Web Site Management

A Web Site Self-Examination Checklist / 2

6.  Are your web pages short and single-focused? Long, bottomless web pages get very little readership. So keep your pages short — 200 words or less — and to the point.

Don’t forget — your visitors are looking for instant gratification. They want specific information: your rates, your location, your amenities, your room descriptions, or your availabilities. And they don’t want to sort through a lot of other stuff to find it.

So make it easy for the visitor to skim through your pages. Organize your site into short, single-focused pages — each with a specific topic or theme. Use short paragraphs with subheads or boldface lead-ins to help the reader skim for information. And when possible, use bulleted lists to enumerate your features and amenities.

There’s an added benefit to having more pages. You’ll have the opportunity to optimize the additional key word phrases we discussed in question 3.

7.  Do each of your pages contain links to all of your other pages? Having a complete set of site navigation links on every page is not only a courtesy to your web site visitors, it ensures that the search engine spider will visit and index all your pages.

If your site uses a graphical navigation bar — with "mouse-over" buttons that change shape or color when touched by the curser — consider adding a set of textual links at the bottom of each page. This, too, will help you with the search engines.

8.  Do you have a visitor tracker on your web site? Do you know how many people visited your web site last month? Do you know how they found you? Did they come from BBOnline, BedandBreakfast.com or did they use a search engine? Do you know which search phrases they used?

Do you know how long they stayed on your site and which pages they visited? Or did they take one look at your home page and lose interest? If you’re not using a visitor tracking service, you’re essentially in the dark.

There was a time when you'd have to pay anywhere from $10 to $40 a month to have a good-quality visitor tracker on your site. But now, most of those same features can be found in the free Google Analytics tracker. While some of its features are designed to track Google AdWords advertising conversions, most of the features are useful for any web site. It is transparent to the user, offers password protection, and tracks all the pages on your site.

9.  Do each of your pages display your contact information? When a potential customer wanders through your web site, he or she could decide to become a paying customer at any time — while viewing your home page, your rooms page or your map page. And when that happens, will your phone number be there? Will there be a link to your email address? Don’t make your customer go off looking for a way to contact you. Put the information on every page.

10. And finally, does your site make these common mistakes?

— Do your outbound links open in the same window, effectively taking your web site visitor away from your site? All external links should open in a new window.

— Do you have important text in a graphic, just to make it look better? The type face may be more attractive, but the search engines can't "read" a graphic. Use regular HTML text.

— Do you use special fonts on your web pages? An esoteric font may look perfectly fine on your computer, but entirely different on most other computers. Llimit your choices to fonts that are on all computers (Arial, Times, Verdana, Comic, Georgia, etc.).

Deep Creek Arts is a marketing communications company in Whittier, North Carolina. For more information, visit our web site. Or call Ellen and Charles Snodgrass at 800-901-4423. Email EllenCharles@DeepCreekArts.com.

Other Articles:

Internet Marketing
(introduction)

Search Engine Optimization

Link Popularity

Domain Management

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