Four Quick Ways to Enhance Your Website

There are myriad factors to consider when assessing the quality of a website—from aesthetic design and layout to the type of content presented and its overall standing in search engines. Sometimes, planning basic website improvements becomes a trip down the rabbit hole, with conversations jumping from slight modifications in copy to whole-scale redesigns. Nevertheless, for those who want to tidy up their website without too much fuss, here are four helpful tips for making some simple enhancements.

Balance your use of keywords.

Once you have developed a list of targeted keywords for use in your SEO strategy, it may be tempting to use them with wanton abandon—peppering every title, paragraph and photo caption with as many targeted words and phrases as possible. Despite this inclination, Google’s search algorithm, and average readers, are too smart to be tricked by keyword overload. Choose carefully when and how you use certain keywords, ensuring that they support your overall message, and do not overshadow it.

Take advantage of coding.

Although the actual task of coding an entire website is too complex for all but experienced professionals, there are several steps that anyone familiar with WordPress or similar platforms can take to improve page quality:

• Be sure to use internal links in your web copy that connect to other parts of the website—blog posts, “about” pages and job listings are great places to start. Including these internal links, and ensuring that they do not contain the “nofollow” attribute, will encourage readers to delve deeper into your site and will send a positive message about your website’s quality to search engines.

• In order to maintain a proper text hierarchy, be sure that each page contains only one <h1> heading. This largest text size should be used for the main title or heading of a page, with sizes <h2> through <h6> being utilized for sub-heads, photo captions, body paragraphs and the like.

• Take advantage of each page’s meta description, which gives you the opportunity to write a brief, keyword-focused description of the content of the page that will appear on a search engine’s results page. Most platforms offer widgets that make including a page’s meta description easy and accessible to all.           

Improve text-HTML ratios.

Although unseen by readers, website crawlers will notice the ratio between how much actual text is present on a page in comparison to the corresponding amount of code. Pages with a low text-HTML ratio (meaning more code than text) can negatively impact a page’s search engine ranking. Adding more text to a page or removing code-heavy scripts and styles are two possible ways to improve your website’s standing in this area.

Increase word counts.

When producing website copy, every word counts. Too much or too little text can not only affect how the content looks on the page, but how visitors and search engines perceive the page’s overall value. Ensuring that content-heavy pages, such as blog posts, company overviews and staff profiles, have at least 200-250 words is an important step in increasing your website’s perception of quality. Crawlers may be more favorable to pages that appear to have robust content, which can affect rankings on search engines, such as Google. While not going overboard, maintaining a minimum content length for all pages is a relatively painless fix that can have great rewards.

While plans to improve your website can easily become sidetracked or too big to handle, taking a few short steps, such as the ones presented above, is a great way keep on the path to ever-improving web quality.