In part 1 of Have you Looked at Your Website Lately? we discussed 10 best practices for search engine optimization (SEO). It would be great if we could stop at that, but SEO only addresses getting the traffic to your web site. Now we have to address how to convert that traffic into customers. The best SEO in the world and millions of visitors to your web site won’t mean a thing, if your web site isn’t usable.

I see sites that are flashy and move and have great images, but don’t seem to get the job done when it comes to making money. (And let’s remember that this is really all about making money.) A web site has to grab the visitor’s attention in a mere second or two. It needs to answer their questions. It needs to lead them in the direction of making a purchase. It needs to do all this and at the same time convey that you know what you’re doing and are a trusted leader in your industry. If it doesn’t, you’ll lose all that traffic that your new and improved SEO brought you.

So let’s go over some basic Web Site Design and Web Site Usability best practices. Many of these are common sense, but for some reason or another, get overlooked in the process.

1. Make sure the page works in different versions of different browsers. – Your web site might look great in Internet Explorer 7, but be a total disaster in Safari or Firefox.

2. Standardize your web site image sizes. – Pick a size for thumbnails, product images, and extra images and stick with it. Don’t have some thumbnails be 150 x 150 and some be 110 x 140. When they are next to each other it looks like crap. I prefer squares 95% of the time.

3. Use a navigation and category structure that makes sense. – If you were an online grocery store you wouldn’t categorize your products by color. Think about how people shop for your product or service. Use more than one navigation structure if it applies. Example: by price, by color, by size, by pattern, by type of product, etc.

4. Watch how your text looks. – Text is most easily readable in a dark color on a white background. Use sans serif fonts. Use font size of 10 or larger.

5. Check for broken internal links. – Seems like a no brainer but check to make sure your links work. All of them.

6. Use clear calls to action. – Spell out what you want the visitor to do. Lead them in a direction to answer their questions and give them the opportunity to buy.

7. Can you tell what you do or sell in 5 seconds or less? – Look at your home page (or have someone else look at it if you can’t be objective). You have 5 seconds. In that time frame, can you tell what product or service you are selling? If not, you need better images, a tag line, a better logo, clearer call to action, or perhaps better links to information.

8. Does your web site communicate professionalism or does it look like it was designed in your basement by your 12 year old? – You need to look like what you sell. If you’re selling high end gifts your site will look different from a site that sells games. Make sure you’ve picked the right tone and that it’s consistent throughout your web site. Your images say a lot about you.

9. Use the standards. – Some people don’t realize that your orange letters are actually links. I know it sounds basic, but links should be blue and underlined. Keep your logo in the upper left part of the page. Have major site navigation across the top and down the left. Include the basics in your footer. Etc.

10. Your important information and your calls to action should be above the fold. – Don’t make someone have to scroll for the important stuff. If they do have to scroll, make sure the design is done in a way that its obvious there is more information to below the fold.

Again, this list of web usability and web design tips and tricks is just a start, but by implementing some of these techniques you can increase your website’s profitability. One important thing to keep in mind when it comes to websites is, they are never done. Don’t be in the mind set that you’ll make a couple of these changes and you won’t have to touch your website until next year. Websites should be updated, added to, and changed continuously.

Another important thing to mention is making arbitrary changes to your website. Or, you may look at the list above and think, how do I know for certain that a change here will make sense. Website usability testing is one way to know with more certainty that a change is warranted.

Google Website Optimizer is a free tool from Google that allows you to test different elements of a page or completely different pages. We’ll be covering website testing with Google Optimizer in a future post. A great book on the subject is Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer by Eisenburg and Quarto-vonTivadar.

If you would like to read more on web design and website usability, I highly suggest Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers & Prospects into Leads by Loveday and Niehaus, When Search Meets Web Usability by Thurow and Musica, and Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions by Tim Ash.

In the next installment of “Have you Looked at your Web Site Lately?”, we’ll review the before and after of an actual site that implemented search engine optimization and web usability best practices.