Top tips to make your website design work better for your business - part 2

In part 1 we started looking at some tips to make your website design work better for your business. The guide continues here...

2c – SEO - Search engine friendly web addresses

Search engines look at the address of every page on your web site and try to extract keywords from the content of the url. Therefore you should try and put as many of your chosen keywords as possible into your folder paths and page titles. If you have a CMS which doesn't produce pretty page titles with real text titles then you could ask your web developer to set your system to output content with "search engine friendly URLs". Some examples:

BAD page naming (no keywords):

http://www.webdesignbristol.co.uk/page1.html ... or
http://www.webdesignbristol.co.uk/?p=184

GOOD page naming keyword rich file names:

http://www.webdesignbristol.com/web-design-bristol.html

2d – SEO – Additional pages to add

Adding the following pages to your website is proven to improve indexing by search engines and make it easier for customers to find your website:

Sitemap

A sitemap provides links to every page on your website and helps search engine spiders which follow those links.  Sitemaps can be hidden from the public but evidence suggests that a visual sitemap is also more search engine friendly.

FAQ

Having a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page helps users find information faster.  An FAQ page is good for visitors and may also help with search engine rankings

Links page

With links to relevant sites (link exchanges)

3 – Home page design and layout

Many visitors to your site will only visit once and the majority WILL leave without clicking a link (Bounce). You need to make sure that your home page is working to convert as many visitors as possible into customers:

• Call to action, Call to action, Call to action! Always lead your customer towards the conversion.
• Layed out in easy to read and digest sections
• Links to all key content on home page
• Not to wordy (short keyword rich paragraphs)
• Good design makes your brand look higher quality
• 3 Second sell - People are impatient and WILL judge your site in 3 seconds

<< back to part 1  |  continue to part 3 >>

Mentor Digital is a web design agency in Bristol contact us on 0117 9237933