Forget about the obvious?

Is your website doing what it’s supposed to be doing? Is it bringing in visitors that stick around, read and convert? If it isn’t, we ask you to consider the points in this article. They’re big points, even though they may seem like little, nit-picky, OCD things. They matter.

Oh, wait… before you continue reading, you have to pretend you’re dumb – because, guaranteed, you’ll one day get a comment about your site (if you’re providing surveys, or otherwise testing, that is) and think, “Well, that’s dumb. It’s obvious that XYZ means…”

So – pretend you’re dumb. Forget about the obvious. Stop believing that everyone thinks the same way you do, because they don’t. When you get to this point, look at your site with your new, fresh eyes.

Does your home page – through text, video, links, or other content – clearly define what it is you offer?

? – If you use images, do they clearly support the text, or are they just pretty pictures?  Example: That picture you have of the man sitting in an office, in front of a computer, staring at a cell phone, may not mean “mobility” to your visitors. To them, it could mean, “lazy employee always dinking around with his cell phone when he should be working.”

? – Do your navigational links clearly define where a click will take your visitors?  Example: Does the link “Clients” mean –

• Click here if you want to become a client
• Sign in here if you are a client
• Click here for a list of our clients

? – Do you have a clear call to action? Examples:

Clear call to action

• View our products
• Call today
• Act now
• Sign up for more information
• Contact us today to…

*Hint – having “Contact Us” in the navigation doesn’t count.

Would your interior pages work as one-page websites?

Many people simply assume that everyone enters a site from the home page. They imagine a clear-cut path of to conversion: Home, Services, Service One, Contact Us, and then Thank You. This is, after all, the most logical, “obvious” path to a completed sale. Because the path is seen as being so cut and dry, many make the mistake of starting the “conversation” on the home page. They simply treat the other pages as a continuation of that conversation.

Reality doesn’t work like that, however. It’s not nearly so clean; it’s somewhat messy, in fact. A site set up in the way just described ends up providing a disjointed conversation. The real path, or paths, to conversion are quite different (please see: The Real Path(s) of Conversion (INFOGRAPHIC)).

While the home page for most sites is the most common landing page, it isn’t the only point of entry. Therefore, each page has to have:

• Its own call to action
• Its own, clearly defined points
• Its own conversation

If your interior pages would not stand on their own as individual websites, you need to do some reorganizing.

Do your 404 pages end the conversation?

Ah, the 404 page; that frustrating page that says, “You know that thing you were looking for? Yeah – it’s not here.” Many visitors won’t take the time or don’t have the time to go digging in your site to find what they were looking for. Most of the time, they’ll just return back to whatever search brought them there.

By creating a custom 404 page, you lessen the visitor’s frustration. Custom 404’s can start a conversation, or continue one. For example, “We’re sorry – the page you’re looking for isn’t available. However, our top pages are listed below, or you can use the handy search feature.”

Check what your 404 page says. Just type in your URL, add a forward slash and a couple of characters ( http://mycompany.com/xya ). This will take you to your 404. Look it over with the ideas of convenience, consideration and keeping visitors there.

Conclusion

Many things can go wrong with a site. Some of the most insignificant changes – changing the link colors, for example – can raise your conversion percentages. If you stop focusing on what you think is obvious, focusing instead on the not-so-obvious, it can help you prepare for your visitors.

Have you thought something was obvious, only to be told that it didn’t make sense? What other tips might you have to help our readers strengthen their sites?

Editors update: March, 13th, 2010

True story: About two weeks ago, I came across a website that listed top SEO companies – well-known SEO companies at that. The website had used a site validator to see how clean the top SEOs’ site codes were. I stared in shock and then started gloating.

Several of the top name SEO companies had more errors than you could shake a stick at – and these people are supposed to know how to optimize website code. Further down on the page were other big name websites, such as the BBC, with just as many errors.

Horror of Optimization Horrors

While sharing this information with my programmer and coding specialist, she made a strange comment. “You know, that’s something I haven’t thought of, running a site validation.” Well, I had the site redesigned shortly before she came on, by a professional designer. I just KNEW our site code would be clean and I could continue gloating.

The first page we ran the W3C Site Validator on had thirty-three errors. Thirty-three! My programmer informed me that, since she had planned on updating the site anyway, these errors could be quickly solved. I took a deep breath and we went on to the next page. Seven-eight errors!

On each consecutive page, error after error was found. I had taken so many deep breaths I felt like I was hyperventilating. She swore she’d clean it up and, after taking one more deep breath, I left it in her capable hands.

A thought occurred to me then, which is the foundation of this blog. “If SEO companies who are supposed to know clean code can have errors like this (and I include mine), what about webmasters that have to rely on outside help?” In other words, if you don’t know programming and you don’t have an in house programmer you can trust, how do you know YOUR site code is… well, up to code?

1. Run each page through the W3C Markup Validator. It will give you a list of errors and information on how to fix them. You’ll probably need a little programming background. If you don’t have any programming knowledge but you do have errors, you can hire a professional programmer to do the work and then run the Validator yourself to make sure they’ve done the job right. According to my programmer, it took her ten minutes to a half hour per page, depending on the number of errors. Factor that in when hiring.
2. Run your stylesheets (CSS) through the W3C CSS Validator. It will also give you a list of errors and how to fix them. Again, you may need a little bit of CSS coding background and, again, if you don’t have any, you’ll need a professional. According to my programmer, it took her ten minutes to clean up our CSS,  but there weren’t that many errors.
3. Use the W3C Link Checker. Not only does this check for broken links, but it also shows where you have redirects. In running our site, we had 400 redirect links when only two were intentional. How did this happen?

There’s a programmer’s shortcut: instead of using the whole URL to indicate where a page will pull its content from, they use a series of path codes that look like this:

/../../filename.extension

Unfortunately, this doesn’t sit well and the engines will use this path to redirect to the full URL. It’s messy and it takes longer, which slows down the time it takes to load your site.

The moral of the story:

A website’s code is just a part of search engine optimization. However, it’s a huge part of how your website performs for the user. If you’re not sure how clean your website is, take a few minutes to run it through W3C. You may be surprised how bad (or good) your code really is.

I wanted to add this wonderful post aptly named ” W3C Validation for SEO – Myth and Reality“ by Alan Bleiweiss

Another great articles about W3C that I recently read was “W3C Validation for SEO? Separating Facts From Fiction” at Springboard SEO