Resources
Top Ten Things You Can Do Today To Improve Your Web Site
By: James R. Dragoo, Jr.March, 2007
- Ask a partner, vendor, customer, or other contact to link to your web site
- Run a validation check of your web site
- Check your web site’s page titles for relevancy
- Add or Update your content
- Check your web site pages for relevant keywords
- Add descriptive alt attributes to images
- Be sure that your text and link colors stand out against your web site’s background color or image
- Test your web site in multiple browsers
- Be sure you have consistent navigation throughout your web site
- Consider starting a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) advertising campaign
Detailed information
Ask a partner, vendor, customer, or other contact to link to your web site
Having other quality web sites link to yours is a good way to make your web site look good to search engines like google.com and yahoo.com. Contact a partner, vendor, customer, or other contact and ask them to put a link to your web site and their web site.
Run a validation check of your web site
You can check the code of your web site against accepted standards using the W3C’s validator at http://validator.w3.org/. Just enter your web site address and the validator will check for errors that may prevent your web site from displaying correctly in all major web browsers.
Check your web site’s page titles for relevancy
You can easily check for page titles by going to your web site and looking at the status bar at the top left of your browser. It should say something like your title – Microsoft Internet Explorer. The next question you need to ask is whether the page title is relevant to that page?
Add or Update your content
Adding to or updating the content on your web site often is the single most important thing you can do to make your web site look good to search engines.
Check your web site pages for relevant keywords
Checking your web site pages for keywords is a little more technical but still is not hard. Go to any page on your web site and in the top of the browser click on view and then on an option that reads source or page source in the coding that pops up look for a line of code that reads <meta name=”keywords” content=”xxxxx”. If you see this line of code your key words will be the words in between the quote marks after content=. Just like the page title earlier you need to ask if these keywords are relevant to this web page.
Add descriptive alt attributes to your images
All images on your web site should have alt attributes. An alt attribute is a brief description of an image. If for some reason an image does not load on your web site the alt description will be shown in its place so your visitors will not be left in the dark.
Be sure that your text and link colors stand out against your web site’s background color or image
You do not want your text or other information to be hard to read because it does not stand out enough against your background.
Test your web site in multiple browsers
If you are like most people you use Microsoft Internet Explorer to view web pages. However some browsers such as Mozilla FireFox may display your web site differently. You can download FireFox for free, install it, and view your web site with it. Does it display correctly? Is it still functional?
Be sure you have consistent navigation throughout your web site
Your web site probably has some sort of navigation bar, usually at the top or left side. These links or navigation should be the same and in the same spot on every page.
Consider starting a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) advertising campaign
Cost-Per-Click is like paying for advertising space on a billboard or in a magazine except your ad appears on search engine web sites such as google.com and yahoo.com. Instead of writing down a phone number from a billboard they can instantly jump to your web site from the search engine.
If you have any questions concerning anything in this article or would like more information give Blaine’s Business Services, Inc. a call at 877-525-2463 and we would be glad to help you.