Is your website search engine friendly?  Is your website working for you?

I was speaking to a computer savvy small business owner who had built his own website.  His website was rather nice looking,interactive with custom graphics. Therefore he was disappointed that users were not interested at looking at his products and would not stick long enough to go to the next page.He was getting a a couple of visitors a day but had no sales.

The first thing I l noticed was the long time I had to wait for the page to load.  This is a huge mistake because users are impatient and do not want to wait for a site to load!  His website page was a whopping 420 KB.  Web usability experts recommend page sizes in the range of 50 to 70 kb.  He had done his website using one of those web builder programs, I think it was iWeb. Where as Web Standards Compliant Code is concerned these web/template builders are far from good.  The code generated is non-symantic with redundant markup making the page huge in size.

Server issues impact search engine ranking. Sites that frustrate users by being slow or unavailable are not the type of sites any search engine wants to present in its results.

You can create the most stunning website, with flash animations, rotating logos, video, audio features,but the truth is, if your website doesn’t have any depth, no amount of “beauty” will get visitors to come back, let alone purchase anything! Also, if you have all these features your website will be slow to load and users will close their browser before your website loads.  Users find too much animation irritating and search engines do not index Flash.

Keep your website simple.  Validate your website code.  It is very important you have clean code so that search engines can read it easily.  Do not be tempted to have too many images on your website.  Make sure your website loads quickly and is easy to navigate. Make it easy for users to contact you.  Have good content and update your website regularly.  Updating the content to keep your customers and search engines happy. These few simple tricks can do wonders for your site.

Author: Rhonda Baynes, Independent SEO Consultant