How to Improve Your Website

Having a web presence is essential for everything from the little ma and pop locations to big business corporations. There are many people in the world who live under the premise of: if it's not on the internet, then it doesn't exist. So since a web presence is essential, you should know how to make that web presence work for you.

I have developed and designed web pages and sites for individuals and businesses for many years, as well as teaching web basic design classes at a community college and computer programming and coding at the university, and all my experience has taught me what is necessary for a successful webpage.

However, there are five basic things every web page needs in order to be successful that are very often overlooked by many web developers that can make a big difference in repeat traffic to your site, harvesting information from your site viewers, and converting sales or clicks into money for you.

Improve Your Website Tip #1: Call to Action

When someone visits your website, you will have no way of knowing who they are, getting in touch with them again, or enticing them to stay on your page or return to your page if you don't give the website viewer some type of call to action.

You want to get the website viewer to DO something while on your page. One of the best ways to get information from a website customer is to provide an information newsletter or ezine that is free to sign up. Nowadays people are a bit more particular about what they will give their email address out for, so offering a free prize or downloadable ebook might just entice them to give you that all important point of contact.

Additionally, you want to keep them on your page as long as possible, so instead of providing everything they need on one page where they have to scroll and scroll to read, give them links to more information. And avoid the tired CLICK HERE tags... use something more interesting and exciting like: learn more... keep reading... get this amazing product now. Well, you get the idea - entice the reader to keep reading, keep going, keep viewing.

Improve Your Website Tip #2: Error Pages

If you own a domain, and the website visitor gets a page wrong, but has the right domain, they will see a 404 error. Many people, even web developers, don't know that you can customize this 404 error for your entire site. Absolutely! You can even use your own logo and header and whatever text you want to let your visitor know this is not an active page on your site.

If you leave it with the standard 404 error, you aren't doing what Improve Your Website Tip #1 tells you to do, which is a call for action.

A specialized 404 error page with links to other pages on the site that DO function will likely keep your visitor on your site much longer, not to mention it might bring visitors to your site who ran across the page quite by accident. Also, this will help a lot with pages when you update and perhaps someone in a forum somewhere had directly linked to a page on your domain you had removed or moved. A special 404 error page will keep the visitor on your site and give them alternative links to view live content, whereas a standard 404 error message would likely cause them to just close the browser and go elsewhere.

Improve Your Website Tip #3: Privacy Statement

These privacy statements that tell your viewers exactly what date you collect and what you do with that data are so important that Google is said to use whether or not you have a privacy statement on your site to help determine your ranking.

A simple statement such as: "We value your privacy and will never sell, trade, give away, or otherwise disseminate your personal information, including but not limited to your email address, name, address, phone number," etc, etc, etc. Of course, if you do have partnership or an opt in sharing agreement where the website viewer clearly knows they are opting in, that's okay, but include it in your privacy statement.

Of course, this statement needs to be true if you place it on your webpage, and honestly, if the statement isn't true - then shame on you!

Improve Your Website Tip #4: Contact Information

Nothing screams scam artist like a website that has no means to contact someone with the company or website itself. If you are a small business and don't want your home phone that's associated with the account on your website, I'd highly recommend getting a second line just for your business. Having a means to contact you other than just a generic email address is absolutely essentially for building trust, and it is another thing Google looks at when ranking pages, so they say (you see, no one knows for sure what Google uses to determine page rank.)

Improve Your Website Tip #5: Keyword Rich / Natural Flow

Your content on your pages should contain your keywords for your product or service, and while you want to have a high density of keywords, it won't do you any good to have good keyword optimization but when you finally get someone to your site they are turned away by the poor writing on the pages.

When writing for keyword optimization, the text may appear to be a bit repetitive, but it should always make sense and just be a bunch of words in order to get more keywords on your site. Think of a viewer who doesn't know how keywords work, and how would they read your website copy? If it doesn't make sense, is choppy, poorly written or doesn't flow well, ditch it and start over with better copy. Keywords versus quality, quality should win, hands down, and keywords are really a distant second.

As the internet continues to evolve, you will soon see that keywords are going to change drastically in the near future. Latent Semantic Indexing, Google's baby, and live human search sites are soon going to do away with keyword stuffing and optimization and we will see more relevant search results. Don't write for the search engines - write for your potential customers, and learn how to market your site other ways.