While doing my morning blog reading I came across a great list of “101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site” from the great people over at Inside CRM. I realize that 101 tips is a lot of information, so I have summarized 10 big ideas and made the whole thing a little easier to digest.
Copywriting
Content is the most important asset to your site. Make sure that your content is being read and understood with these tips.
- Make the most visited pages easier to scan
If your site looks like a big block of text, chances are people are not reading it. Try breaking it up into smaller, easier to digest paragraphs. Use bolds and underlines to highlight new sections and topics.
- Keep each block of text to a single topic
Better yet, keep each page to a single topic and use links for additional pages/topics. Visitors are more likely to read several one paragraph topics than to read one long paragraph.
Usability
If your site is a pain in the neck to navigate, visitors will leave. By taking the following steps you can ensure visitors stick around, and the more visitors that stick around the more conversions you will see.
- Test the site on real users
Many times site designers will test the site for usability themselves. This is a big mistake. If I built the page I should also (hopefully) be the expert on how to use said page. So if I know how to use it I probably won’t find anything wrong when I do usability testing. Always opt for the outside opinion.
- Add more internal links
Add text links to your income producing pages on your most visited pages. This will help boost your conversion rate and is very simple to do. Example: Boston Interactive is an interactive web design and strategy company based in Boston, MA. Internal link…done.
Search Engine Optimization
The following are tips to help you boost your search engine rankings.
- Get rid of frames
Frames scream “I made my site 10 years ago and haven’t updated it since.” FYI
- Give pages real names
Naming you pages is not only helpful to users and search engines but to you and your developer also. I recently helped a class mate build a resume site and she named all her pages 1.html, 2.html, 3.html, etc. Every time I wanted to change pages I had to click through them all to find the page I was looking for. Real names also make you, and your site, look vastly more professional. Check out my previous blog post: 5 Tips for Titling your Web Pages
Design
Fix up your site’s appearance using the following design tips.
- Place important information “above the fold.”
Most visitors will quickly scan the homepage for any sign of what they are looking for and if they don’t see it they will be gone in less than 30 seconds. Make sure the important content is as close to the top as possible.
- Limit each page to one topic
It is ok to have a products page with all your products images and names linked to individual descriptive pages about that particular product. If you were to put all that information on one page it would overwhelm the users and they would most likely leave.
Legal
Keep your site and yourself safe by avoiding copyright infringement and protect your content by using these improvements.
- Legitimize images
I’m sure you’re thinking “eh who will ever know, no one will catch me if I just take this image from Google.” Your probably right but it could happen to you. It is worth the few extra dollars to either buy the image legally or to go take some your own (because it is actually a ton of fun).
- Protect content
I usually copyright my websites by printing them out and mailing them to myself. File the unopened envelope away and the postmark will serve as a legal creation date of the material. Then just drop a (c) symbol to the footer of your site and you should not have any problems.
If you are interested in reading more tips, click here to go to the Inside CRM article. If anyone has any additional tips or pointers please let us know in the comments section
