Virtual tips for the savvy business owner!

Creating a website that lists your products and services may not be enough to attract new business. To keep your business growing online, it must past the test with search engines and Web users. Keep reading to learn how to gauge whether your website is making the grade.

Here are some of the factors that raise or lower your grade with search engines and potential clients:

•    Number of images without ALT text—a high number of these means that text is located within images on your website and search engine spiders can’t read it.
•    Readability level—can a person with a high school education understand your website, or is the language extremely technical? Unless you are targeting a very narrow niche audience, using easily understandable language improves website results.
•    Metadata—your grade might go down as far as search engines are concerned if your website’s content and formatting are jumbled together with lots of metadata tags.
•    Use of headings—your readers will become confused if there are too few headings to break up content, or new headings every two or three lines. Try to use one or two main headings per page to keep content easy to read.
•    Search engine data—there are also external factors that determine whether your website’s making the grade. You may have a great looking site that isn’t attracting much attention by search engines because of problems like the ones mentioned above.
•    Do you have a blog and does it draw traffic and links? This one’s self-explanatory; it’s good to have the additional online presence of a blog, if it contains meaningful content that others like to link to.

One way to test your website’s performance in these areas is with tools like Website Grader. This free SEO tool measures your website’s marketing effectiveness by comparing things like website structure and search engine data.

Once you’ve learned how your website rates, it’s time to take action. Use this useful feedback as the basis of your website improvement plan. Red flags like difficult readability and too many headings are easily corrected.

Keep in mind that the purpose of this type of analysis is to make your website more interesting and useful to your target audience, which, in turn, results in more conversions. Any time you spend revamping your site to raise its overall grade will probably translate into increased traffic and sales. And that can move your business to the head of the class!

Filed under: SEO Tips, Website design