Stream of consciousness SEO

Ok, so I am going to succumb to another list about great website content for SEO … since that seems to be what floats people’s boats out there in the interwebs.

1. Put your audience first – what will they be looking for on your site? What will turn them on, and keep them there to read all the good stuff and maybe even purchase your products or services … and what will scream out at them to just click right off the site.
2. Use the tools at your disposal. There are many free tools to analyse how people are interacting with your website and most of them are free. Make sure you install Google analytics at the very least, and learn how to use it. This is powerful information that too many people ignore.
3. Keep your sentences short and sweet. People will be scanning the page, so they need to get the sense of what you are saying quickly. Avoid long, complex sentences – attention will be quickly lost. 
4. Review your site content as if you had ADHD. Flick your eyes over the page. Do your main messages stand out? Are your calls to action obvious and compelling? Do you immediately understand what the page is about and what you are expected to do from here?
5. Make things clickable. People expect everything on a web page to be clickable – headings, pictures, anything that5 looks like a button, logos. So don’t disappoint. Make them clickable, link them to relevant places, AND, use alt text so when they mouse over your links, they can see what they are.
6. On that note, avoid using Flash. Sure Flash animations can look great, but they are pretty much invisible to the search bots.
7. Keep your best stuff above the fold. All the user research shows that many people will not scroll down the page. So never put your most important calls to action at the bottom, below the fold. Never.
8. Make sure you use some keywords on the page. Don’t “stuff” unnecessary keywords into the headings and text, but DO make sure there are sufficient relevant words on the page to be recognised by a search engine. You would be surprised by the number of sites that just have something like a product name and product photograph on the page – and no searchable text.
9. Make sure text is text, not an image. Don’t make the mistake of using a graphic designer who puts all the fancy fonts etc into an image – which looks great on the page, but can’t be reviewed by the search engines. You may have to sacrifice a little of the designer-ness, to help your site be found. And after all, there is no point having a fancy looking site if no-one but you ever sees it, right?
10. Get second, third and fourth opinions. Test your site for usability and to see if your messages are getting across. Don’t just ask people who will say that it is great, even if it’s not. Ask your target audience, your customers, for their opinions, and be prepared to make changes if what they say makes sense.

There you go, a great little guide to awesome web content. If you do all of those ten things, you are way ahead of about 60 – 70% of the sites currently out there. Of course there are plenty more things you can do once you get all of this right, but this list is a great place to start.

Karen