Web tips & advise

Searchability

Making your site easy to find is essential to attracting more potential customers. Here are some quick tips on increasing your web traffic:

• Key word s & phrases; Identify keywords and phrases that captures the essence of your website and then use them as much as possible through out your website. Search engines capture these keywords or phrases found in your website and then match them up against search queries.
• Text instead of images; A common mistake is to have text in images that is important for search engines to capture. For a search engine, text in an image is not searchable. What is searchable is the name of the image and it would pay off to name all your site images specific to their function.
• Referral traffic; When your website is linked on another website, a search engine sees that as credibility and will increase your "search points".
• Sitemaps; Sitemaps lists all the links and pages of your website. Some sitemaps can even list the priority of each page and can allow you to specify the importance of each page. Sitemaps can be submited to search engines such as Google and make it easier for website to be searched.

Design and navigation

Getting the design right is important to your website. More is not always better as it can clutter your website. Simplicity is they key, making a website simple and easy to navigate will help retain visitors. When someone visits a website they want to be able to find what they are looking for quickly. You need to be able to look at your design from the eye of a customer and this is sometimes more difficult if you are too familiar with your own products and services. Bring the experts in ; web designers and developers have had experience in the industry and will more the likely be able to design a more effective and productive website.

Continuous analysis

A website easily gets neglected. There are various tools out there to help you analyse your website statistics, one such tool is Google Analytics and its free. It is important to be able to quantify the effect on changes to your website. Statistics can help answer the important questions such as, Is my new design more effective in keeping visitors at my site? Is my advertising campaign generating more traffic? Which pages do users visit the most and which do they not? Reacting on these statistics is vital, when something is not working, change it! When it is working, capitalize on it!

Advertising

In many competitive industries, having the right design and keywords is not always enough. Advertising on other related websites or common visited websites can increase your websites visibility. Having the right marketing campaign can have an enormous positive impact on your website or company's productivity.