Your site is only as good as the weakest link?

What does this really mean? What is your weakest link?

Does your site have great graphics, but broken links? Google will penalize you severely for this. Or perhaps your links all work well, but there are other problems. Maybe you have great content, but horrible graphics. Maybe your links are to irrelevant content or poorly organized. Or perhaps everything is perfect, but your server is so damn slow. In web business, to do well, your site has to be good in all respects. If there are 20 factors to consider and you are weak in even one, then you can lose a lot of traffic. Below are some considerations to what makes your site good.

Good content
This means that you have a lot of text on various pages about industry specific information. Not only do you display your projects, but you compare them honestly to other similar products and you give a lot of free related information. If your site is about lawn mowers, compare its features to your competitors lawn mowers. Have pages all about types of grass and the attributes of those species of grass. Have information about outdoor recreation. Write articles about what other people did with their lawns and show some nice pictures of the people and their lawns (and their pets of course too.) They key to good content is to grab your audience and make them want to stay on your site for a long time and come back go your site in the future. Those regular visitors are more likely to make a purchase from you than a short term visitor who thinks your site is useless due to limited or disorganized content

Good organization
If your site has one thousand pages, you need to keep them organized. A good navigation bar can organize your site in a very basic way. It might link to your home page, contact us, about us, articles, site map, and a few other pages. It can’t go beyond that. So, how do you organize your content after that? There can be links on the home page to the most popular content. Your site map or articles page can organize your additional content into sections.

Links
Google cares about links, and quality links. You need incoming links, but you also need outgoing links. You can barter for relevant links or just give them. Google respects you all the more if people click on the links you have on your pages, especially if the keywords on your page match the main keywords on the page you are linking to!

Graphics
If your site has good graphics and pics, people will gravitate towards your site. Some sites spend big bucks on fancy pictures. I wouldn’t do this until you are making the big bucks. But, quality photos and graphics go a long way, even if they are not the most expensive in town.

Speed
If your site is slow, then people will get frustrated waiting for pages to load. They might just forget about you.

SEO
Don’t hire the wrong company or you will get a bunch of links that Google will penalize you for. Then, you will be sorry. But, if you have a keyword structure for all of your main pages, having each main page focus on one or more keywords, then you are in good shape. For your secondary pages, they can focus on a single keyword per page, and repeat that keyword several times per page. That keyword could be in the URL, metatitle, and text, not to mention incoming and outgoing links from that page.

Internal link structure
Sure you need links from other sites. Those might come on their own if you offer quality content. But, if you have the right number of outbound links from each of your pages to other related pages on your site, you might find that Google is very nice to you! Finding the right number of links and the right types of links requires a lot of experimentation and use of Google Analytics, so learn these tools and good luck!

Fresh content
Good content is not enough, you need fresh content. The Google gods are not satisfied with your old content. You need to keep creating new content. Content writers are really in business as a result of this. A blog is a good way to have new content, but you can edit existing pages on your site and add new pages as well.

Layout
Part of a well organized site is layout. But, some layouts are more attractive than others. You need to space your information in an easy to digest way. There should be the right amount of space, the right amount of pictures in the right places, and the right amount of links. Finding a good layout is not easy, so spend some time on this.

There is a lot more to having a great site. But, if your site is lacking on any of these main points, you might lose a ton of traffic!

Tweets:
(1) Does your site look good, but have other things wrong with it? That can hurt you more than you think!

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