By Kay Frenzer
Many people build web sites that chase visitors away. The following tips will help you avoid the mistakes that make a web site less than effective.
Music
Music is a huge turn-off to many people, especially if they are browsing from a work computer. Often when visitors reach a site that has music, they move on immediately. It may not be to their taste, may be too loud, or could just be inappropriate. If you must have music on the site, give the visitor the option to turn it on and off.
Giant Sized Text
Tiny grey print is hard to read, especially for those past a certain age. However, very large text looks amateur and can also be hard to read. Browsers now make it easy for visitors to increase the size of text on a site if it’s too small for them to read. For font color, usually dark grey or black is best unless the background is dark.
Black Background
Black backgrounds may look cool, but are hard to read. Consider your audience; for music and art sites black might be a good choice. However, as a commercial site owner, you don’t want anything about your site to be difficult.
Gigantic and Unoptimized Photos
It’s a good idea have photos above the fold, but make them a reasonable size. They should also be in some sort of orderly formation – big photos helter-skelter across a site are distracting. Photos should be optimized so they load quickly. Even small photos should be optimized… it all adds up, and visitors leave a slow loading site. If you don’t have a program that will do it for you, do a Google search – there are online photo optimizers that will do it for you.
Frames
Web sites with frames don’t index well. Depending upon how they’re set up, the search engines most likely will not see the most important part of your site – it will be a big blank space. Frames are old-school anyway. There are much better ways to build a web site.
All Flash Page
Make an all Flash page and the search engine sees absolutely nothing. If you’re already famous, or a brand name, you can get away with it; otherwise you’ve got to have visible (to the search engines) content. This is what the spider sees when a full flash site is crawled:
[ NOTHING ]
Google AdSense
Why would you send your visitors away from your site? Unless your site is designed to sell from affiliate ads and AdSense, keep the visitors on your site and sell them your own products.
Long Pages
Site visitors don’t like to scroll a lot. Your most important content/photos should be above the fold, and a little scrolling after that is okay. But if you have a great deal of content it should be on separate pages. This is a good opportunity to utilize SEO, too, since you can optimize for more keywords and will have more pages for the search engines to spider.
Kay Frenzer is an SEO Strategist, with years of experience in helping clients’ sites reach the first page of Google for top tier keyword phrases. Read her blog at SEODiva.net. Want to learn more about SEO? Sign up for the SEO Diva Newsletter and get monthly tips and advice.
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