Tuesday, October 14, 2008

How to Make Your Website User-Friendly

Today I going to tell you how can you make your site to generate more profit as well being helpful in achieving your business goal. We often hear that your site should be user friendly if visitors find your site confusing or cannot successfully navigate through it, they will leave. Keep some point in mind when you make your site for visitors/users friendly. Here are three simple tips to make your website user-friendly:
1. Navigation
The navigation on your site is probably its most important element. Make your navigation bar as simple as possible. One of the worst mistakes is using an expanding navigation bar that makes the visitor scroll over it in order for the menu to reveal their options. Most often, this type of navigation bar has too many choices; your visitor doesn’t know where to go, so they get flustered and leave.
Navigation on your site is an art, and you should direct your visitors through a logical path to where YOU want them to go (not to where they think they want to go). One way to do this is through call to action buttons or CTAs. We use these buttons on all of our sites; a visitor will go to a main page, and then we can direct them to the parts of that site that we want them to be aware of. We use this method instead of an expanding menu, because we find that it is more logical for visitors. With this method, you can direct visitors to where you want them to go, allowing you to control the buying process.
Quick Tip: most “expanding menus” are created in Macromedia Flash. Search engines cannot read Flash, and therefore they will not pick up these links on your website. If the search engines do not pick up the links on the navigation bar and these links are nowhere else on your site, they cannot accurately crawl or index your site. This is search engine suicide, because without even knowing it, you are stopping search engines from understanding what your site has to offer and from driving traffic to you.
2. Page Load Speed
Page load speed is VERY important. I know that when I am surfing the Internet and I stumble upon a site that loads slowly, I get annoyed, frustrated, and don’t browse the site for very long. If your website is loading slowly, you are probably losing out on valuable customers, no matter what business you are in. here are the factors involve that effect the page load are;
· In today’s web world, we are seeing more and more images, audio files and videos. These things are useful, but you have to be careful that they do not affect the inner workings of your site (in this case, the time it takes for a web page to load).
· You want to be careful about the size of the images on your website. Both large-sized images and using too many images can cause your website to take too long to load, resulting in visitors leaving.
· Another tip is to convert videos into a jpeg (image) that only loads and plays the video when a visitor clicks on it. Yes, you may be adding more images to your website, but these are usually small image files; in the hierarchy of the web, a video will slow down your website much more than a small image.
· Another factor that can influence the load time of your website is the amount of excess code you have on your site (that is a topic for another day - but ask your webmaster, and they will know what I am talking about).
3. Information
The number one thing that visitors look for is information. They are coming to your site to be educated about your products and/or services and, most of all, how THEY can benefit. With this in mind, it is critical for the information on your website to be accurate, complete and up-to-date. Visitors will leave your site in a split second if the information you are providing is old news.

What’s that best way to provide up-to-date information on your website? The best way we suggest is through blogs and articles. By having a section on your website for blogs and articles, you can provide new, relevant and educational information to your visitors. Adding them is not only simple, but it is fast too!

So there are my three simple tips on how to make your website user-friendly.

Regards,

Monday, October 6, 2008

Impact of LSI on the Ranking of Your Web Pages

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing, On a technical level, it's computers using complex mathematical models to figure out what text in documents means.

Basically, LSI can use the other words in your page to help it figure out what your site is really about. This helps solve the problem of synonyms (where two or more words can mean much the same thing) and polysemy (where one word can mean more than one thing).

Also, using LSI, Google can compare the vocabulary of your page to the words used on all relevant websites—and all the books in its database. Therefore, you're compared against authority sites and the experts who've written "real" books! Latent semantic indexing helps search engines to find out what a web page is all about. It basically means to you that you shouldn't focus on a single keyword when optimizing your web pages and when getting links.

The web pages on your web site should be related and focus mainly on a special topic while using different words that describe the topic. Use variations of your keyword and synonyms. That makes it easier for search engines to determine the topic of your site. Google’s new algorithm will scan content on a webpage and then analyze the phrases within to determine what other related [latent related] phrases should naturally occur in that document.
LSI can have a significant impact on the ranking of your web pages.
How can a search engine tell the difference between relevant information and irrelevant information? Some search engines use LSI to achieve this goal. LSI helps improve a search engines performance in three significant tasks: recall, precision, and ranking.

Recall is getting all of the relevant information available for your search.
Precision is getting only the information that is relevant to your search.
Ranking is getting all the information ordered in a meaningful way from the most relevant to the least.

Regards,