Tuning Up Your Web Site - Tuning Up
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Are you still hearing an unpleasant "knocking" coming from your web site? Then you tune-up isn't finished. There are a few more parts you need to look at. For example, are you getting errors in your site statistics? Then you need to track them down and fix them.
How about the links on your web site? I'm talking not just about the links that lead to internal pages of your web site, but the ones that go off-site. If you have any broken links, you can bet a site visitor will click them and be annoyed that they don't go anywhere. You don't want annoyed visitors. Therefore, it's a good idea to set up a regular schedule for checking for and fixing broken links.
It goes without saying that you should fix any broken links reported to you by your visitors. Which brings me to the next point: visitor feedback is golden. You should encourage it. One way to do this is with a site link, available from every page of your site, which says something like "Feedback" or "Contact us." It can lead to a form with a text box for the visitor to fill in. However you decide to do it, it's important to have an obvious way for your site visitors to communicate with you.
When a mechanic tunes a car, he makes sure it is functioning to factory specs, and measures it against certain standards. You can do the same thing with your web site. For instance, does the HTML code on your site validate to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards? You can run it through the W3C's own validator to find out. Presumably your site is not static; in that case, you'll have to validate your site's HTML regularly. You should also find out whether your site meets Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
My last two notes are so basic in a way that I'm almost surprised they're necessary. As far as most visitors and search engines are concerned, web sites are about content. Therefore, you should make sure you have content in all the important places, like your home page. Search engines like to see at least 250 words here. It stands to reason that the home page will tell your visitors what your site is all about, so you should pay special attention here. And my second point? I've barely touched on it in this article, but we have many articles devoted strictly to this topic: link building. That's really part of "Being Seen," both by the search engines and web surfers. Don't assume you can work on building incoming links to your web site once and be done with it; link building is an ongoing process.
If you put all these points into practice, you'll soon have a well-tuned web site that delivers an excellent return on investment. And a nice ROI is enough to make any site owner purr like a brand-new Ferrari. Good luck!
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