Is Your Website Letting You Down?

Every so often I make a note of a web address that I see either on a van, shop or in the local paper and take a look at the site.

What I invariably find is a website that could do with plenty of improvement. Most often the home Page is a picture with a few links or in some cases just a collection of links.

What is also evident is that the sites have mainly been designed from an aesthetic view and not from a functional viewpoint.

That is, they generally look ok but they were not clear as to what they are there for, and are never going to be found by someone searching in the search engines.

If you're a business owner with a website take another look at it and ask yourself.

• What do I want my visitor to do?
• What search terms do want to be found for?
• Does the site look good?

Now if the main purpose of the site is to get visitors to contact you then the test of how effective your site is in the number of contacts you are getting.

If you want to be found for the phrase "Skin care Products" . Then simply type it into yahoo, Google and MSN and see if you are in the top 30 entries. If you are good, if not then you aren't going to be found.

Does the site look Good? You don't need to win a design award you just need to make sure that the site is easy on the eye and easy to use. Take a look at some of you competitors sites and see which ones you prefer.

Better still get someone else to look at it see what they say.

Measuring Your Performance

To understand how visitors react to you site its important to use some form of visitor tracking.

Today almost all sites use Google Analytics because it's good and its free. Using tracking tools you can find out things like

• what pages visitors visited
•  how long they stayed on the page
•  where they went from a particular page
• Where they came from
• What keywords they used.
• etc