JESAOnline

Keeping a fresh face or bringing old sites up to Web 2.0 standards is very important for your business to compete online. Every year thousands of businesses hire freelancers or in-house web design employees to give their website a face lift. The majority of them will make big mistakes by approaching the project in the wrong way. A website redesign done wrong can:

• lower your search rankings,
• lower your website traffic,
• reduce your leads,
• reduce your sales,
• and damage your company's reputation

Optimizing content for keywords

A website redesign is more than just a new look and feel. Having good copy presented in a way that can easily be parsed by humans AND the search robots is equally if not MORE important that a slick user interface. The search strings that you would like people to use when looking for your site online need to be interlaced throughout your content. Those keywords should show up in at least 5% of the text. The more, the better without being redundant :)

Heavy Pages

The average human attention span is 15 seconds. Can you remember the last time you visited a slow site? Was it yours? Your front page should load in about 2 seconds and your sub-pages should load in no less than 8 seconds. Sticking to these guidelines will all but guarantee that your site visitors will stay to browse your site instead of bouncing back off to search for your competition.

Google will also rank your site lower if the pages are more than 100kb or just take too long to load. If your host is not up to speed or your site is loaded down with flash and tons of graphics this can dramatically affect where your site comes up in searches.

Fancy layouts are NOT better

If your site visitors are lost in your layout, the calls to action may not be clear. Too many pictures, too many buttons, too much text can all distract from what you want your users to do on your site. Navigation also plays a big part in how fast your users can find the information they are looking for. Make paragraphs short so they are easy to scan. If at all possible, keep the average of your writing to a High School reading level. Your site should engage the user and help them to feel empowered by your content. The short attention spans of modern users also limits the time you have to make this connection.

J.E. Shannon & Associates knows your advertising dollars are precious and we desire to help you make those dollars go far! We implement all these strategies and more to make sure your new website redesign is clean and professional looking without sacrificing search engine friendly aspects and giving your users an easy-to-use interface. Contact Us today to get your redesign started!

If you want to be notified of future blogs by J.E. Shannon & Associates subscribe to the RSS Feed below or Follow us on Twitter @jesaonline!