5 Tips for the Perfect Website
Here at Peritus Digital, we think long and hard about what a website needs to accomplish before we start. When having a website built for the first time, it can be a little daunting thinking about design, functionality, and most importantly the user experience. Below is a list of the most important things to think about when creating a website.
1. Creating Interesting and Regular Content
The bottom line is, if your website isn't relevant enough to a subject, people are not going to visit your site, or even find it through a search engine. Since Google Panda's algorithm update, Content quality has quickly become the most important part about a website.
Websites are penalised for having duplicate content, or content so rammed with keywords that it appears spammy, or content that is the same on each page, just with different keywords.
While this means a lot of effort for creating content on a website, it will rapidly widen the gap between people who work hard on their website, creating the best content, and people who have a website built and don't touch it for 6 months.
A good technique that we apply to all of our websites, is the use of a blog, or a content update system. Our users can easily log in to their website and add a blog post or extra page to their site, and once they click save, the content is time-stamped, and added to the website. The time stamp function is brilliant, as it lets search engines know that the content is new, and if regularly updated, it lets them know that this site is a place to go for the newest and most relevant information about the chosen subject.
The worst thing you can do for a website, is build it, and leave it alone for a year. Especially if you are trying to reach the top of the rankings, a website that is constantly updated, and has lots of new and interesting content, will beat a static website in the search listings every time.
How to apply this to your website:
Keep content interesting and well written for every page of your website.
Add regular Blog Posts with rich content weekly, if not more.
Don't copy other articles you have read, make your content unique.
2. Find your Target Audience, and Target them!
When building you website, remember that you are not building it for yourself, you are building it for your customers! When that customer enters a search term that is relevant to your website into Google, will your website be there to be clicked on?
Time must be spent figuring out your customers. What search terms will they be typing into search engines? Will they be location specific, or product specific? For example if a customer types in "Buy Volkswagen parts in Glasgow", and you are selling Volkswagen parts, and you can ship to Glasgow, make sure that somewhere on your site, you are saying "Buy Volkswagen parts in Glasgow", and then write a bit more information, in detail about what parts you supply, so that more specific search terms will land on your page too.
The main struggle is to get found on search engines, and the second struggle is to actually get clicked on when they see you in the listings.
Firstly, this means that your content should be relevant to your business industries search terms, so for Website Design in Devon, instead of updates like "Really busy this week, thanks everyone", updates should be a bit more specific, like "Wow, a busy week for Devon Website Design".
Secondly, once you are in the listings, you should make sure your page title, and the text that comes underneath the title on the search listings, is interesting, and gives a good reason for the customer to click on that link. (This can be achieved by changing the meta data in the code for each page of the website).
How to apply this to your website:
Work out who your target audience is.
Make sure that your website covers the main search terms for your industry.
Make sure you have the appropriate meta data ready for your web developer to put into every page.
Be specific! It is a lengthy process, especially if you have lots of pages, but it will pay off in the end!
3. User Experience and Bounce Rate
A very important subject to think about is User Experience. How easy is it for people to find the information on your website, and is it easy to use? The bounce rate for your website is how often people click on your website, decide it isn't what they are looking for, and leave within 30 seconds. If this is happening, it means that your content wasn't relevant, or people couldn't find what they were looking for. Tools like Google Analytics will tell you how much time people are spending on your website, and a number of things will affect this. People that are using search engines to find information on a subject will want immediate results, therefore bad content, or slow loading times will have a negative impact.
Your website should be simple, easy to navigate, and easy to read. The following list mentions a few of the major stumbling blocks that people experience.
Too much random or useless content. One of the worst things we see is old SEO techniques like long lists of search terms down the side or at the bottom of websites. For example, listing the same keywords 20 times, with 20 different locations after it. Google's Panda update penalises this kind of duplicate content spamming. Especially if you are writing the same thing on every page of your website.
Large Images that have been shrunk to fit. If you want an image to display at a width of 200px, don't upload a 1000px width image and shrink it, re-size the image in an external program (like Photoshop, or Microsoft paint) before uploading it. A image that is 200px wide may only be 40kb in size, and will load quickly, whereas a 1000px width image that has been shrunk may be over 1mb in size, and will take forever to load, especially if there are a lot of them.
Colour schemes. Make your font easy to read, the simplest is black text on a white background. Putting pink text on a red background makes it very difficult to read, and old SEO techniques like hiding a list of keywords by making the font white on a white background will also be penalised by Google's algorithm.
Menu organisation. Make sure your websites menu lists all of your pages, in a simple easy to find layout. Having a bad menu layout with pages that are hard to find, or lots of menus all over the page won't affect your Google listings, but may be frustrating for your users.
4. Page Titles and Heading Tags
While search engines are relying more on page content, it is still very important to have content specific page titles, and page headings. One of the worst things we see is when a website has been built without any attention paid to title tags, for example, at the top of the browser window, the title of the main page is just "Home". Sure, you want users to know they are on the home page, but there is so much value to be had by having a good title.
The same can be said for the title of the content on the page. Search engines will index a page, and pay attention to the <h1> heading tag. If you haven't used these on your page, you should do. An example of this is the blue title bar you see at the top of this page.
How to apply this to your website:
Use keywords in your title tag. For example, instead of "Home", use "Welcome to Devon Website Design | Top quality website design in South Devon".
Use relevant H1 header tags for every page of your website.
5. Incoming Links
An incoming link, is a link from an external website, to a page on your website. The more incoming links you have, the more important you seem to search engines. If you have built a site that people are using a lot, this will happen over time anyway, by people sharing your content, and linking to it on social media or on their websites. You can speed up the process a bit by listing your website on free business listing sites, or by contacting other businesses in your local area, or in the same sector online, and requesting a reciprocal link. (A reciprocal link is where you agree to put a link to their website on yours, if they do the same for you.)
In conclusion, the list for SEO techniques is endless, and every month people are coming up with new ways to try and get around the algorithms, or manipulate them. The truth is, the simplest way is just to play ball, and create an exciting, useful website that people will want to visit, and search engines will be happy to promote.
To get a free SEO report for your website, please contact us, including your website domain in the message, and we will contact you as soon as possible with helpful advice and improvements.