Seo Strategy – Quality Webdesign
Published on March 2, 2009 |
By David Leonhardt
The look of a website is unlikely to result in conversions, or even to keep visitors wandering about your website for long. I am sure you wander onto plenty of beautifully designed websites that don’t hold your attention.
On the other hand, I come across dozens of websites every day that say “Amateur” or “Crap”, and those sites surely suffer from back-button leakage…even those whose content should hold our attention. Bouncy websites. I think you know what I mean. The look, or at least the quality of the look, is vital to keep people from leaving before even giving your website a chance.
I do not pretend to be an expert in design and what look is most professional or credible. Furthermore, the look you need will depend both on the demographics of your target market and the type of product or service you are selling. For that reason, the following design tactics are of a fairly general nature and are offered strictly from a Sticky SEO perspective.
- Get a professional design that looks at least somewhat modern, using common design conventions, and in a style that suits your products and target audience. This is the basic focus of all marketing design, web or otherwise.
- Make sure your website is not designed around square corners. Some corners are OK, but if your design is based on boxes, it looks like a basement job, since that is what basic HTML delivers. It’s nice that your 12-year-old nephew wants to help, but it won’t close a sale.
- No Adsense-type ads. Yuck! Honestly, that is the biggest sign of a low-quality website. In fact, “made-for-Adsense” has entered the lexicon to mean poor-quality. Some directories specify “No made-for-Adsense websites”. A run of these text-style ads across the bottom is not bad, but the more prominent the PPC ads are on your page the cheaper the site appears. I can’t tell you what it is. It’s like walking into somebody’s house and something just smells out of place. You can’t quite place your finger on what the odor is, but it feels uncomfortable and you just want to leave. By the way, just like odors, some ads are OK. I have nothing against advertising. The more the ads look like content or like part of the website, the better. Adsense-style ads just look cheap. They smell. They are Bouncy.
- Keep it clean. Like any marketing material, if it is too cluttered, people feel overwhelmed and lost. I was at a hardware store not long ago, and I was trying to find a very simple mouse trap. I felt totally lost when pet supplies and gardening tools and metal bolts and …well, let’s just say everything was jumbled together on the first shelf I looked at. And I left without digging through the “rubble” to find what I needed. Just as in a retail store, your website has to look organized and welcoming. The difference is that once you arrive at a messy store, people make a much larger commitment to walk in and are less likely to walk right back out, even if it looks cluttered. You can’t just hit a “back” button and show up in another store. Your visitors will have no trouble hitting the “back” button if your site looks like a jumble, and Google and Yahoo will know right away to stop sending you visitors until you quite literally tidy up you act.
- Make sure your web pages look good in various browsers and in various screen resolutions. If 70% of people see a superb website and the other 30% see garbled images and text, that means one in three visitors will bounce back to the search engine … telling the engine that your website is not very useful (and it isn’t if it can’t easily be read by 30% of searchers).
- If the page is extremely code-heavy and image-heavy and takes too long to download on a significant number of computers, you will have the same problem. This might not be an issue if your target audience is web designers; they all have plenty powerful computers. But if your target audience is farmers, your page better be slim and quick-loading, or they’ll just bounce back to the search engine they came from.
- Make sure your website is available, which means good hosting. If your page is unavailable, 100% of visitors will bounce back across a wide variety of search terms. If your page is unavailable too often, you can kiss your rankings goodbye…at least once usefulness is fully integrated into the search engine algorithms.
- Make sure your code is working properly. Seeing a PHP error makes the site look broken. I don’t buy from someone who might be selling me broken goods. Subconsciously, anything that appears not to function acts like a big do-not-enter sign, and will increase your bounce-backs to the search engines.
- Make sure your design is good, but not over the top. If your visuals call attention to themselves and distract from your message, you will lose people. Notice how many of the most used websites have the simplest designs? Clean. Professional. Simple.
- Give people the option of viewing larger photos of the products or usages. This creates time engaging them in the sales process rather than in the bouncing process.
- Font size…need I say that it should be big enough for all your readers.
- For bigger websites, breadcrumb navigation is key. When someone lands on an interior page, it’s like being transported into the middle of a dark cave. Breadcrumbs show people where they are and how to get out, giving them an alternative to “Beam me up, Scotty.
- Avoid automatic audio playing. I can guarantee you that 99% of people browsing from a cubicle, as well as others in shared space, will zip back to the search engine in no time flat. That sends a pretty bad signal to the search engines. Audio is good. Audio is useful. Let users have control over when and whether to play any audio message.
- Nix the cover page, especially one that shows a slide show on start-up. This is a major barrier for the search engines, since the cover page does not have lots of relevant, juicy content, and to people, who are forced to click an extra time. And if you think people can easily scroll to the bottom to click the “skip intro” on a flash presentation, consider how much easier it is to click the “back” button and choose a new website that does not place a needless barrier to its visitors.
- Add “trust logos” such as the Better Business Bureau or an industry standards association. People will stick around longer in a place that feels safe and secure. Yeah, I know…but people are like that.
- The look of your website and the elements you choose to enhance that look all affect how your site is perceived. Perception will drive your visitors’ actions. Based on what they experience in the first few seconds, visitors will decide whether to bounce or stick around long enough to delve into your content. Ah…content. That’s what really makes people stay.
Category: SEO Tips Tags: 3in7, common design, design conventions, design tactics, design web, marketing design, professional design, SEM, seo strategy, seo tips