The following are five best practices to help your website become a powerful marketing tool for your business:

1) Try to avoid splash pages

Splash pages are graphically rich and aesthetically pleasing but very annoying stumbling blocks to a good user experience. I personally can’t stand reaching a website and have to “click to enter” a website. It drives me mad! Splash pages are a dying breed and thankfully, not too many web designers create them for clients anymore. It is much better to just present your website’s visitors with the information straight away without making them click through what I would call a wall to the real navigation of the website.

2) Go easy on the advertisements

Although the argument about whether you should monetise your business website using paid advertisements or not is outside of the scope of this blog post, I would certainly argue that if you have made the decision to add adverts to your site then do so wisely. Usability research has shown that video adverts can be distracting so if you are going to add these then be very careful about where you place them.

3) Think about your navigation and page structure

Remember Jacob Nielsen’s rules of thumb about good navigation – reduce memory load, etc by making navigation simple, always have a clear way of reversing errors and help users to keep their sense of where they are on their website. If you’ve studied any Psychology then you might have heard about an individual’s need to maintain their internal locus of control. This applies to website’s too. Don’t let your website’s visitors got all hot under the collar or they won’t enjoy the user experience. They might not end up completing the tasks that they visited your website to do and might click away never to return.

One common excuse is that “my website has lots of information so it is going to be difficult to navigate”. This is a poor argument and even complicated websites that be improved by having good, well structured navigation and page layouts and links. Look at Amazon for instance.

4) Don’t let your visitors get lost in your website

Don’t break the Back button, allow easy reversal of actions that have gone wrong (e.g. adding that extra product that you didn’t want), breadcrumbs, etc. All of these things help to reduce cognitive memory load, relax the visitor, help them to complete tasks on your website and improve the user experience.

5) Auto play video and audio is a big no no

I know that this is the year 2011 and most web designers have wised up to allowing the visitors to click the play button on audio and video if they wish to. But lately I’ve seen these autoplay green screen video sales person popping up on websites that I detest! I refuse to offer this service to my clients because I think that it’s just a flash in the pan concept that will fall by the wayside. Online video is great don’t get me wrong but the autoplayers just won’t stand the test of time in my opinion.

Now many companies argue that conversion rates improve because their website’s visitors can just sit back and learn all about the Who, What, Where, How and Why of the company with having to read any text. But call me an old fashioned kind of guy but I like to scan text and find the pertinent information about the website for myself. Maybe these increases in conversions can be attributed to these videos and split A/B testing will help to identify this but I don’t like them, I don’t believe in them and, therefore, I won’t use them. If a client really wants one though then the customer is always right.

“Don’t you dare load Dreamweaver”

I remember the days at college when my lecturer said “Right, none of you even dare to open Dreamweaver! We’re using Notepad!”. We all glanced around at each other with shocked expressions on our faces at the time but I later came to appreciate this early lesson. I, like most other developers, use Dreamweaver on a regular basis. It is, afterall, the defacto standard in web design and development tools amongst most designers and developers. But that early lesson stuck in my mind and I soon realised that learning HTML the hard way soon began to pay off.

“The lessons that the notepad lesson taught me”

Looking back on that important lesson I realised that I had become much less reliant on (and sometimes even annoyed by) software aids such as auto code completers such as tag finishers. There is a certain benefit in having that low level, detailed view of the code that you are developing. Having the ability to switch in a out of design and code views in Dreamweaver is equally, if not more useful, because it provides the designer or developer with that holistic viewpoint that we so crave. New developers on a shoestring budget who cannot afford to purchase expensive (and frequently updated) software now have the benefit and being able to get down and dirty with code with Notepad but, ultimately, every good developer should be able to develop in either way. Dreamweaver is quicker though and, professionally speaking, just more fluid to manage multiple projects on simultaneously. And let’s face it, the real world of the web design business demands this.

But Notepad is nice for those nifty little changes right?

Here’s a little video clip that I found on YouTube which shows a quick example of scripting HTML in notepad. This is similar to the first lesson that I had at college when I was learning to script. Enjoy!

Targeted traffic

First of all let’s differentiate between Targeted Traffic and Traffic. Traffic is any visit to web pages on your website. Whereas Targeted Traffic is traffic to web pages on your website that you want! This is achieved by optimising for the correct keywords and keyphrases that will attract the type of website visitors that you are targeting. Simple eh?

Keyword research

Keyword research is the phase of a search engine optimisation campaign in which you discover which keywords and keyphrases your target marketing are typing into the major search to find products and services like yours.

So how do I get more targeted traffic to my website then?

Right now you’re asking the right question. You don’t want just any old traffic because traffic is just that…traffic! I suppose you could alter the old business cliche about turnover and profit and say that traffic is for vanity but targeted traffic is for sanity but that wouldn’t be telling the whole story. There’s a couple of other vitally important factors involved here and those are Click Through Rate (CTR) and Conversions. So basically if you have some great search engine positions on the results pages but are a low click through rate or if you have lots of traffic coming through to your website but you aren’t converting then there is a problem which needs solving. It is the job of your Search Engine Optimisaion pro to discover where the problem resides and tackle it with an appropriate solution.

Potential problems

One problem that you might encounter is an aesthetically unpleasing website with lots of traffic, another problem may be poor information architecture, and yet another problem may be poor usability. Poor page loading speeds are the obvious ones and the most straight forward to fix so I won’t go into the easier solutions too much. So fixing some of these issues will potentially improve your existing traffic conversion rate and then you can get on with some more search engine optimisation tasks.

Driving targeted traffic to your website QUICKLY

Firstly when someone says quick, lots of people immediately think blackhat or even greyhat. But those methods may get you banned from search engines and, especially if you’re a smaller business, you don’t have much if any chance of getting back into the search engine that you’ve been banned from once it’s happened. So don’t do it.

This is why it is so important that you seek the advice and guidance of a Search Engine Optimisation professional. A guy at an event once told me about his new website and asked me “so how do you actually get ranked well on Google then?”. I told him that I can’t really explain the ins and outs in a few minutes but I’ll give him a call soon to discuss it. He said that he had been trying it out himself so later that evening I checked out his website. To my dismay he had white on white text (a typical black hat technique). I asked him what or who had prompted him to incorporate such an ill advised feature into his website. He said he had searched for his keywords and a competitor was doing the same so he had just done the same! He removed the offending hidden text following my advice but it just goes to show that it is worth following the advice of a professional.

White hat search engine optimisation techniques are the way to go. The best way to drive targeted traffic to your website is to write quality, timely and credible content and publish it onto your website. You could have a blog and post regular content. Depending on your time constraints it may also be feasible to monitor and accept comments onto your blog. After a while you’ll begin to recognise which are the spammy ones and which are for real. Blogs are much easier to manage than forums which, essentially, require real time monitoring. In addition, you can use the plethora of available social media websites, authority websites, forums and directories to promote your website.

It must be noted, however, that a sustained link building effort which follows a well defined internet marketing plan is always best. What I mean by this is that I see lots of search engine optimisation efforts which start off well but then begin to taper off. This is sometimes due to complacency but often due to not following a structured plan.

Resting on your laurels when you meet a keyword position target could be a mistake. What about your competition? What are they doing to optimise their sites? This is particular true of highly competitive keywords and keyphrases. Whole marketing departments in the larger firms could be working on these terms right? This leads me on to another point – be realistic! What is your budget? How much are you prepared to pay a Search Engine Optimisation professional to get you your desired search engine positions? Is your budget sufficient? If you aren’t hiring a professional but thinking of doing it yourself then how are you going to undertake the training? How much will this cost in terms of time and money? Wouldn’t you rather be running your business instead? If you are thinking are undertaking enough training to get involved in your own businesses search engine optimisation project then this is a fantastic idea but just be aware that your time does have a value and you must spend your time wisely.

Conclusion

So in conclusion, first of all it is important that your website conveys the correct message about your business. If it doesn’t then change it. There are no quick and easy ways to get good rankings on the major search engines. If the keywords you are going after will drive quality traffic then they are worth spending effort, money and time on because they will produce a return. If you need quick wins then go for long tails keywords are part of your short term strategy and premium keywords for for long term strategy. This makes sense and works for many businesses.

If your website is not aesthetically pleasing, modern, up-to-date or professional then again change it. Even if you’re already actively in the process of search engine optimising your website it is important that the website itself looks good, relfects your business properly, is usable, the pages are linked together in a semantically logical way and so on. If not then the existing traffic that you receiving may not turn into repeat visitors. In fact they may never ever click through to your site again from the search engine results page because they might have already clicked onto a competitor’s website. What I am saying is protect what you already that then go looking for more. Just like a business person will look after his existing customers before prospecting for more customers. It is vital that your site is right before you go for more search engine positions. You wouldn’t invite guests over to an untidy house, direct them towards a dirty table and try to seat them on a broken chair would you? Your house represents you just has your website represents your business.

Happy Search Engine Optimising!

More advice available from the Computer Coders at Web Design Barnsley

This article is also published here How To Increase Your Website Traffic Quickly