Some of the best website quality improvements may be easier to make than you think. The search engines pay attention to your website quality scores and other metrics that you can control. The visitor’s quality experience can also be measured and improved, which results in new customers. Here are 10 tips to help you improve your website quality.
10. Keep Track of Analytics
Using your Google Analytics information to make informed decisions about website changes will keep you on-track to continual improvement. Ignore the data and you delay getting to a great website with ever-increasing traffic. Start with changing the pages that have the highest bounce rate first and work towards keeping visitors longer and growing the conversion rates.
9. Use Pinterest
Get an Pinterest account and add the “Pin It” button. Not supplying a ‘Pin It’ button for visitors to pin your graphics to their Pinterest accounts is ignoring free marketing. Sure, everyone has Facebook Like buttons but Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social networks around. If you are not being pinned, you are losing new customer opportunities.
8. Optimize ALL of your Images
Don’t think you’re done if you’ve only optimized the larger pictures on your website. Optimize all of the little ones that make up arrows, rounded corners and such. Reducing load time is critical. Every little bit helps.
7. Get your Blocking Scripts down to a Minimum
If you haven’t tested your site lately you probably have too many blocking scripts that have to load prior to displaying a page. This dramatically lowers your website quality score from search engines. Test website score here: Google Insights.
6. Minify your .CSS Files
Most programers don’t minify .CSS files. This can leave them bloated and slow down loading for the page being rendered. The page will get a lower score from search engines if you don’t correct this.
5. Conduct A/B Testing on Landing Pages
If you haven’t done A/B testing on landing pages to find out what appeals to your visitors, you are missing out on easy improvements. This is similar to not monitoring your analytics data. A/B testing makes it easy to tell what page changes work. Go with the page that does better!
4. Join Social Media
Reach out by being active on social media, providing a newsletter or blogging. Pick something and keep being interactive. You need to represent yourself as an authority, gain new website visitors and get more relevant links back to your site.
3. Clean up Mistakes
Plain and simple. Review your pages and links on a regular basis. Fix broken links, misspellings, pages that are orphaned, and keyword overload. Set a time on a regular basis to review and improve your websites quality.
2. Compress and Cache
You probably send WAY TOO MANY bytes over the internet. This is especially critical for mobile devices browsing your site. Compress your pages and utilize browser caching. This is critical for search engine website quality scoring.
1. No Time? Pay for a Quality Website
If you went the cheap route and got your website from a “sign up” discounter like GoDaddy and others, you probably didn’t understand that items 2 – 10 even mattered. Move your site to someone that cares about your success, can make you a high quality website and provides hosting on fast servers.
If you regularly spend time working on your site you can improve it dramatically within a short time. If you fall into the group of website owners that barely has time to load new content, pay a website developer to do an audit. You can work on the issues one at a time or hire a professional developer to help on the tougher items.
