Simon Kolz

A weblog by Simon Kolz

Website Woes: Top Five Offenders

I see a lot of mistakes, but here are the top five offenders you need to correct to give your site a boost.

Bad Title. Look at the title for each page. The title shows in the top bar of your browser. It is also what shows when you set a favorite or bookmark a site. Plus, the title is what shows in the search engine results. So you want your page title to be a “headline” – something that will make people want to click on it.

Give every page a different title according to its content. Include your keywords or key phrases in the title. Remember, people won’t want to click on your company name, unless they’re looking specifically for you. Instead, they are more likely to click on key words or phrases that reflect what they’re looking for.

“Me” Language. Read each page of your site from your visitor’s perspective. It’s an eye-opener in most cases. If you want to “see” the impact of this, print the page and using a brightly colored highlighter, go over everything that is about them. You’ll be amazed at how little of the page concentrates on the benefits to them.

Visitors don’t care about your mission statement – they want to know what you can do for them. They don’t care where you went to school or what degrees you have – they do care about why that matters to them. Speak “benefits” not features.

To be sure you are using benefit-driven language, keep asking the question “so what?” For example: Our site is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.So what?So that means even at 2am you can access the information and start using it immediately. It means that regardless of where you live around the world, the information is available when you are.

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