Design, marketing and optimization
A good website should be effectively designed depending on it targeted audience. Web designers, SEO consultants and marketers (when they are not the same person) should work together to determine how to achieve maximum results. The general concept, often forgotten for obscure reasons, is that a site should be effortless to read, fast to download and easy to navigate.
Low color contrasts and fancy fonts usually give unprofessional look and feel and result in a poor sales conversion rate. Some sites also extensively use super fast flash or images animation that have a negative impact. Let your visitors see what you have to show them unless your ultimate goal is to make them dizzy and eventually sick.
Hyperlink navigation should be found easily. Studies show that long anchor text results in more clicks by users. When the hyperlink is visited it should still appear clearly to the user for obvious reasons.
Do not give original names to specific pages such as the “contact us” or the sitemap section. Internet users must be able to easily find the basic parts of your website architecture.
Your design and layout must be consistent throughout the web site. In addition, your prospect must feel comfortable browsing the pages. By constantly changing the layout, page by page, the visitor may be lost or even irritated. If you’ve made a commitment to spend a few thousand dollars in search engine optimization and promotion of your site, you’d most certainly prefer to keep your visitors live on your site until they make a purchase.
Next, a fast loading time is one of the most important characteristics of your website. What is the point to carefully optimize and promote your online business if visitors can’t see your pages in a timely fashion? The number of dial-up users, especially in the US, is still very high (above 45%) and a page is considered slow to load when it takes more than 8 seconds to display its content.
To increase loading speed it is recommended to limit the use of heavy flash and image animation. It is recommended to use flash and image animation with moderation – just enough to highlight the best features you want to market. In addition, you might want to reuse the same animations all over the web site – this technique will enhance the user’s experience since his/her browser will cache the heavy files and reuse them locally from his/her computer.
Remember that part of your website promotion and optimization is the submission to directories. Thus, some of the first visitors to your site will be the directory editors. In addition to being time consuming submitting to Directories, may become more unpleasant when your site gets constantly rejected by editors because of its difficult navigation.
Finally, search engines algorithms integrate quality factors as well. Even though it is not publicly admitted, when choosing an unreliable hosting company that would send slow data to the spiders, your site could be given less importance or even get some sort of a penalty.
Qualified SEO specialists know that search engines try to match human visitor’s behavior to return the most relevant organic results; Thus if the search engines ever find your pages difficult to download, they may consider this as a negative sign and your ranking would be negatively affected.
