Tried and Tested Tips to Improve your Website - Part 1
 by: Sushanth B

1. DO NOT use excessive graphics or banner images on a single web page. They tend to slow the loading of your Web page. Impatient surfers might close their browser and move on. If you have many images on a single page, consider deleting few of them or moving them to a new page.

2. You should include these elements on your website: About Us [Brief description of your company and its products. You can include a few personal details about yourself and your employees], Contact Us [Provide the postal address, telephone, fax, email of your company or business.], A Links to Related Sites page, A Home Page link on each page and Site Search tool to allow visitors to find information on your site.

3. Give something FREE on your website. You can offer free ebooks, articles and/or software. The stuff that you give away should be related to the topic of your website and should benefit your visitors in some way. This helps to keep people coming back to your website.

4. You should specify colors for page background, text, active link, visited link and Url links in the body tag. This will ensure that your site is displayed exactly as designed. Although most people are used to reading text on a white background, you should avoid the white background because it strains the eye.

5. In the Keywords Meta tag try to use both singular and plural variations of the words. e.g. internet cafes, internet cafe. DO NOT use a keyword more than 3 times and DO NOT repeat a keyword one after the other.

6. Other than the Keyword and Description Meta tags, you must try to use keywords in following areas: the Title tag, the Content of the page, Image names, Image alt tags, Href title attributes and in the Text of a link.

7. Now a days most surfers are using PHRASES for search terms. This means that you should also use phrases in the Meta keyword tag. For deciding the keywords use the suggestion tools provided by Overture or 7Search. Overture is more popular than 7Search. You can also use the Free Trial provided by Word Tracker.

8. Try to keep the size of the HTML file of your web page under 32 kilobytes[kb]. Always check the web page/s for errors in spelling and grammar before uploading it to your server. After uploading the web page/s get friends and colleagues to read through your site and point out any errors they see.

9. Check for broken links on your web pages on a regular basis. You can do this manually or use a software program to do this for you. Links to website which have shut down or sold out will lead to broken links.

10. If you have an Autoresponder to build an Opt-In list, use a double Opt-In. The first message should ask for confirmation of the Opt-In and have a link that allows users to remove themselves from the list. Only if the user sends the confirmation, should the 2nd message be sent.