  Does this sound familiar? You’ve spent a lot of time and money building your company’s website to reveal it to the world. Then it sits dormant in cyberspace for the rest of eternity (or until you are replaced).
Even as a professional web developer this happens to me occasionally. I spend most of my time working on everyone else’s website but my own. In fact a coworker emailed me today notifiying me that I still had a employee listed on our site who left the company at the beginning of the summer. As I think about it, I have to ask myself is my website making the grade?
You might be facing the same thing. You’ve poured the effort and the finances into it and now you want to know if your site is bringing in the ROI you had hoped for. Here are a few tips to evalaute the effectiveness of your website. By comparing these items against your site, you should be able to extrapolate a score on how your site is doing in comparison with the normal standards of today’s websites.
Ten Evaluation Tips to Make the Grade
Do you have a Blog?
Blogs are important for today’s websites. Blogging is a great way to reach your customers and share your thoughts, opinions and offerings on relevant topics. It creates an ongoing interest in your site.
How Many Pages Has Google Indexed?
The Google web spiders come to your site occasionally and look for new content to index. Generally, the more pages you have in the Google cache, the better you will fare. (This is another bonus of a blog; new content to index, keeping the crawlers happy and hard at work).
What is your site’s readability level
Your site is scored using a simple formula that measures the approximate level of education necessary to read and understand the content on the page. In most cases, the content should be made simple so that a majority of the target audience can understand it. Do this by keeping your sentences short and using words with fewer syllables.
Is your site optimized?
Optimizing your content is a key step. However, to ensure you give your valuable content the best chance of drawing traffic from the web. Here are some tips… Complete metadata for every page on your site (site descriptions & keywords). Use alt tags on both images and links, so that the search engines can process and understand them. Let the search engines know exactly what your site and pages contain by making sure your keywords show up in the correct density and appear in top of your content and the title of your pages.
How long is your domain name registered for?
Most experts agree that you should register your domain for a long time, because search engines factor domain stability when looking at your pages. Show Google and other search engines that you are committed to the domain name, take a leap and renew it for 5 years!
How many sites link to your site?
One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites link to it. This is called inbound linking. The more sites you have that that link to you, the better because search engines see this as a vote of confidence. It is an indication that your website is trustworthy and contains good content.
Have you promoted your site recently?
Utilize Twitter, StumbleUpon, Google Buzz, Facebook, Delicious and other bookmarking sites… enough said!
Not convinced? Read these articles…
Social Networking: Just A Fad?
Top Ten Reasons I Love Facebook!
Social Networking... More Than A Midlife Crisis?
Managing Your Online Reputation
Do you have an RSS feed?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a standard way to easily deliver content to visitors after they've left your website but they're still interested in your subject. RSS is commonly used with blogs, news feeds, and other formatted news or other sources of information.
Do you have a conversion Form?
Conversion forms are the primary way to get leads from your website. Without forms, you can't convert your website traffic into customers. They are easy to set up and very customizable. Let your visitors engage with you by giving them an opportunity to fill out a simple contact form and following up with them.
Have you measured your site’s traffic lately?
Check your analytics regularly. Watch your bounce rate and pay attention to how visitors use your site. Monitoring your site traffic will help you optimize new content and improve your site. Evaluation on your traffic and site stats will help you draw conclusions from your competitors and other sites that are related to your business and make the necessary adjustments.
There it is! Ten tips to improve your website so you have an A+ site. As traffic goes up, hopefully ROI will as well…
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