When’s the Last Time Your Site Had a Tune-Up?

 Just like a car needs regular tune-ups, so does your website. A lot of time and effort went into building the best site possible, so don’t squander all of your hard work by letting it fall into disrepair. Going back to the car analogy for a moment—when you buy a new car, it’s in pristine condition, with everything working perfectly. In order to keep it in tip-top shape, you need to be vigilant with oil changes, washes, repairs, etc. Well, your website is the same way—it may be perfect to begin with, but it needs constant monitoring and upkeep to stay that way. Keep a close eye on the following areas of your site to ensure that it keeps functioning in optimum condition:

Technical Issues

First and foremost, you need to check for technical problems like 404 errors and broken links. Having a bunch of errors and links that no longer work is very damaging to your site—with the search engines AND human traffic. Because websites are dynamic creatures with content constantly being added and taken down, constant vigilance is required in order to avoid 404 errors and broken links. If you have social share buttons for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc., you will also want to periodically check them to see if they are doing what they should. Act like you are a first-time visitor to your site and fill out any and all forms you have to test whether or not they work and if they are easy to navigate. Lastly, check your page load speed and adjust it accordingly so you won’t lose traffic because your page loads at a glacial pace.

Feedback and Analysis

Once you’ve made sure that your site is in good working order and is firing on all cylinders, it’s now time to focus your attention on what can be gleaned from any customer feedback you’ve received, unsolicited or not. This data really is your bread and butter and can provide you with valuable information that can have a huge impact on the success of your site. For example, you may think your site’s layout is intuitive and easy to navigate, but the actual users may think otherwise. Whether or not you choose to implement this feedback is, of course, your choice, but this raw data can be your best friend for determining what is and isn’t working on your site. You will also find it helpful to study your analytics data (you DO have some sort of analytics program running on your site, right?) to find out where your traffic is coming from, what pages are the most popular and which ones have the highest bounce rates.

SEO

Last, but certainly not least, you should keep current on the latest happenings with search engine optimization. If the whole Google Panda debacle has taught us anything, it’s that SEO best practices are constantly changing and evolving; just because doing things a certain way took you to the top of the SERPs in the past doesn’t mean it will always be the case. Therefore, it’s vital that you stay on top of the latest changes and developments in the SEO world so you can make sure that your site is easily found by humans and indexed by the major search engines.

While checking under the hood of your site may not be the most glamorous or sexy of tasks, it’s something that you can’t afford NOT to do. A successful, highly functioning website, much like an exotic sports car, requires a lot of TLC, maintenance and monitoring, so don’t neglect these much-needed tune-ups and calibrations.

Landing Page Optimization

Landing pages play an important part in converting visitors to customers, so great care needs to be taken when creating these pages. A landing page is a specialized page where someone is directed when they click on your link from an email or social media sharing sites. Since the landing page is the first thing visitors new to your site will see, it’s of the utmost important to make sure this page is optimized for optimum conversion. Following are a few suggestions for making the most of your landing page.

Keep it Simple

The primary purpose of a landing page is to tell your visitors what you want from them, whether that be purchasing a product or signing up for a service. Thus, you want to have as few distractions as possible to divert visitors from the main call to action. Avoid superfluous images and text that can overwhelm and divert a visitor from the reason why they’re on the page to begin with. Your landing page isn’t the place to experiment with different fonts and design elements. The best plan of action is to keep the fonts simple and easy to read and to use white space and headers to organize your information.

Put the Important Information Above the Fold

People want to be able to find the information they seek and do so fast, so it’s extremely important to place your call to action towards the top of your landing page. You definitely don’t want to make visitors have to scroll over halfway down the page to find the sign up button. Make it as easy as possible for them to find the appropriate information by putting it at the top of the page and list the less important data below it.

Hone Your Content

Since your landing page’s function is to achieve a conversion as quickly as possible, you’ll want to use text sparingly, yet effectively. You don’t want to throw up just any old content; rather, it needs to be carefully crafted so it has the most impact. After all, it is the wording that will be doing the selling, so you need to pay attention to every word, from the first line in the headline to the last one in your call to action. Just remember to keep your message clear and to the point to avoid any confusion or uncertainty.

Keep in mind that there’s no exact science to landing page optimization and that constant testing and experimenting is necessary to find what will work best for your particular company. If you aren’t getting the results you are after, try tweaking your headlines and the wording of your copy. Don’t get discouraged if at first you aren’t able to succeed—just keep trying!

The Importance of Meta Tags

Over the past couple of years, the use of meta tags have become widely debated, with many abandoning them because they don’t have a measurable affect in search engine placement. While this is true, meta tags don’t factor into how the search engines will rank your site, they still have an extremely useful function and if you aren’t using them to their full potential, you’re seriously hampering the effectiveness of your website. Meta tags control the information that’s listed about your site on the search engine results pages (SERPs) and it’s crucial to optimize it to generate traffic and conversions. Following are examinations of the most useful meta tags and how they can boost your business’s reputation.

Title Tags

Title tags define what your business is about, so you definitely don’t want to leave it blank. If you do, Google will create one for you and do you really want a third party defining your company for you? Of course not, so don’t overlook this crucial step. When choosing a title, make the most of the ~60 characters that are available to you by listing your organization’s name and a descriptive tag line. You will want to create a different title tag for each individual page within your website by acting as though you are placing an ad for each particular page. Take some time to come up with copy that will entice users to click through by thinking of what would lead you to be interested. This process sounds very time consuming, but it only takes a few seconds if you do them as you create the pages.

Description Tags

These tags generate the description that shows up underneath your website’s title on the SERPs. Again, while Google has acknowledged they don’t use this information for ranking purposes, it’s still very important to include it. This is your chance to list more in-depth information about your company and to represent your brand so people will be interested in learning more. Don’t merely repeat what you put in your title tag; instead, enhance your title, be as descriptive as possible and don’t waste this precious real estate with quotes, dashes or other non-alphanumeric characters. If you don’t create a description tag yourself, a random snippet of text will be chosen from your site by the search engine and it may not always make sense or be relevant.

When you take time to optimize your meta tags, you are signaling to those who come across your website that you’re a business that wants to be taken seriously and cares about its customers. While it’s desirable to be ranked well in the search engines, you need to keep in mind it’s actual human visitors, not search engine spiders, who will be buying your product!