Link Bait Ideas | Small business marketing ideas and strategies

How to Make Your Site Standout

April 24th

Part four of our SEO for Beginners Guide is all about your visitor and making them happy. This is a topic that is very near and dear to my heart. By focusing on your users, you can create a usable design, a sensible architecture and outstanding content that will make your site stand out from the rest. I promise.

Usability

You can incorporate the SEO tricks around, but your site will still have to justify that it’s “deserving” of top rankings. Search engines’ goals are to rank the best, most usable, functional and informative sites first.

You have only a few seconds to make that initial first impression great and stop visitors from hitting that back button. How do you do this? Don’t make your users think.

Test your site on real users. Define a set of optimal task you’d like your visitors to achieve at your site and test them out on people who actually use your site. If the goal of your site is to sell kites, sit down a user and ask them to try to purchase a certain type of kite & see how successful they are.
Stick to design standards. Underlined links, top and side menu bars, logos in the top left corner should be adhered to. Make use of white space and keep your style consistent through out the site. Don’t try to be clever because it will only confuse your visitors and they will go away quickly.
Organize and label your site as your users would expect. Use an language that is understood by your visitors and categorize topics as they would expect them to be, not how they are categorized inside your organization. The architecture is strongly effects usability.
Navigate easily from top levels to deeper pages. Navigation is one of the sites primary functions so provide users with obvious navigation systems such as breadcrumbs, image alt tags, and well written anchor text on your links. Be sure to use visual clues that indicate the user will be leaving the site. Users want to know where they’re going and how to easily return to a page.
Provide quality content. This is where all web development should start. Too often they begin with a design and how the site will look. But content should drive the design. Copyblogger is a site that has everything you need to know about writing excellent copy.
Create pages that load fast and function as intended. Nothing will ruin a site faster than one that doesn’t even load. Just as bad is a site that loads, but doesn’t work. It’s filled with broken links, forms that don’t function, or missing images.
Make your site accessible to everyone. Run tests to validate your site is accessible to disabled or impaired users. Not only does it widen your market, if your content is accessible to them it’s also accessible to spiders and bots.
Invest in a professional user-centered-design. If you hire a web agency to create a site for you, make sure they design it using user-centered-design practice. How do you know? They’ll do some research upfront before showing you and designs. Research includes:
- create personas about your target market
- test your existing site on real users
- create prototypes & to test on users
- developing a site architecture and wire-frames
- complete a content audit
- do a card sort activity
All this is done upfront before they show you pretty colors and exciting fonts and pictures. If they start with a pretty design, beware. And if you can’t invest in a design agency, then get yourself a copy of Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.
Offer goodies and make it worth their time. In SEO terms, this is called Link Bait. A single exciting piece of content that gets picked up en masse across the internet is worth a small fortune in public relations and exposure. And can sty with your site for a long time, providing search visibility long after the event itself has been forgotten. Below are a few ideas. you can also find a few more on Carla Kay White’s blog How to Create Link Love.
- Create Freebies like Wordpress themes, Desktop wallpaper, icons, images, tools. Whatever matches your product base or service offering.
- Guest Blog on other sites. Or get someone from your industry to blog on your site.
- Create a contest. Sites do well with this. The prize doesn’t need to be big but it will spread rapidly.
- Interview Well-known Insiders. Even just a short interview or an email is great.

In today’s market, the trend is word-of-mouth over pushing advertising. You want people to link to your site because it’s worth the visitors time and they want to pass it along to friends and colleagues. If you don’t invest in a design that works for the user, they won’t invest more than 7 seconds on your site. They have billions to choose from and will go somewhere else.