Monday, June 30, 2008
- Tim Wall
Why not run through this little checklist on your own website. Maybe you've already got these figured out, but if not, these are some simple and quick ways to make instant improvements to your online presence.
- Optimize your website's title. Do you have a title? What does it say? To find out, load up your website and look at what shows up in the very top of the browser. For example, on our home page, it says "Oklahoma City Web Design Element Fusion offers the best Web Design in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma." Creating a complete and keyword-rich title can really help the way search engines view your site, as long as the content of your page actually fits what the title says.
- Check your home page description. 90-95% of the time, search engines display the page description whenever your site shows up in search results. If you don't have a description, search engines just grab some of the content from the page. By using a page description, you can control exactly what the search engines display. Just like your title, your description should be descriptive, keyword-rich, and should match the content of your page.
- Add some images. Nothing spruces up a page like some imagery. If you have pages in your site that are text-heavy, consider adding an image in here or there. You take take your own photos or search for royalty-free images on stock photo galleries, or even search for creative commons licensed images on Flickr.
- Add a form and a call for feedback. Find ways to get your website visitors to talk back to you. Add a simple contact form and then ask them fill it out. Or, use other types of forms to get feedback on a product or to solicit comments. Getting your visitors to interact with you will greatly improve your user's experience and help you know more about what is working and not working online.
- Display your contact information on every page. It's a good idea to have your company address, phone number and contact email on every page of your website. Often, this information is added in the website footer. This not only helps with local search listings but also makes it easy for your website visitors to find out how to connect with you.
- Remove unnecessary stuff. Sometimes you can make big improvements by just removing things. Go through your site and take off any outdated, irrelevant, or unnecessary content. Trim down your page structure. After all, less is almost always more.
How do you do it?
If your site is running on one of our content management systems, making all of the above changes is a piece of cake. If you need help figuring it out, check out our support site or email our support team.
If your website is running on another system, check with your provider or administrator about how to make the above changes. If you don't know where to begin, contact us and one of our consultants can show you the way.