Website Usability: Before You Begin Promoting Your Website
Posted Under: Website Usability
Before you begin promoting your website, take a close look at what you are offering other people, stand back and give your site an honest critique.
Here are some things you must consider before you begin promoting your website.
Are you providing enough interesting content to your visitors to keep them interested enough to return? All web surfers obsess over information that serves their needs and most web surfers fall into the information junkie category.
Before you begin promoting your website, be sure you have great articles, videos, links, tips, tactics, free reports or other worthwhile information for your visitors to keep their interest and insure they return to your site.
Free stuff will attract visitors like bees to honey. Web surfers act like children when something for free is offered to them.
If you don’t give your website visitors something for free; you are missing opportunities for building your list, generating additional web traffic and making sales.
Offer your visitors a free ebook, software program, “How To” email course, service or anything of value so they feel they have received some benefit from their visit to your site.
When visitors feel that they have received a good deal; they have a tendency to tell others about their deal. This word of mouth “promotional campaign” can spread, turn viral, and generate a substantial amount of web traffic.
Make sure the free offer relates to the theme of your website. You wouldn’t want to offer free marketing material to visitors if your website is about coin collecting.
Before you begin promoting your website, check your layout.
Website usability is important.
If you have a huge amount of graphics, compress and optimize your images so they load faster. Don’t use glitzy scrolling marquees, pop up windows, blinking graphics, etc. if you can avoid them. A pretty layout can be had without all this nonsense.
Match your background to your text size and color, so it can be easily read.
Keeping your layout simple without distractions will focus your visitors on what you really want them to look at. Your squeeze page sign up form, your free giveaway, your landing page link, or whatever.
Navigation should be simple, easy to find and easy to use.
Your visitors should be able to get to point A from point B without getting lost. If your site is large or has the potential of becoming large; create a site map to simplify access for your visitors.
Before you begin promoting your website you should have sufficient content already posted on your site.
In addition you should provide fresh content at least on a weekly basis to keep returning visitors interested.
Fresh content can be in the form of a video, an ebook offer, an announcement, or even just an update to your bio or resource page.
Make sure your site has correctly placed keywords in your Title tag and Meta description tag.
Meta tags aren’t used by all the search engines but for those that do use them, it will you will rank higher and it never hurts to use them.
This resource site will help you with Meta tags if you are unfamiliar with them.
http://webdeveloper.com/html/html_metatag_res.html
Avoid placing external links on your home page before you begin promoting your website. It’s not a good idea to send visitors to your competitors before you begin promoting your own site.
There are some basic NO NOs you should adhere to before promoting your website such as:
- Avoid using the words My, Me, Mine, Us, Our, and We in your text as much as possible. Instead use Your, and You. Your website is not about you, it’s about your visitors.
- Avoid using banners. Nobody likes them much.
- Avoid Logos and Awards on your site. Awards are showy and only useful to the search engines for checking link popularity.
- Avoid grammatical errors in your content. Spelling, typographical and grammatical errors reflect on your professionalism and tend to turn off readers. With the availability of word processors and spell checking software, there is no reason for these type errors to appear in your content.
- Avoid using frames. They make surfing difficult, require scrolling to read and activate links, and aren’t indexed by the search engines. In addition, many web browsers don’t support frames. Enough said?
- Avoid broken links on your website. They are unprofessional, annoying and frustrating as hell. They waste your visitors time and can drive them away from your site permanently.
- Avoid detailed explanations of the history of your company. Nobody really cares these days, however DO place your contact information on every page of your website. Your business name and address, your email address, your phone and your fax number should be visible on all pages of your website.
- Avoid uploading your website until it’s finished to your expectations. Never use Under Construction pages. If your website isn’t finished, don’t upload it.
Your website is the mainstay of your business and without advertising you will never succeed but before you begin promoting your website; make sure that it is complete, optimized, loading quickly, well designed and provides a benefit to your visitors.
