First, you absolutely need to know what you are trying to accomplish with your website. Are you selling a product? Offering a service? Something else? What do you want people to do once they get to your website? You may be scratching your head saying "Good question" or "I'm not sure". Well, if you don't know, how are your visitors supposed to know? It's your job to guide visitors thru your website.

If you don't know what you're trying to accomplish, you're in trouble. Visitors know why they came to your site, but are you providing the information they want? Are you helping them accomplish what they want to do? If not, they'll just move onto another site that does. Bye-bye sale!

Realize that lots of traffic does not equal success. Just because you have people coming to your site doesn't mean they're buying. To measure your website's success you'll need to know your conversion rate. Your conversion rate is the rate at which you convert visitors into customers. This may include things like buying a product, filling out a request form, calling for more info or subscribing to your newsletter.

If you have 100 visitors to your site and you convert 3 of them, your conversion rate is 3%. Simply divide the number of converted visitors by the total number of visitors within a specified time period to calculate your conversion rate. If your site has a very low conversion rate you know you need to make changes.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Traffic Generation Most businesses are receiving un-targeted website traffic. In this case, you're marketing to people who don't care about what you have to offer. These people will never buy from you no matter what the circumstance. When this happens, you need to better target your marketing and advertising. Also fine tune your site so it comes back at the top of the search results for more specific and relevant keywords. If your site is improperly optimized people won't find it regardless of what it says.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves using relevant keywords in the correct way with proper arrangement of content and navigation. Probably the most important (and time consuming) part of seo is link building. To rank high in an internet search you must increase the number of in-bound links to your site from quality sites with relevant content closely related to your own.

Content Your content must be informative and logically organized. It should clearly convey what makes you better than the others. All content must be based around the main subject of your website. This may seem obvious but you'd be surprised at how many people don't get this. For example, if your website is about gardening you shouldn't have articles about video games on your website. If you do this you'll just confuse visitors and damage their opinion of your company, product and/or service. If you are on topic, your content should be naturally keyword-rich and not overly saturated to the point search engines construe it as spamming.

Make sure your text is broken up into concise and manageable 3-5 sentence paragraphs. Don't overwhelm readers with large blocks of text that scream "Don't read me!" Instead lay out your content using noticeable and appropriate headlines for easy reading and navigation. Tell the visitor exactly what they will get if they read the text below the headline so they can easily scan your site.

Navigation Let visitors easily find their way through your site by arranging links and buttons in a way that's easy to read and understand. Make sure your links are named appropriately. If your link reads "Download PDF" visitors should be able to download a pdf when you click on it, not be sent to the contact us or other page that obstructs their access to the info they want. You also don't want to have too many links. Too many links will have the same effect as too few. It's confusing and will prompt your visitors to leave.

The first page visitors land on should be informative and let them know that your site has the content they came for. Then make sure they can easily navigate to that content. Don't try to give visitors everything on the first page or this will overwhelm them. Allow them to achieve their goals quickly and easily in as few clicks as possible instead of baiting them through irrelevant pages or unnecessarily long forms, etc.

You want to strive to optimize your website, believing there's always room for improvement. If you need help with your website there are many experienced web designers out there who can review your site and offer suggestions on how to fix it. Some things will be very obvious while others will only come to light after extensive testing. The important thing is to try something new, review the results, adjust as necessary based on those results and test again. This will make your website more and more effective at doing what it's supposed to do - sell!

We're here to help you. The web experts at Think Tank Designs can perform an evaluation of your website and make recommendations on how to make it function better. Call (909) 393-6363 or fill out our quote request form.

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