Website improvement is not merely a part of a SEO strategy; it is the major path to genuine success. There are hundreds of articles describing Black Hat and White Hat methods to maximizing your website’s rankings and regardless of your tactic to getting users to your site, it will all be worthless if your site isn’t worth visiting.

Making a website useful to a user will encourage them to bookmark your page, revisit it and even let their friends and online community know about it. This is worth way more then a links farm or a sneaky unethical method of getting traffic to your site. It has only recently become evident that the online communities are doing more for sorting out the internet with regards to useful and useless sites, what is happening is that users are starting to rank sites and to link them, thereby taking black Hat tactics completely out of the equation.

The fact is that even though Google search engines use hundreds of variables in there searches, they can still be manipulated, but only for a short period of time. However a human is not looking for the same things bots are, and therefore the users are assessing the sites themselves and suggesting them to others. Time magazine was even quoted as saying ‘Next time, don’t Google it, Stumble’. Search engines have seen the value in this and have started giving the appropriate variables more and more weight.

So you can get by with cheating the system and not improving your site, but eventually, within a shorter time then you think your business/website will start to suffer dramatically. There have been mentions of stages that the Internet has gone through, currently we are experiencing the social online community era, in which these communities are responsible for more then anyone would have initially imagined.

So how does one make their website more user friendly? Firstly, don’t try to much, but at the same time the website can’t look bare, so essentially use of space is vitally important. The site needs to be useful. Useful to your target audience, not just jammed with irrelevant but useful information. For example if you are selling soccer boots, have as much information and links to relevant soccer sites, rather then filling up the space with useful information about rugby, athletics, cricket and ballet. Information applicability is key.

Links are essential for any website. The word website describes the very nature of this seemingly untamable beast. WEB implies a net or intricate network suggesting something that was formed by weaving or inter-weaving. Therefore by definition a website needs links to really be a part of the Internet or to survive. Useful links will make your site a gateway and will continue to bring more and more active users, as long as the links are applicable.

Finally avoid annoying the user, this includes everything from using obscure software, unusual font to pop ups and over the top flash advertising.

Get Involved