Look and think beyond the obvious . . .

Look at your Web site as a whole. Don’t look at just the four fingers. Everything is important. View your Web site as if from the sky looking down:

1. Navigation (very important: straight from Matt Cutts). Don’t play a game of Clue with me on your Web site. I don’t want to guess whether the polka dot watch can be found under “Fashion Watches,” “Stylish Watches,” or “New Age Watches.” I just want the polka dot watch! Remember that navigation is for your users AND the search engines.

2. Writing, graphics, theme, and everything else must match. If you have a hobby store but the atmosphere of the store doesn’t make me want to play, am I going to be in the buying mood?

3. New valuable content added on a regular basis (very important: straight from Matt Cutts). Don’t bore me with the same content. Give me fresh new content all the time. Keep me interested. The site should be about ME ME ME, your visitor.

4. Hook (very important: straight from Matt Cutts). Hook me into coming back, and hook me into telling all my friends about you. Hook me into linking to your site. Grab me kicking and screaming to your site by the captivating title and description you’ve put in the search engine results. Sell me on coming to your site in the first place, and then keep me there. Don’t make me want to hit the back button. The back button is very tempting to hit, so you’d better captivate me . . . and FAST.

5. Keyword research. Don’t forget that if you’re selling real estate in Las Vegas, you don’t have to use “las vegas real estate” as your keyword phrase.” That’s where Wordtracker comes in. Study the other areas of Wordtracker. Wordtracker doesn’t begin and end with Keyword Universe. It holds a wealth of information.

6. Simplicity. The engines like simple Web sites without a lot of code bloat. Get rid of tags you don’t need (do you really think an engine is going to revisit your site in 15 days just because you tell it to do so?), and move JavaScript and stylesheets to separate files. Clean up your code.

7. HTML site map (very important: straight from Google). HTML site maps are important to both your users (first) and search engines (second). Plus, Google says to have a site map, so do it. Read the engines’ terms of service and adhere to them. Simple as that.

8. Robots.txt file (very important: straight from Google). Keep the engines out of your images files, your personnel files, your intranet, your credit card areas, etc. The first thing an engine looks for when it visits your site is a robots.txt file, so give it to them.

9. Submit an XML Google Sitemap and a Yahoo! Sitemap. Great way to get your entire site indexed, especially when working with dynamic sites.

10. Link popularity, which comes with fresh content and a hook (which is what the Idea Motivator blog is all about). Also, visit Martin’s site for a listing of free directories where you can submit your site and gain link popularity by following in Martin’s footsteps. He’s done all of the work.

11. Search engine optimization (Rather obvious, but a little SEO to the site never hurts!)

12. Web site analytics (So many people forget to analyze their traffic, trends, spider traffic, and so forth. How do you know how to make changes to your site if you aren’t monitoring your traffic? This goes for both organic traffic and PPC traffic. Are you getting the conversions you want? How do you know? How long do people stay on certain pages, on average? Do they eventually buy? What are your top converting pages, and why? What are you doing “right” on those pages that can be done on other pages?

13. Creativity of that content. That’s why you’re here. We don’t need another toolbar! Don’t be afraid to be different.

14. What is your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)? Every business needs one.

15. All on-page factors should be totally focused before moving on to off-page factors.

I could go on and on and on. We haven’t even talked about usability issues. The foremost authority on usability issues on the Web is Jakob Nielsen. I strongly suggest you join his newsletter. It’s an eye opener.

Here’s the title of this week’s newsletter:

Does User Annoyance Matter?

Summary:
“Making users suffer a drop-down menu to enter state abbreviations is one of many small annoyances that add up to a less efficient, less pleasant user experience. It’s worth fixing as many of these usability irritants as you can.”

Read the whole article at:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/annoyances.html

To subscribe, send a blank e-mail to join-alertbox@laser.sparklist.com

His Web site is: http://www.useit.com/. Notice how plain and simple it is. What does that tell you?

Robin