So you’ve created a nice-looking website. Ideally, before you put it on the internet for (hopefully) all to see, there are a few things you should check first. Because it doesn’t matter how great your site is — if Google and people online can’t find and use it, it’s all for naught.
1. Test Website Accessibility
Before you optimize your content, be sure that search engines are able to locate it. Embedded links in Macromedia Flash content and JavaScript Navigation Systems sometimes cannot be found by search engines. Search for “search engine simulator” on Google and make sure all your website pages are accessible.
You will also want to make sure that your website can be easily navigated. Have a friend look for something on one of your deeper-level pages — say an article or product. Were they able to locate it quickly? Is the location intuitive? If not, now is the time to fix it.
2. Check URLs
Are your website URLs intuitive and easy to understand? If a person looked at them, would he have a sense of what the page was all about? Look at any page on your site besides your home page. Copy the information in the address bar and send it to a friend. Can they get the gist of what your page is about without actually viewing it?
3. Check browser compatibility
If your site doesn’t display correct in one or more web browsers, you’ve got problems. Visitors will turn away in droves. Before starting your SEO work, check to make sure your website renders correctly in all popular browsers, like Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome.
4. Research keywords
Do your homework. Take time to conduct comprehensive keyword research to determine terms buyers use when searching for your products and services. Google Adwords Keyword Tool is great for identifying keywords and building related content.
5. Optimize images
Try right-clicking on an image and look at where it says “img alt”. Does this accurately describe the image? Is it even there? The alt tag is what is seen by search engines when they crawl your site. It is also there for visually impaired readers. Making your alt tags relevant and descriptive improves the accessibility of your site and helps with search engines.
6. Meta description relevance
Check your meta description (the part below the title in the search results). Does it accurately describe your website? Does it invite a random user to click on it? Make sure the answer to all these questions is “yes”.
Great tips on webdesign. Your first tip is of course the most important one, making sure that that the SEO recognizes your website or it is all for nothing. Making sure to scrutinize your content. Keywords, optimize images, checking your urls, browser compatibility, and of course meta description relevance all so important.
All important tips and I think making sure you have a solid content development strategy that can keep the traffic you receive engaged is really important too. Using Web Analytics such as Google’s to optimize pages will enable you target and compete for relevance search terms.
As a publisher on the Web or a website creator, there is nothing better than writing a new post or launching a new feature and then watching the traffic come rolling in. The problem is that the standard web analytics suites leave users waiting several hours, at best, before reporting on the traffic. Google Analytics provides a tremendous amount of depth and analytical capability, but the data that it collects from a website is not available immediately or even after a short delay. It could be hours before the data from a given website turns up on Google Analytics. The legacy analytics products allow you to see aggregate counts of hits, visitors, page views, and other statistics over a 24-hour period. However, they do very little to give a website creator a picture of what is happening on the site at any given moment.
If a website is interacting with users in realtime, providing constant updates and prompting for responses from the users on any number of different platforms, the analytics package had better be able to keep up. This chapter looks at a couple of new analytics packages that allow for monitoring your web traffic in realtime, and then we’re going to dive in and create a small analytics application that can be deeply integrated with your site.
The web can be used in a variety of ways to make contact with users. Contact with the
expert, high level user may be most fruitful using web forums and discussion groups, in
which users and producers can exchange views and information. In other contexts it may
be instructive to think in terms of customers rather than users. Commercial websites
which are trying to find out what their customers need and what their views are of the
products on offer will ask visitors to provide brief details of themselves and to complete
on-line surveys about their views of the service provided – for example, ‘did you find
what you were looking for?’. We feel that there is an obvious carry-over to the purveyors
of statistics, and commend such techniques to producers.