Every organization needs a website. However, the days of a 10 page site are over. Your website should be useful for customers and enticing for prospects. Maybe it’s time for a makeover?
- Play the us and them game. Create a spreadsheet with a column for your website and columns for competitors.
- Then list look/feel, menu options, message/text, etc. If they all are roughly the same, then you’ve got a blueprint for what to change.
- Your website should be at a major web host and not tied to your facility – business continuity and escape hardware capital cost and time consuming web server maintenance.
- Better start using something with standards like Expression Web 4 – get the Pro version and you’re set for graphics and video editing too.
- The site should be HTML5 and utilize schema.org for better search results with Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
- Avoid fully unsupported features by all browsers like the canvas.
- Everything is a DIV – eliminate tables.
- Unless you haven’t gotten the memo, flash is dead, will leave a negative impression, and won’t be found on search.
- Plan on spending at least $200 with iStock or your favorite for photos or video.
- Have your keywords or categories ready and listed for how you want customers to find you with search.
- While researching, click related searches in Google or Bing for other keyword/content ideas.
- Create content to answer your audience needs, automate, or aggragate.
- Start with the bottom line and fill in to support.
- DON’T bore with tell the agenda, tell each agenda item, and tell again the summary of the agenda.
- If you can, tell a story.
- There’s got to be something fun and different for your audience and to separate from the competition – THINK.
- Video is currently a major content differentiator.
- Authority on the web is through quality content and quality links.
- Since the advent of NOFOLLOW links, your main source of links and ones you directly control are your own content.
- Successful sites must have more than 100 pages of quality content that is useful to the audience and not reprinted or minimially changed from other sites.
- 500+ pages will be the watermark for 2013.
- Everything is a little bit bigger. 1024 x 768 is the lowest resolution of your audience.
- Test for the top 3 browsers of Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox.
- The look should be open and clean with headers and footers stretching the width of the page.
- Ditch the distracting background image.
- The most common font for major publishers on the web is Georgia.
- Font size is larger and usually the same for screen and print like 12 pt.
- General layout is header, nav, article, aside, and footer.
- Decide if you will incorporate the use of ads.
- Best ad locations are above the title of the page, middle of page content, or prominent placement on sidebar or aside.
- Use only one CSS file for faster page load speed.
- Don’t forget to add print formatting to CSS for all that good content.
- Generally header, nav, aside, and footer are not printed.
- .print and .noprint may be used for some elements such as a black logo instead of white on screen.
- List the full URL in parens in a smaller font for printed links on paper output.
- Simple HTML navigation with no java script.
- Highlights when hovering over menu options are fine, but remove visual borders around menu buttons.
- Drop down menu options offer 1 click for users, but many search bots still struggle with all those links on one page.
- Menu links should be anchor text for key words.
- Company or About menu option should always be last, with most useful audience menu options first from left to right.
- No one wants to hear you brag about your company – ever. If you presented a good impression and appealing story, then prospects may want to know more about the organization.
- Each page should have a link to About with either rel=author or rel=publisher to denote the authentic source or author.
- About page should have a link to a Google Plus account with rel=me.
- Google Plus profile should link to the about page as a contributor such as www.kevinfream.com/about.htm.
- Signup for Google and Bing webmaster tools and analytics.
- Add the code for Google and Bing verification.
- Plan on tracking traffic weekly or monthly.
- It’s not the number of hits, but conversion that is important. Where is your audience going on your site and how do you respond?
- Use a generic e-mail address and password for all services that is not tied to an individual such as webmaster@yourdomain.com.
- Responsibilities change and companies are bought and sold – make transitions easy for you and your successor.
- Layout for home page can and should be different than sub pages.
- Nice visual layering effects can be done with divisions.
- Often the H1 tag is assigned to the logo on the home page – not typical for other pages.
- Home page link is www.yourdomain.com and not index.htm or default.htm.
- Meta title is limited to 69 characters.
- Meta description is limited to 156 characters.
- Current meta title trend is “brand: keyword, keyword, keyword”.
- The same is true of a descriptive meta sentence with brands toward or at the begining.
- Make sure to use the ALT tag for images to give search engines text to understand for images.
- Use itemscope and itemtype for major elements of a page from schema.org.
- Emphasize only 3-5 important elements on a page for microdata.
- Too much microdata may be considered SPAM or gibberish.
- Home page should have some elements that change daily, weekly, and monthly.
- If you choose to have a large ad or image rotator, change the pictures at least monthly.
- The concept is a funnel where you want to direct the audience to 3-5 major choices.
- Important choices or calls to action should be above the fold – before you scroll down to see the rest of the page.
- Every page should have buttons for like, follow, plus, etc. from AddtoAny or similar service.
- Other services like Addthis and Sharethis have better websites and offer analytics, but are difficult to implement or don’t work properly in HTML5.
- You’ll also need a bit.ly account to further track hits on links from retweets, likes, and pluses.
- Old school thought of fitting everything on one page for 800 x 600 resolution, without scroll shows lack of content and looks ridiculous on large monitors.
- You rarely sell anything on the web and shouldn’t think that way.
- Move the sale along until the user raises their hand to request contact, help, or next step in the process.
- Drop the testimonials as they are not third-party validation and the public perceives them as fake, purchased, or unrepresentative.
- Don’t use reprinted blog posts.
- Recent posts should only be original content useful for the audience.
- Spend some time on the footer – not the old duplicate navigation links.
- Modern footers have columns to help drive evaluation and conversion along with address and phone for localization and Social Media icons to view content at those services.
- Throw all images in an images folder.
- Then use Smushit to make them smaller and load faster without loss of visual quality.
- In HTML5 you write articles, the main section of the page.
- The article has an outline to use heading tags H1 – H4 for visual emphasis and keyword sections of the article.
- Try styling H1 with character spacing to achieve a unique look.
- Links are no longer underlined, but a different color from the text and the link is added when hovered. Don’t forget to change the color for visited links.
- Take extra time to plan folder structure for growth and to avoid moving pages and breaking links for search.
- Create a folder for each keyword or phrase and image having a hundred or more pages in each.
- Main category files should be in the root and associated pages in the category folder.
- All file names should be lower case and have keywords separated by dashes without unnecessary articles or prepositions.
- Simple tools like PowerPoint can be used to save pictures or slides with transitions as videos.
- Add quality content and value to fill the whole screen on each page concentrating on just one subject or keyword.
- Always have a clear call to action and links to other relevant pages or categories on each page.
- Generate and submit a sitemap.xml to Google and Bing – and of course regularly update when adding pages.
- Ditto for an RSS feed to syndicate the site and have other RSS services providing links and exposure.
- Use Google Alerts to monitor your key words, competitors, and customers.
- Social media is for broadcasting useful content to show authority on a subject and entice visitors to your web site.
- If you already don’t have a Gravatar, get one for a standard picture accross the web and verification it is really you.
- Facebook is for B2C and should be avoided unless you have stories, video, pictures, and ads to upload daily.
- Twitter is for listening to customers and competitors and daily links to valuable content preferrably from you. Twits are people who don’t understand this concept.
- Well done videos on YouTube not only separate you from the crowd, but provide invaluable search links from the description.
- LinkedIn is by far the best business social media site – effectively fill out your profile and your organization to show expertise and actually learn some things from others in groups.
- Remove the old stuff, add the new, monitor, and start generating content because your competition read this blog and has been posting new pages daily.
Howdy, i read your blog occasionally and i own a similar one and i was just curious if you get a lot of spam responses? If so how do you reduce it, any plugin or anything you can suggest? I get so much lately it’s driving me mad so any assistance is very much appreciated.
WordPress.com spam filtering is actually pretty good. I get about maybe a handful per month that are usually people foolishly still trying to get backlinks from comment garbage on blogs. If you’re having a lot of it, then I would review any apps and contact forms and also contact support.