Tips For Building/Redesigning Your Website

Building and redesigning your website can be a daunting task, but it is one of the most important parts of your internet marketing strategy. Here are a few tips we thought we’d share:

Use Effective Page Titles

You want your page titles to stand out from all the others when someone performs a Google search. You also want your titles to provide useful information. A good practice is to use the format “Keywords | Business Name” for your page titles. Often times sites will just put a bunch of keywords in their page titles, which only helps it blend in with the thousand other sites using similar keywords. Keep it to a couple solid keywords with a vertical bar and then your business name to help set you apart.

Flash Isn’t as Flashy as You Think

Websites built in flash may look cool, but all this really does is make your site invisible to search engines. Nifty animations here and there are just fine, but don’t overdo it.

Search Engines Like Clean Code

There are a lot of “website builders” out there, but you have to be careful about which ones you use. Some can add a lot of unnecessary code and this is not good when it comes to SEO. WordPress is a great, free platform to build your site on and it generates much cleaner code for your site. However, you want to choose your WordPress theme wisely, some themes have cleaner code than others.

Create Stellar Content

Art touched on this in his SEO basics post, but we can’t reiterate enough how essential good content is for your website. Your content should be relevant, compelling, and there should be A LOT of it. Also make sure you spell-check and have other people read it before you publish. You can have all the content you want, but if it doesn’t make sense chances are people aren’t going to read it.

Don’t Overuse Images

Sure, people like pretty pictures and graphics, but too many images can slow down your site and wear on your user’s patience. Search engines also cannot read images; when you do use them remember to add “alt text” to your image HTML so that the search engines can pick it up.

Think About Site Navigation

It’s important to consider how site navigation affects the user experience on your website. If a user goes to a specific page, can they get back to where they were before (without hitting the “back” button ;)? Using what are called “breadcrumbs” is always a great idea. They are really helpful when it comes to SEO and especially for users navigating through your site.

Keeping these tips in mind the next time you build or redesign a website should help both you and your site visitors. Cheers!