1: Don’t make it too hard
These tips will focus on what you need to do to make it easy for your users to access your content. This is achieved by reducing the users efforts to find what they are looking for and the performance of your website. Content should be organised intuitively. To achieve this you will need to be able to anticipate their needs. You need to make it as simple as possible.
2: Don’t make them wait
Performance. The speed in which your website pages load is crucial. Not only for the attention span of your visitors, but Google will punish slow loading websites in the rankings. Web pages should load between 2-3 seconds in order to keep the users train of thought. One common cause of slow websites are images. Make sure your images are optimised for the device they are displaying on.
3: Keep your content up-to-date
There is nothing worse than a user doing a search for a subject and finding it was written years ago and the information is out of date. When writing content try to make it “evergreen” so it is ageless and will remain relevant into the future. Re-visit old content and update it so that it is still current and and interesting into the future. Maybe add some insights into your post.
4: Simplify your navigation
Keep the website menu simple and intuitive to the user. Can they easily find what they are looking for and can they find their way back. Breadcrumbs are ideal for sites with larger amounts of content. Take time to anticipate what your users might be looking for. Think of innovative ways of organising your content. Dropdown menus, clickable images etc.
5: Put your best foot forward
Show off your best content so that you are attracting the most traffic for the popular search terms. Try to promote the most popular pages that users are most likely to click on, throughout the site. Link them in the menu or advertise them the footer.
6: Make your pages look good.
Presentation is just as important as content. Just like in cooking, the food needs to look good as well as taste good. You have to make your content engaging and compelling to the user. This is much easier to do now we can use typography, bullet points, charts or graphs, images and graphics.
7: Make your site mobile friendly.
More and more users are searching the web via their mobile devices, so if your site doesn’t display properly on a mobile device they won’t stick around to read your content.
8: Un-clutter your website
Research shows us that users look at a website in an F pattern. Top banner, left hand side and middle section. Don’t confuse the user by having stimulus overload with adverts and banners all over the page. Concentrate on the F of the page and put your most important messages in the right places.
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