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Web Traffic and Site Design Tips
Add a field to allow users to search within your site.
Once you get visitors to your site, you will want to help them find the product or information they need as quickly as possible. Fast loading pages and easy navigation are solid foundations, but it is a good idea to also include a search box on your web site. This will enable even the most impatient visitor to find what he or she is looking for in just a few keystrokes. Site analysis tools can help you gauge how effective your site is performing these functions. If people consistently click through to a certain page and then click off, you may want to consider split testing or changing your site design.
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Use easy-to-read font sizes.
Not only is it user-friendly to use an easily readable font size on pages with lots of content, but it may also prevent your site from being ignored by search engines. Studies show that content-heavy pages that use small-font text are often not listed by search engines. To be safe, use a font size greater than 2 for the bulk of your body copy. Otherwise, all of your efforts to create rich web content to optimize you search engine ranking could be compromised.
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Limit the use of Secure Server as a landing or home page.
While search engines can spider secure server hosted pages, these pages often require that a visitor fill out a form or log-in with a username and password before reaching content. Search engine robots simply leave a page when they encounter such forms. Thus, search engines often either penalize or downgrade sites that use immediate URL forwarding, especially from a home page. To avoid creating form-filled pages that engines will ignore but still capture the customer information you need, try doing some internet marketing research and a site path analysis to understand how you can direct customers from a landing page to a secure server pages without losing them.
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Leverage image and alt tags to include keywords.
Some search engines look at image and alt tags as part of their algorithms. Take advantage of this and potentially increase your web site ranking by renaming your image and alt tags with your keywords. For example, instead of having the picture on your homepage named, "image1.jpg", change the name to include one of your keywords.
