Did you know that a normal web surfer only takes about 10 seconds to determine whether they want to stay on the website they just logged on to? That leaves you with a very small window to make sure they don’t make a quick exit! Makes you think, right?

A visitor can exit your site for various reasons. Some of which may include:

• It’s too cluttered and busy to navigate
• It’s too empty or plain
• It doesn’t load properly
• It takes a long time to load
• It doesn’t seem like what they were searching for

If you are a small business owner, investing thousands of pounds just to have visitors click off within a few seconds can be highly demotivating. It is becoming an increasingly well-known fact that if a visitor leaves your site in 8 seconds, something is wrong and it needs to be fixed. As a website designer & developer, click-off is one of the biggest challenges to face. However, here are five solutions which will help dramatically improve your websites performance, ratings and appearance to gain a better response from visitors.

1) Bold Keywords

Search engines are continuously working in order to provide the most relevant results to sites with high-quality content. This makes it vital for you to make sure you have the most relevant, high-quality information that your target audience will be looking for. A simple way to make sure your visitor realises that your website is relevant to them is to highlight your keywords so that the first thing they can see is what your content is about. You do not need to continuously highlight your content keywords, just a few at the top would be more than enough.

2) Optimise Your Website

One of the main reasons for a potential, long-term customer leaving your site is that it may be very slow to load, which is usually the result of large, high-resolution pictures or animated files. These can weigh down the site loading time considerably.

To overcome this problem, try to use a few, light-weight images on your homepage, preferably with no ‘flash’ at all. You can also compress your images and lower their resolutions.

Another reason could be a slow host. Make sure you do your research and invest in a good, speedy host for high-quality connections.

You can also check your website’s loading time by using a slow internet connection by limiting your bandwidth.

3) Comply with Online Quality Standards

W3C is a set of rules or an online standard that ensures your website sticks to a strict, high-quality standard.W3C is short for World Wide Web Consortium and is currently the chief organisation for international standards on the web.

When you adopt such reputed and quality standards, it will tell everyone how dedicated you are to the website and its rating.

Some coding differences are so minute but as a web designer, you will know how much effect it has on your rankings.

If you are not creating your own website, make sure you ask your web developer to follow the W3C rules to everything.

4) Tag Your Graphics

You can also improve your graphics so that they are more visible on the search engines. You can benefit a lot by being listed at the top in the Google images database.

When constructing your website, be certain your web developer puts in the precise coding to label your images with appropriate keywords. Name your image files with applicable, expressive words and include a title tag as well as an alt tag to your image code. These tags will permit you to include more information and keywords linked to your image. By including these elements, search engines will understand the content of your images better and it will make your site more accessible to visitor

5) Update Dates On Your Website

When your website displays the current date at all times, it tells the visitors that this website is continuously updated and has fresh content. Search engines also know when your site becomes stagnant and lowers your rankings accordingly. Outdated information makes the site look neglected and unprofessional.

Want to know more or how you can improve your Website Ranking?

Get in touch…