Optimizing your website

So you’ve got a website. What’s it doing for you? How do you know?

There are 2 different kinds of optimization I’m going to write about here and in upcoming articles.

1. Search engine optimization (SEO), making your site friendly to search engines, so they will present it to searchers;
2. User optimization, or making your site as easy for your user to find what he’s looking for as possible.

There’s a ton of stuff out there to read about search engine optimization. Getting your site seen on Page 1 of search engines is better than advertising in a lot of ways. While companies do pay good money for specialists to perform this service for them, it is possible for someone with a small site to learn to do it themselves. If you do it yourself, that is free advertising.

There is less information out there about user optimization. The deal is, if you pay for advertising or put a lot of work into getting searchers to visit your site, do you know what to do to maximize the chances of them finding what they were looking for?

So right now I want to talk a bit about making your site user-friendly.

The most important rule in designing a website is that your users should be able to find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. They should be able to see immediately what the purpose of the page they have landed on is, and they should be able to see where they can go from there without scrolling around or clicking. Then, when they click the link that looks like it is going to take them where they want to go, they should end up exactly where they expected to be.

If surfers don’t see what they are looking for within a few seconds, they will click away and find some other site to look at.

Example: If you have a phone sex site, you may have a warning page the surfer will have to click past before getting to your main page. Is there any content on it that gives the surfer a reason to keep going, or is there a scroll box with legalistic mumbo-jumbo? Look at it critically. Does your main page have XXX rated photos on it? No? Then get rid of that warning page. Make the photos on the entry page R-rated and provide enough information on it so that anyone landing on it will know what they have found, so they can either leave or continue.

Making the user click past a pointless entry page is causing your site to lose customers before they even find your content.

Now, open your main page. Close your eyes. Now open them again. What is the most noticeable element on your main page? Is it clear without reading anything that it is probably a phone sex site they have landed on and are about to enter?

Is there anything that has been added to the page that distracts from that idea? Is there a big block of dense text talking about…something? Move it to its own page.

Presumably you have links to other pages. There might be a “gallery” page, “about me”, “blog”, “news”, “links”. How easy is it for the visitor to find the links to navigate to those other pages? Is there an obvious navigation bar, or are there some links or buttons here or there?

Once there, how easy is it for the visitor to get back or visit another page?

Is anything cluttered? There are sitebuilders out there that make it easy for users to randomly jam odds and ends into their pages. Resist the temptation. Don’t do it.

Where do you have a “call to action”, telling the visitor what to do, ie, “call me!”? On every page?

You need to think about all these things, because your visitor does not intend to spend any time thinking at all. Think about it.

If you need to clean up your website, get to it!