11 factors that influence online success – Website performance markers
- Original creative design that echoes your brand
The design should be in line with industry acceptability though pushing the norms so it’s not totally conformist. It must in every instance be immediately identifiable by any visitor as to what the site is about and have intuitive navigation whilst being avant-garde. - Proper Coding
Proper coding to W3C standards means the site will be compliant with accepted world standards. Further audience specific coding is important as additional code needs to be written for “broken” browsers that have their own stilted interpretation of the standards. Bloated sites and pages stuffed with poorly optimised images and video will hurt your rankings. - Properly Programmed
It’s no use using programming that is not supported by key sections of your market. If you are selling to institutions such as banking, you’ll find that their web browser security is set to “paranoid” which means it will block all but the most mundane code. Therefore any facilities on your site using Flash, Java or even humble Java Script must have fall back facilities using basic code. This is what we call degrading nicely. The majority of sites we see will not degrade nicely and in the worst cases page construction falls apart completely and the site becomes un-navigable as the menus disappear or become dysfunctional. - Properly Researched
The Internet thrives on search results and king of the search results is Google providing some 80% of the worlds domestic and business search traffic. Key to success here is to use the right keywords in the right place in the right manner and frequency. Ideally research the key terms for your business by quizzing the websites of your leading providers in your sector. Then rank all the terms you’ve gleaned against real world search usage to determine the most effective. Then optimise the site using these terms. This search engine optimisation routine is a complete science in itself, but is well founded with clear rules. The basics are for you include a bare minimum of 100 and preferably 300 words per page. Make sure the prime keywords are used in the page title, meta description and titling on the pages. Cross link on the prime key words and ensure the key word density is between 4 and 8% per page. That will get you a fair way to making a reasonably well optimised website. - Good content
Search engines are much cleverer now and, through what they call Symantec learning, know what constitutes a good site from a poor site and grades it accordingly. Don’t try and fool the search engines by overly keyword stuffing. A good SEO company will be able to optimise the site for both human and search engines without resorting to what are called Black Hat techniques that will ultimately get your site blacklisted. Google has expanded its algorithm that catalogues and ranks sites to include Video and PDF files so this is all valid content if used in the right way. - Relevancy
This word crops up all the time in the search engine optimisation world. Keep your website relevant and on target. This strengthens the message and makes it clear to the search engines what you are all about. - Keep it current
Stale websites eventually get side lined as they offer nothing new. Keep your site fresh with new and relevant articles. One way to do this with the minimum of effort is to have a blog running for all your news and take a feed from your blog to a news flash on every page. This way when you update your blog with a new article you also update every page on your website. - Link and Be Linked
One of the biggest performance markers is to have a goodly number of relevant back links to your website. Backlinks are links to your site from other websites. Even a handful will noticeably improve your rankings. We invariably advocate an exchange links programme to our clients and provide visiting webmasters the exact code we want them to use when linking to us so they use our chosen keywords how we want them to. - Social Media Marketing Shares
More than a complete seminar in itself is the boom phenomenon of SMM. If your clients Tweet, Facebook and alike, then add the SMM share buttons to all your pages so anyone can rebroadcast your pages to their followers. This way your interesting pages can be shared at a click with the viewers followers. - Correctly Hosted
When a site has been coded properly it will use the smallest files possible so that the site can be delivered quickly and give a great visitor experience. Google monitors and rates sites for performance. All the good coding work can be undone by simply hosting on budget servers that are maxed out for profit rather than performance. There are free tools available to performance rate your hosting for your site. - Marketing
Promote and monitor your website on a regular basis to all the key search engines, the niche market search engines and directories and the local gazette sites. Use Google Analytics to monitor your site traffic and work out where improvements can be made. Use Google Webmaster to tell you where improvements can be made to your site. Test and measure all the time.
That should give some additional considerations for getting you the best advantage for your website on the net and therefore getting a greater return.
About the Author.
This article was written by Simon Thomas who has been active on the Internet since 1995 and runs a number of commercially successful Internet projects. He supports the building of clients’ websites to the correct standards, not just SEO, and maintains on-going search engine marketing for clients that value high performing websites.
For more information.
t: 01279 871 694
e: simon@toucanweb.co.ukw: www.toucanweb.co.uk
Copyright Toucan Internet LLP 2009©. All rights reserved.
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