don’t translate well on different browsers and platforms. Take the extra steps to ensure that your site presents itself properly on Mac and PC as well as the many browsers that are available, especially Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Mozilla Firefox.
Text should be easy to read and sized appropriately. Fancy fonts and extra large or extremely small text comes across as unprofessional and difficult to read. Keep color in mind! Dark text on a light background works best and is easier on the eyes.
Content
The best design in the world won’t engage a visitor unless the content delivers. Avoid superfluous verbiage. On the web, people rarely read–they scan, so it’s critical for written content to be direct and concise, brief and informative.
Be sure all of the critical information you want to present about your company, products, and services is available on your site. Not only will this make you more accessible to your customers, it will also field phone calls and other inquiries because the modern consumer almost always goes to the web first when they are looking for information or have questions.
The writing should be persuasive but it needs to come across as informative. Sales-y language works well in ads and presentations, but often come across as preachy on the Internet. Make sure the tone is friendly and professional.
Keeping it Current
Many web sites are launched and then ignored. Your site is a valuable marketing tool. It needs to be updated on a regular basis. Not only will this please search engines, it will keep the site fresh, and entice visitors to keep coming back for more. Stale sites are often left in the dust by search engines and Internet surfers, so set up a plan to update the site on a weekly basis, and stick to it.
Keywords
Keywords help search engines sort out where a site fits into a directory, and how a site should rank on a search results page. Be sure that you use the most important, defining words on your site in titles, and make sure those titles are presented as text, not images.
Navigation
Navigation is part of design but deserves its own mention because it’s often overlooked in favor of presentation aesthetics. Most sites have a menu at the top of every page, or in a sidebar. This makes it easy for visitors to find their way around and enables them to quickly navigate to what they are looking for.
Site Maps
Site maps provide an index to your site, which allows your visitors a way to find information or pages that may be buried. Search engines love site maps and use them to quickly rank and index your web site, so even if you have a simple site with only a few pages, and a very proficient menu, a site map is a must-have for search purposes.
In today’s world, a web site is one of the most powerful tools that any business or professional can use to reach customers. The convenient, accessible nature of the Internet lends itself to information sharing, and every business should strive to share information about its products with the public. Proper design, quality content, regular updates, keywords, and site maps are essential for increasing the effectiveness of your web site, maximizing on its power.
-
Blog
