25 Ways To Improve Your Site Today

Yes, the title may look like this post should be on an amateur blog and that it will be full of references to clip art and animated gifs, but this is serious. I’ve compiled a list of what I think are 25 ways to improve your website in as little time as possible. All can be done in a matter of minutes. Now, a website is hard work and usually there are no quick fixes but this list should provide you with a few pointers to make some updates today. If you like, it can also be used as a basis for a quality check document.

Usability/Accessibility
Because it matters. If people can’t use your site, they won’t stay.

Navigation: Ensure that your navigation is easy to use and consistent. You may be able to use it, but could a newcomer find the information they desire?
Search: If you don’t have a search box, then why not? Sometimes navigation isn’t enough. It may not be a 5 minute job to add a custom search facility, but it is extremely quick to add a third party search like Google’s.
Click here: Why? Change this phrase everywhere on your site. It doesn’t make sense out of context. The user has to read the whole paragraph (which they probably won’t) to understand why they should click there. Consider phrases like “Download the profit/loss graph” or “Listen to the podcast entitled food for thought.”
Title & Alt Attributes: Use them how they are supposed to be used. If you haven’t used any at all, then a quick fix will be to start adding them to navigation and other elements on every page.
General: If you’ve got any code snippets that could annoy the user, like resizing browser windows or opening new pages in a new window, then remove them. Just because you like something a particular way, your users may not. Don’t take over their desktop.
Search Engine Optimisation - SEO
Because you want to be found. (On-page tips only here)

Titles: Add consistent, relevant but different titles (title tag) to every page in your site. If you already have titles, check that they are short and describe the content of the page.
Link around: Internal links to your pages (I’m thinking from the body copy here) are just as important as external links. Besides the usability gain, you have the unique opportunity of specifying your link and title text.
Strengthen keywords: Probably the quickest thing you can do. Highlight some keywords and phrases and add a strong tag (bold) around them. This shouldn’t be overused but can provide some positive results if used sparingly.
Headers: The correct use of headers (in a semantic, logical manner) can produce fantastic results. The H1 tag is the most important - try using some keywords in there.
Overkill: It seems whenever I speak to someone about SEO and give them some tips, they go way overboard. This can really ruin all the hard work you’ve done for the user. So remember, optimise with the user in mind. And stay away from dodgy SEO stuff - every time you use black-hat SEO, a kitten steps on broken glass.
Design/Development Process
Design is our passion. Let it show.

Images: By all means create beautiful images, but don’t forget to optimise them for the web. You may have a quick connection - not everybody does.
Design comes from scratch(pad): Don’t necessarily fire up your graphics editor before thinking about the design. It can only take 10 minutes to draw (you know - pencil and paper) various layouts and wireframe the design. Doing this will make you think more about placement of elements and less about the aesthetics.
Contrast/Text-size: Ensure that contrast levels and text sizes are ‘acceptable’ - There are no golden figures (although recommendations are available) to aim for but at least check with other people using different setups. Just because you have perfect 20:20 vision doesn’t mean that anyone can read your site.
Consistency: There’s nothing worse (OK - an exaggeration, yes) than a website that doesn’t function consistently. A user can find it hard enough to learn how a website is put together without having to remember all the little quirks and foibles on your site.
Testing: Check (or get others to check) the site under as many conditions as possible. Try to do this every time the site has a significant update. It’s worth it as it only takes a minute or two.
Content
That’s why people visit the site.

Text/Whitespace: There’s a big trap that often people fall into. Whitespace. How many times have you heard “we need to fill that space and cram the text in a bit more” ? More text in a single area isn’t a good thing. It can make it harder and less enjoyable to read the content. It you had a shop would you cram as many products in as possible? No. You’d let them have space so they get noticed. Do the same with your text.
Write for your audience: Can people understand your text? Think about your audience and reword those confusing sentences.
Corporate Boasting: Which is more useful ~ “We provide 200 megaunits of wobble-sprockets to our worldwide, global markets” ~ or ~ “We can provide a wobble-sprocket to you anywhere in the world.” Speak to the reader and engage them. Don’t waffle.
Use interest: If someone has read an article or item of content, then it is fair to assume that they were interested. Instead of leaving them high-and-dry after an article, point them somewhere related, whether it be another article or a product perhaps.
Objectives: When writing content, make a little mental note of what your goal is for the page (e.g. encourage registration) and try to guess what the users goal is (e.g. to get at information.) Match the two (e.g. “to find this information simply sign up”) and you’re golden.
Off-Site
Because it’s not all about you.

Hang out: For reasons surrounding traffic and respect. Go to forums, blogs and portals within your niche and hang out. Offer advice, link up with people and gain respect. Doing this for 10 minutes a day will improve your image and lead to quality, niche-lead traffic. A bonus. Oh, and don’t spam your community.
Learn: As well as handing out advice, listen. Whether it be listening to colleagues, competition or potential clients you are bound to learn an awful lot just by witnessing other people’s actions.
Encourage viral promotion: Not particularly in a gimmicky-email-newsletter fashion (that takes budget and time) but in a social fashion. Tell your friends and colleagues (and clients if relevant) something unique about you, your company or website and chances are they’ll pass it on. 5 minutes of blabbering could lead to heaps of traffic.
Be yourself: When interacting online, don’t conform to internet stereotypes - just be yourself. Doing this will mean that you are natural when interacting online and more likely to take a similar approach as you would offline. So, take your offline business ways online.
Spam: As in don’t spam. Every time you spam, you are adding disrespect to your own company/site. It’s the real-world equivalent of pushing a leaflet into a potential customer’s mouth.
And there we go. I hope this list is useful and has shown you how easy it is to improve various aspects of your website and its marketing. This isn’t exhaustive by any means - as I said earlier it takes effort and time to really get your site near-perfect. Evolution is the key: tweak, feedback, measure and repeat. Oh, and before you go looking, no, I don’t always practice what I preach!

Buying Text Links

Buying text links. It's all the rage.
Is it evil? Is it good? Will it help your search engine rankings? Will it get you banned? Will it increase your PageRank? Will it increase your link popularity? Will it bring targeted traffic to your site? Should you do it? Should you hire a broker to do it?
These are the questions on webmasters' and search marketers' minds. What follows is my take on buying text links.



There's nothing wrong with purchasing an ad on a website that links back to your website. Advertising your site is good. Advertising it on popular sites where your target market hangs out is even better. After all, the name of the game is to bring in targeted traffic. Your advertisements on other people's sites are none of the search engines' business and will not get your site banned or penalized. They will not hurt your site in any way. How you market your site is completely up to you, and you don't need to worry about the search engines if you decide to purchase text link ads.



So what's the big deal?



Here's where it gets tricky. A good portion of ads that are bought on websites are not purchased for the targeted traffic they will bring, but as an attempt to artificially inflate the link popularity of the site being advertised. No big news to you, I'm sure, and no big news to the search engines. Since having a popular site can often help with natural search engine rankings, people have been looking for cheap and efficient ways to boost their site's popularity for years.



Ya gotta do what ya gotta do -- but so do search engines.



To the search engines, a link is supposed to mean that someone found a site useful and wanted to tell others about it. This may very well have been true at one point in time many, many years ago. But today a link could mean something completely different. A link might be a simple trade between webmasters, or an ad, or even a vote *against* another site. With no way for a search engine to really know the intent of a link, things have really gotten complicated for them.



Ads used to have tracking links so that webmasters could measure their return on investment; however, today's text linkers often prefer to keep the tracking codes off because their web analytics software no longer needs them. And besides, if you're going to buy an ad, you might as well get the possible link popularity credit that comes with it. That's more likely to happen with a plain old, stripped-down href link.

Unfortunately, this is wreaking havoc with search engine algorithms. On the one hand, they know it's not their place to tell people whether they should or should not advertise on other sites -- especially since most of the engines are advertising companies in their own right. On the other hand, without any way to figure out which links are truly a vote for a site, and which are simply a paid ad, the relevancy of the search results for any given keyword phrase can be skewed towards those who are willing to put their money where their mouth is.



The good news for search engines (and I guess the bad news for link brokers) is that most text link ads and the sites that sell them tend to leave noticeable "footprints" behind in the code. It would be no trouble at all for a search engine to do a little digging into what the latest footprints are, seek out all pages that have them, and simply not allow them to pass any link popularity. This is not a penalty, mind you. It would just be a way for the search engines to count only votes and not ads. Your ads would still be worthwhile for the exposure and direct traffic they bring, but not for providing you with link popularity. So although your site wouldn't technically be penalized, its rankings could drop if it was dependent upon the link popularity of paid links.



For those of you who don't believe the search engines can or would do this, you obviously haven't been paying attention over the years. What do you think every major update at Google has been about? They haven't been specifically about purchased link ads, but they have been about finding a subset of pages that all have similar characteristics and no longer allowing them to count the way they used to count towards rankings. Which means every page using the technique in question suddenly finds their rankings have dropped like a rock.



It's not a matter of *if* this will happen with paid text link ads, but *when*. It could be next week, next month, or next year. Regardless of when the engines decide to lower the boom, you can bet we're going to hear a lot of crying in the forums about it! For now, if you're buying text link ads, or have been thinking about it, I wouldn't really worry about it. Just make a mental note to yourself that whatever boost to your rankings they may provide now could vanish at any time. It's no big deal if you're getting real traffic from your ads, or if you're simply using them to jumpstart your SEO campaign. It's going to be a problem only if your livelihood depends on buying or selling text link ads to boost link popularity.

Common Sense Search Engine Optimization

For years, when people thought about search engine optimization, in all likelihood, gateway pages, doorway pages or informational pages probably came to mind. If you're a search engine optimization specialist, you've probably had clients requesting that you create these types of pages for them.



They may believe the following statements to be true:

Every search engine has a different algorithm (formula) to determine the ranking of a Web page, and therefore none of their "regular" pages will rank highly in all of the engines.
Keyword-rich copy that the search engines will like is not text they can visibly put on their site where people can see it, especially not on their front page!
Our site needs to be on the cutting edge and use Flash animation and/or lots of graphics. Since the search engines can't index these very well, I have to use gateway pages.
Business sites need to be on the cutting edge and use Flash animation and/or lots of graphics, and they shouldn't have to change this just to please the search engines.
Although there is a grain of truth to each of the above, let's examine each point in more detail so you'll have some ammunition the next time you get this type of request.



Dealing with Differing Algorithms



Yes, it's true, search engine algorithms are varied and do change. There will always be SEOs who spend many hours poring over search engine results and statistics, trying to figure out each search engine's current formula for high rankings. There have been many software programs written over the years to help crack the algorithms and automatically generate high-ranking pages for each engine.



One of the problems with using this method is that as soon as a new algorithm is in place, these carefully crafted gateway pages will often drop out of sight in the rankings. The new algorithm must be cracked again, and new gateway pages must be created. It's truly a never-ending, time-consuming and expensive process that is very much against the best-practice guidelines put forth by the search engines.



The truth is that even though search engines do have slightly different algorithms (and they do change them at times), basically all engines appreciate the same things that real people look for in a Web site:

A simple, cleanly coded design
Well-thought-out, intuitive navigation
Well-written, descriptive copy
Titles and Meta tags that help identify relevant keyword phrases
Links that accurately describe what can be found at the site.
It's really just common sense. Web sites with the above features don't need to crack algorithms. These sites have the potential to achieve high rankings for many keyword phrases in all major search engines for many years, regardless of ever-changing algorithms. And more importantly, they will likely be a hit with their site visitors.



Writing Keyword-rich Copy



Clients (and even some SEOs) often justify the use of doorways and gateways by claiming that there's a difference between good copy for search engines and good copy for their site visitors. That is simply not true. Good marketing copy can be written that sounds great, stresses the benefits to the user and also utilizes keyword phrases. There's definitely an art to it, and you have to be a good copywriter to begin with, but it most definitely can be done. The key is to use a professional copywriter, not an SEO, for that aspect of the job.



Use of Flash Animation and Graphics at the Expense of Content



Over and over again we hear from companies that want high rankings and lots of traffic and sales, yet refuse to forfeit their LUGs (large useless graphics) and Flash animation in favor of good content. Unfortunately, these pages don't give the search engines much to go by when trying to determine what the site is all about. This forces the engines to figure things out solely based on the Title tags and the links. That may be enough in some cases, but the best indicator of what a site is about is through the content on its pages. Now, it's true that some search engines have started reading the content of Flash files, but there's generally not much "meat" contained in the ones I've seen!



Never forget that the ultimate goal of most business Web sites is to sell a product or a service. When you see a Flash presentation on a site, does that make you want to purchase their products or use their services? Sure, it might appear cool the first time you view it, but thereafter it only serves as an annoying distraction and/or waste of time. And if you're on a dial-up modem (yes there are still some left!), you probably don't want to wait around to view it. Besides, you can have your cake and eat it too by simply using small amounts of Flash in appropriate places, along with your great content.



When all is said and done, most people would rather be presented with information on the types of products or services offered in clear, concise language, right on the main page of the site they're visiting. Luckily for us, that's exactly what the search engines want to see as well!



Optimize Your Actual Site



You don't need a second (or third or fourth) site for SEO purposes. Those companies that are willing to create useful content within the pages of their Web site can very often own long-term high rankings. Plus, they won't have to rely on link popularity as much as the low/no-content sites have to.



In years past, convincing companies of this fact was one of the most difficult jobs we had to do. Thankfully, as the Web matures, more and more site owners are discovering that their fancy, cutting-edge sites don't convert as well as the competitor's informational site that gets right down to business. It's usually at that point that they become more receptive to doing what it takes to make their site the best it can be for their visitors as well as the search engines.