The Seven Most Important Things on Your Site

When you are building your site, you are trying to utilize so many components that it is easy to lose sight of the goal – customer usability. After all, if they can’t use your website, what is the point of them visiting it? All the links in the world won’t help if they are broken, and content is only as good as you personally make sure it can be.

Content. If you don’t have good content, you are never going to get anywhere. When someone clicks on your site, nine times out of ten they are looking for information, whether to buy something or for research. If you are able to provide clear concise information with a humorous twist, your battle is half won.

Contact information. If the customer has a question, and merely providing the answer could mean the difference between a sale or no sale, wouldn’t you rather have the sale? Have a clearly marked “Contact Us” button with address, email and phone or fax information posted prominently, and business hours, too! Also have a ‘home’ button on every page to assist your clients in finding their way back to the main page.

Links. Don’t have unusable links on your site, or pointing to your site! This is the fastest, most sure fire way to lose customers there is. Most won’t even give you a second thought if they run up against a ‘page not found’ error – they’ll move on down to the next listing. Check and update your links regularly; both the internal and external ones. This will ensure that your site can be reached every time from anywhere.

Hooks for your target audience. You want your home page to welcome all comers, but your specific demographic could benefit from a specialized greeting. Have a special link to a subsequent page for aficionados, and lead the rest into the main portion of your site. You can shape the site like a castle, with a hallway leading away from the main entrance and various doors opening off the hallway.

FAQs. If you devote a page to frequently asked questions, you would be surprised at how much interest you get. You might even be able to subsequently rank that page if you have really good answers to a specific question. (This will cut down on use of that contact information, too!)

Organization and sequence. Make your landing page informative without being crowded. Set the hook and reel them further in, page by page. Hint at a freebie on the landing page if you like, but make it require accessing several levels down to download or utilize it.

Use graphics, but only relevant ones and not so many that your page is too crowded. There have been several cases when the ‘best practices’ in regards to graphics have been proven wrong!

By setting your site up with the user in mind, you will already have done most of the things needed to optimize your site, and it will be easy to add the components necessary to start ranking higher in the search engines.