Before you invest time and money into promoting your website with search engine optimization, social media, linking, or advertising, you should test your website for any problems.
There are many easy ways that you can do this yourself without getting too technical. If you want just an overall score of your website go to http://websitegrader.com/.
1. Grammar and Spelling: The biggest turnoff on many sites is (are?) grammar and mispelled misspelled words. These mistakes send a message to users that your company is simply not professional. You should check and double check all content before you put it on your website. Do not allow anyone in your company (including you) to add content to your website without having it put through a spell checker .
One of the commonest mistakes is confusing “it’s” and “its”. “He’s” means “he is”. The apostrophe indicates that the “i” is missing. Likewise “it’s” means “it is” because the “i” is missing. If you want to use the possessive pronoun the word is “its” just like “his”.
2. Loading Time: Users quickly make up their mind if your page is worthwhile viewing. If a web page takes more than 20 seconds to load, 50% of your users will be gone. Flash and images are the slowest elements to load. See how your web pages are loading at http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/wso and http://tools.pingdom.com/.
3. Different Browsers: If you usually surf using just one browser you might not realize that there are problems with other browsers. Check your pages in Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Firefox and perhaps Chrome, Opera, and Safari. If you haven’t installed all these on your own computer you can see multiple browser views at http://browsershots.org/.
4. HTML Code: If the HTML code is not written correctly, many browsers will not display your web pages as you intended. Bad HTML code makes almost all browsers slower to display and can confuse search engines. Check your site at http://validator.w3.org/.
A common mistake is to fail to tell browsers that your web page is coded to the latest standards with the result that the web page will display like an old 1999 webpage. (This is called quirks mode.) Mistakes are caused by poor web programming, poor website design wizards, and content management systems like WordPress. Don’t be too alarmed as many web browsers overlook many of these coding errors. But that doesn’t make it right.
5. Accessibility: People with sight disabilities and search engines can only read text. They cannot “see” your images and beautiful Flash presentations. . Go to http://www.contentquality.com/ and see how accessible your site is.
If your company name, for example, is only shown in your logo image then the search engines cannot index your company name from the web page.
6. Your Links: There are two types of links on your website. Those that help users navigate to your other pages and links to external sites. Be sure none of these links are broken. And be aware that many fancy dropdown menu links cannot be followed by search engines. (Turn off JavaScript in your browser and see if your menu links and buttons still work.) You can check broken links at http://validator.w3.org/checklink
7. Inbound Links: Your search engine rankings can be increased if other sites have links back to your web pages. Just type in “link:www.MyDomain.com” in most search engine URL boxes to see who might be sending users to your site. Be sure to thank them.
8. Image problems: Naturally you should go through all your web pages to see if any images are missing. Only use Internet Explorer as it will show a red “x” for every missing image. (Firefox doesn’t tell you that images are missing.) Next mouseover each image and see if you see some text which explains what the image is about. Search engines cannot index your images if you don’t have this (these are called“alt” attributes).
9. Error Problems: Most images are kept in an “images” or “pics” folder. Right click on any image on your page and then left click on Properties. You will see something like http://www.MyDomain.com/Images/MyPictueer.jpg. Then type only http://www.MyDomain.com/Images into a URL box. Your users should see a nice friendly explanation message with your banner and navigation, not a technical error message. Also see what happens on your site if you mistype a page name like http://www.MyDomain.com/Indexx.html.
10. Bookmarks: Many users might like to bookmark you website as a favorite. Your “title” in the far upper left top of your browser should have your company name and the name of the web page. Too many sites have “welcome” or “untitled”. Search engines like to see a descriptive titles too.
11. Content: Up-to-date and interesting content attract both search engines and users. Make sure that your latest press releases, articles, or news items don’t have old dates. Your “copyright” should have this year’s date too. You don’t want to give the impression that you are “out of business”. If your content is also stale and never changed, both users and search engines will eventually stop coming back to visit.
12. Search Engines: It goes without saying that if a user types your company name into Bing’s, Google’s, or Yahoo’s search box that your company should come up on the first page. See what happens, however, if you type in one of your keywords with your city location. Sometimes in Google a map is displayed with local businesses. Is your company listed there too? Is the description that the search engine shows what you want users to see?
13. Look and Feel: As you move from page to page in your website, the banner and navigation should remain in the same place and the colors and fonts should be coordinated. In Microsoft Word you can use “styles” to control the format of your document. For web pages these are called CSS styles. If they are not coded correctly, these styles can cause major problems in how your pages look. Check them out by going to http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Only after fixing the problems above, should you start looking into ways to promote your website. Nothing is worse than driving a lot of traffic to your web pages only to have users quickly abandon them.
