Properly written, frequently updated and easy to find content are critical to the success of your website.  Think of your website as a living organism and the content its food.  In order to keep your site healthy and looking good you need to feed it on a regular basis.  Well fed sites rank higher in search engines and drive repeat traffic.  Content starved, or more specifically update-starved sites fall by the wayside in search engine rankings and give people no reason to come back.

1.    Is your content searchable?

If your website was written from scratch then it’s likely that you don’t have a search.  People expect that function and you should give it to them.  There are some modules you can add to static sites, but your best bet is migrating to a content management system where searching is a built-in function.  This is especially important if you have lots of, or complex content.

2.    How often do you update your website?

I can’t tell you how many times I ask this question only to hear “never”.  Believe it or not, people want to hear what your business is doing, so tell them!  Beyond just informing your customers that you are alive and your business is busy doing things, search engines will love you if your content changes regularly.  The more it changes the more they’re forced to come back because it’s in their best interest to stay current also.  If your content never changes, your site will invariably be ranked lower than some with frequently updated content.  There are numerous ways to keep your content fresh and we will discuss some in the next installment.  Suffice it to say that if you are never updating your site then you are probably getting very few repeat visitors and your search engine rank is very low.

3.    How do you let people know about the updates?

Supposing you are actually updating your site, the next challenge is to figure out how to let people know.  This is another topic of discussion for the next installment, but in short, you need to let people know on your site that content has been updated (cross-linking and self promotion) and externally that content has changed via other outlets like social media, partner sites and blogs and more.  Some changes like adding inventory is not as critical as other updates like press releases but the objective for all of them is to drive new and repeat traffic to your site.

4.    Was your content ported from your company’s printed marketing materials to the web?

Web design is different from print design and unless a person with web experience made the translation, your web content might not be up to par.  It is common for companies to take pamphlets, flyers, newsletters and other print media and try to convert the content word for word to their websites.  This is bad practice.  What you can do is take the ideas and concepts that you are writing about as well as the overall design theme and build your website around this, but just copying and pasting is not advisable.  Content for web needs to be written slightly differently and most certainly formatted differently in order for it to make sense.

5.    Are you advertising other people’s stuff on your website (i.e. do you have banner or other ads on your site)?

We will start with the one exception to this.  If you are running a website whose entire existence is to generate ad revenue through traffic then clearly you need ads for other people’s things on your site.  However, if you are a standard business or a corporation and you have banner ads on your site then you need to print up all of those ads and paste them on your building or storefront for everyone to see because that’s all you’re doing on your website.  The people that design these ads are building them to attract people to their sites.  If they go to their site then guess what, they’re no longer on yours.  The $.05 generated by the click is probably not enough to offset the cost of a lost customer.  Stop advertising for other people.

1. Design
2. Navigation
3. Technical Attributes
4. Content & Updates
5. Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

Next:  Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

Let’s face it, if your design sucks people won’t stick around. Period. Why would they? You wouldn’t shop in a store with cluttered shelves, carpet on the walls and a crazy person in the back popping up to remind you that you’re the millionth visitor when right next door is a store selling the same goods and services with clean, well organized stock, friendly service and no distractions. People are visiting your website and in their minds your website is a direct reflection of the quality of your business. Crummy website = crummy business. The inverse is also true and something you can and should take advantage of. If you’re a small business with a stellar website you have a great opportunity to put yourself on a level playing field with the big boys.

1. It is immediately apparent to a casual visitor what your company does (have a non-employee do this)?

At first, asking a question like this might sound absurd, but it is If by just scanning your homepage a visitor cannot immediately determine the purpose of your site and your business then you are doing something wrong. Plus, if a real person can’t tell what you do then it’s fairly certain that search engines also will have no clue what you do and therefore will rank your page lower than you would like.

2. Does your logo look professionally made? Be honest.

If you didn’t pay a professional to do your logo and instead used either a pre-packaged one or had a friend or relative do it for free then there is a very good chance that your logo looks like it was done by an amateur… because it was. Remember that done right, your logo will provide you with [good] brand recognition. People often balk at spending a few dollars here, but this logo will affect the design of both your online and your printed materials and if it starts off looking bad then you can expect subsequent marketing materials to follow suit.

3. Is your site at all [handicap] accessible?

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has published guidelines (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/) to use to ensure that your website can be browsed by individuals limited or no sight, vision and movement. In order for many of these people to browse the web they need the assistance of special tools that either magnify the screen or read the content aloud to them. While it may sound like a daunting task to make your site accessible, the truth is that by at least working toward a base level of accessibility you are helping all of your visitors. The core guidelines basically state to:

Separate structure from presentation. This means don’t make your entire site in Flash, or out of images. This also means use proper underlying tags to format and frame your content.

Provide text and text equivalents. This means that your site should have text (duh) and that any images on your site are tagged with text describing the images. This is good for accessibility as well as to make your site search engine friendly (SEF). Doing this kills two birds with one stone.

Make content understandable and navigable. This means using proper links on the site for navigation, proper headers and limiting your use of non-traditional navigation, linking and page orientation.

By following these guidelines when developing your site you are opening it up to a greater number of visitors as well as using proper techniques to make your site more understandable and usable for everyone.

4. Did you purchase images and graphics for your website?

If your website has clip art from your Microsoft Word, or images that you just found online and saved or simply contains no images then this is a red flag. As we mentioned earlier, your visitors can tell the difference between quality and junk and if you’re using clip art then you are leaning toward the latter. Secondly, if you just borrowed some images from other websites then you are stealing and breaking the law. Also not good. Purchasing images can be extremely cheap ($1-$10 each in many cases) and make your site look far more professional (probably because the images are done by professionals). Please note that when I say images, I do not mean only photos. This includes backgrounds, illustrations, etc.

5. Does your site have a consistent look and feel on every page?

If your site has five different sections, one for each line of products you sell and every section has different fonts, backgrounds and branding just so your visitors understand that they’re in a different section then you are not only insulting the intelligence of your visitors, but you have made a lot more work for yourself come time to update the site. Or, if you have simply hand-coded every single page and are not using any consistent template or formatting across any pages then you’re in real trouble when you want to add new content or change a layout.

The key here is to choose a format that works for what your objectives are and run with it. You can customize each page a bit with images and text, but being consistent is critical from a search engine optimization (SEO) standpoint as well as from a visitor sanity standpoint. If Sony can sell DVDs, computers, service plans and digital book readers (www.sonystyle.com) using the same formatting then your business can offer service X and widget Y using consistent formatting and styling.

1. Design
2. Navigation
3. Technical Attributes
4. Content & Updates
5. Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

Next: Navigation