8 Things Your Visitors Don’t Like

In the early 1990’s, when were not so popular, commercial sites were designed in a very simple way. Their number is not many and they’re just about being ‘live’ and readable. Today, with tens of millions sites online and have ‘war’ on the internet, visitors would NOT choose worse-organized and unprofessional sites that don’t provide information they search for. So, be careful when you design your own sites.

Here are 8 things you should avoid when designing sites. Your visitors don’t like them very much.

1. Outdated information
It’s clear enough. In the world of information, there’s nothing worse than outdated information.

2. Lack of focus
Many websites seem to make their visitors wondering what the site is all about. You have to always make sure that your home page will explicitly convey what information you are offering and its value. Don’t forget to attract their interest to explore the other pages on your site, too.

3. Text, text, … and text
A lot of text would be no problem actually. Just, don’t use lengthy paragraphs without any breaks between them. Reading online is absolutely different than reading printouts. It’s always better to use breaks at your text-block. Try using short and more focused paragraphs, white spacing, heading & subheading, numbers & bullets, or picture with the right size and the right place.

4. Hard to read
How do you feel when you read text with blue-coloured font on black background? Or otherwise… yellow-coloured font on white background? What about text with tiny fonts that strain your eyes when you read it? Yes… all of them are absolutely bad choices. Make sure your writing is easy to read.

5. Crowded and disorganized
Let’s say you have a great site. But if you ‘force’ your visitors with lengthy text blocks, promotional offers here and there, animations, sales chart, flash, or any other thing that is too much, you’ll soon confuse your visitors, drive them away and finally lose them!

6. Too long to download
Don’t waste your visitors’ time by displaying such photos, flash, and video with large file size that will only make your site longer to download. You only have seconds to attract your visitors and catch their interest. Use their time efficiently!

7. Aggressive ads
Surely, we hope our sites or blog can act as a media to lead our visitor from prospect to costumer. But showing ads blatantly is not the correct answer. There’s something more effective, and that is providing right information, solution and good product value. You can use pop-up, but don’t display it full screen and difficult to close. Your visitors will get angry with it!

8. No Privacy Policy
People hate being spammed. So, if you ask your visitor to fill a form with their e-mail address, please be sure that you have convinced them you will protect their e-mail address and won’t sell or distribute them to anyone else.

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Eventually, the content of your site might be the main key to attract visitors. But site appearance is another important thing you have to work on. When people enjoy visiting your site, then there’s more chance for you to do business with them.

7 Steps to Get Your New Site Indexed in 24 hours

Michael Jensen wrote this article on Monday, 11/26/2007, and published it on http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/2007/11/26/7-steps-to-get-your-new-site-indexed-in-24-hours. You might find it interesting if you have a new site.

Most SEO’s will advise you to buy an existing site/domain (lots of age benefit), but there are times when you need to start from scratch with a fresh domain. It can sometimes take a couple of weeks to get a new domain indexed by Google (even longer to start ranking!). In order to
speed up the process of getting your site indexed quickly, even in 24 hours, follow the steps outlined below:

1) Create 5 pages of content
Skip the “under construction” page and write several pages of real content, at least a few paragraphs.

2) Create Internal Links to your Pages
Put the content in a template with a menu structure to make this step easier. You can find free templates at oswd.org and other places, at least to get started. Link to the content through the menu, and if you have a major landing page, link to it from the content of a page or two.

3) Tag on Social Bookmarking Sites
After just a few minutes to create an account with these sites you can submit a link to your site. This gives you an instant way for Google and other search engines to find your site because these social bookmarking sites get visited by the search engine bots (like the Googlebot) quite regularly. A few bookmarking sites to recommend: Del.icio.us, BlinkList,
StumbleUpon.com, and Furl. Make sure you tag them with common words, like those you find on their tag clouds (BlinkList has a good one, just scroll down on the page to see it).

4) Comment on popular and recent blogs (with your link)
Find 5 blogs that are fairly popular, relevant to your site, and have a recent blog post (last day or two). Read the post and add a comment that contributes to the discussion, including a link to your site in the URL field.

5) Create, Submit, and Ping your XML Sitemap
You can create a free XML sitemap here then upload the file to your site (just save it as sitemap.xml). Then ping Google with your sitemap by typing in the following URL in your browser, replacing the domain name with your own:

http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

Next, create an account with Google Webmaster Central, add your site, and submit your XML sitemap.

6) Install Google Analytics
Add Google Analytics (free) to your site. Don’t forget to verify your site with them to get the data collection started.

7) Run some Google Ads
Create an account with Google Adwords and start running some ads, even if its just for the domain name, company name, or some long tail keywords. Google has to go to your site because of their quality score, which includes “your landing page quality”. Just spend a couple of bucks and it can help jumpstart the indexing.

With these steps, you should see your site indexed fairly quickly. I can’t guarantee the 24 hours, but it is possible. At the very least it will speed up the indexing significantly (from weeks to days). Look for the “googlebot” to visit in your site analytics. Then look for your site to show up with Google by doing a search with the site: operator (for example, site:sphinn.com). Enjoy!