Maryrose Lyons blogging since 2003...

3 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Website

January 27, 2009 at 11:56 pm

Continuing in this series of ‘free stuff that you can do online’, this season we’re going back to basics.  Before you go marketing your website, you got to first make sure it’s in a fit state to be marketed.  That means following these 3 steps to making sure you’ve got a site to be proud of.

1.     Website Copy

Google loves frequently changing content.  That’s why it’s such a great idea to add a blog to your website and to write in it often.  When blogging, you don’t have to write lots – little and often is plenty.  All those little blog posts add up and over time, this will significantly help your search engine ranking.

That’s why when you search for “rugby club Dublin” for example, Old Belvedere is the first rugby club in the results.  Why?  Because they have a vibrant blog in which many members update all the news, results, and updates on the goings on around the club.

Even if you choose not to add a blog to your site, when’s the last time you carried out a thorough review of the static content?   Surely your marketing geniuses have come up with new and novel ways of describing your services since the last time the web copy was looked at?

You can either do this yourself, or engage a professional web copywriter to do it for you.  We’ll apply a fresh pair of eyes to your content – just like a potential new customer will – and, once we’re clear on what it is you do, we’ll get down to work at conveying that in a succinct and sassy way online.  And we’ll do this very fast.  Just think you are half a day away from a clever clear site that works as hard as you!

2.     Meta Data

While meta data (title tags, description tags, etc.) don’t hold as much weight as they once did, they still have a little role to play.  When the Google spider finds your site, you don’t want to leave it all confused and make it go away again.  That is why you need to make sure that you’ve got your title and description tags well thought out and in order.

Don’t bother with long lists of keywords for the keywords tag, as none of the search engines really look at that anymore.  Title and description tags are the most important.  Don’t go putting your company name as the title tag.  And worse! If you’ve a title tag of “welcome to our website” do me a favour and lose it now!   Think about the keywords that most accurately describe your business and insert them first, then by all means add your company name, and if you wish, your location.

3.  Are You Proud of Your Website?

If you’re not, you’re hardly going to be working hard at promoting it.  The amount of times I meet people at networking events and they literally cringe when they’re handing me their business card.  And that’s before I tell them that I work in the web!

Too many people are still brandishing designs from the last century.  Sites that don’t work.  That aren’t intuitive.  Sites that were developed by people with no love for the web.  Sites that still carry a copyright 1999 on them!

If your website design isn’t too bad, consider giving adding some updates.  Some newly styled buttons, or links to new applications such as blogs, Flickr, Twitter can give it a lift.  Even adding logos of groups you’re a member of can give a little lift.  Recently I added logos of all the media sites where Brightspark has been featured, just to freshen up the home page a bit.

If you’re sporting a hideous design, don’t be afraid!  It’s likely you had your site built back in the 1900’s – in the days before WordPress.  Back then, even small static sites could cost an arm and a leg.  You’re thinking – nope I don’t want to even begin to think of how much they’d cost today… The good news is that WordPress, apart from being the much loved blogging platform of choice by the world’s leading bloggers, is also a free content management system.

We create many websites for small businesses using WordPress – you can view a selection here – and the good news is that the cost of production on these beauties has gone down rather than up!  Ask me why.

To conclude, these are three ways you can improve the quality of your website for little or no cost.  Next week, I’ll be looking at how you can get into more serious internet marketing in Ireland.  Techniques that work and that you can put into place yourself.

Whatever you do during these difficult times, don’t stop marketing.  Now is not the time to decrease your marketing spend as the following whizzy graphic from Hutch Carpenter clearly demonstrates:

Posted in Web Design | 2 Comments

Tags: meta data, website content, website design