Rule 1: Make Your Site Usable (Put your Customer First)

Any website should be built from the ground up with two main goals in mind.

Firstly you need to think about your users and their experience when they use your website; they must be your priority. Your website must be nice to look at, and nice to use.

Don't ever think that you can go to far in helping them navigate around your site. Having users that get lost or confused is an absolute no-no, because they will leave in a flash.

Try to think of every conceivable way that someone could have reached a page, and cater for them. Every error should contain a solution. Never, ever write an error message that says "An unknown error has occurred", think about why that error has occurred and provide possible solutions.

Ensure that your website is well hosted, reliable and fast. There is much research that shows because there are so many options available users will leave and go somwhere else if they are made to wait more than a few seconds for any web page.

15 Points To Consider:

1. Don't make your user have to "work out" where to go next, guide them.
2. Make it easy to read.
3. Make it very clear what a page is about.
4. Use appropriate call's to action.
5. Check regularly for broken links.
6. Make the navigation user friendly, obvious and easy to use.
7. Use lists to aid clarity and focus.
8. Use colour to relate ideas and/ or sections.
9. Use photos, images, illustrations and diagrams to help convey your message.
10. Have a professional look and feel to your website.
11. Use clearly defined headers and sections.
12. Work hard at removing any complexity or ambiguity, simplicity is the key to a wide audience.
13. Focus on your goals, drive conversions.
14. Link your logo to the home page.
15. Make sure that your contact info clearly available on every page.

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Remove Barriers to Entry

Your second primary goal has to be optimizing for search engines - this after all is where the vast majority of you free targeted traffic will come from.

Only keep specailist date or information behind a login. Search engines can't index pages that sit behind a login so they won't drive you traffic.

Steer clear of session ID's, session ID's are used to track users, keep them in your cookies or in a session variable - never in the URL. Search engines will NOT cache a page with a session ID in the URL.

Static URL's Are Your Friend

Static URL's are preferable to dynamic URL's, URL's such as http://www.heresalink.com/directory/heres-an-article/ are generally better than URL's such as http://www.heresalink.com/page.html?article=104. The more complex the URL the less chance of it being indexed.

It'ss easier for the search engines to follow and cache pages with static. Hyphens are generally considered better than underscores because search engines will separate your URL using the hyphens, you then have as set of ready made keywords for your page.

Your web development team can solve these issues for you.

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Get You Internal Linking Structure Right

Try to build in a linking structure that allows easy access to every page, users need to be able to reach most pages in as few clicks as possible. This is sometimes called the "3 click rule", as this is often quoted as the maximum number of clicks that should be nessesary to reach any given page.

Search engines such as Google assign a rank - PageRank - to every page of your website, generally the further it is from your homepage the lower the PageRank will be. So as long as you maintain usability, try to link as many pages as you can from your homepage.

If your site is large, don't get carried away, rule 1 still applies as the most important, and also remember that deep linking - that is linking to pages other than your homepage - will help bring visitors directly into your site. Possibly meaning that they are just 3 clicks away, as they have bypassed your homepage.

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