When you land on a website while searching for specific products or services how many seconds does it take for you to determine if you are in the "right place"? What things trigger your reaction to look further? Is it professional graphics, the colors and design, the headings, or all of these things that trigger a look further or abandon the site?

The point being that most studies show that people judge the website in about the first 10-12 seconds. First impressions do matter in a highly competitve environment. If your web site is not easy to navigate and users cannot quickly find a path to what they want they will be gone.

The next time you go searching for something, think about your reaction to each website you look at and how it effects your decision to stay or leave. Also, line your website up against your competitors and analyze each one, which one feels like the best place to buy from. Better yet, ask some customers or friends to analyze the websites side by side. In times like these buyers are at a premium and your website needs to convey quickly that this is the right place.

By the way, how many seconds do you normally give a website you land on to decide if this is the "right place"?

Hyperlinks are what everyone on the internet calls "links". Links are an essential part of the World Wide Web and are used to connect everything together from web page to web page and web site to web site. They are used in menus, within web pages, by the search engines, and even in emails. Although links have been around for many years they are often taken for granted and poorly written.

In order to better understand HTML hyperlinks and how to use them effectively we need to dissect a typical HTML hyperlink. The diagram above shows what we would see if we looked under the hood at a hyperlink in a HTML source file. The following is a brief definition for each part:

The real success of any hyperlink are with the words you use. The words need to be relevant to the page or website you are linking too and should help the web visitors understand what to expect if they click on the link. The words are also used by the spiders and can definitely help boost a web pages organic (free) ranking position within the search engine results if they are relevant to the page being linked, are repeated throughout the linked page and are used in the search phrase by the user at the search engine. To be continued in a future post. :-)

I have noticed many template generated website use duplicate content for each business. Meaning, all the websites have the same, exact content on most of their web pages as do on the websites using the template website solution. This is due to many companies not wanting to write their own content or lack the skill and time to do so.

BUT... you need to understand how search engines, such as Google may interpret websites with duplicate content and why I strongly recommend creating unique content. Google's website guidelines for webmasters states that if web pages or websites contain duplicate content they are most likely going to be:

• either, removed from showing in the search results at all
• or,they may select just one of the web sites to show in the search results and all others will be ignored.

Google has an entire web page discussing the do's and don'ts about Duplicate Content. Click here to read Google's Duplicate Content article.

Do you ever wonder how much text you should put on your web pages? Recently I read where the average person reads about 6 words per second. That would mean a page with 250 words would take 42 seconds to read and a web page with 500 words would take 1 minute 23 seconds to read. This is not taking into account how much of the content a person may retain.

This should definitely make you want to reduce the number of text words on each web page  Using graphic images and/or embedding a short video clip may also help readers to more quickly get the point of your page without having to read every word. Text on a web page is important, but not to the point of becoming overwhelming to the your readers who may be looking for a quick answer.

With billions of web pages for the search engines to crawl it really helps if each web page has a well written Title Tag and Meta Description Tag. These two tags help describe to the search engines what the page is all about and are used in organic listings by the search engines.

Unfortunately, most people don't understand where to find these two HTML tags to see if they are being used properly. So I wrote a simple SEO web tool that allows anyone to see a web page's Title Tag and Meta Description Tag values. Along with this information I also show the entire web page HTML source code so people can get a sense for how search engines see a web page.

Click on the link below to take it for a test drive....

SEO - Examining Web Page Title Tags and Meta Description Tags.

It is interesting to read about some of the research done on how people visually scan pages. Generally it is agreed that people visually start at the 10 o'clock position and than move in a clockwise direction to 2 o'clock, 5, 6, 8, 9 and then back to the 10 o'clock position. This would obviously indicate that when designing web pages the most important actions within the page should be at the 10 or 2 o'clock positions. See my diagram below and than imagine how this would work on your web pages.

A lot of time companies think of their web site as print advertising and thus while creating their web site they mentally are thinking of print. I recommend not falling into that trap. The reasons are pretty simple. Print advertising is found in newspapers and magazines that people read. BUT... the reader didn't start to read the magazine or newspaper to find your print ad, it was just there.

As web users we go to web sites for a reason and the web site has to quickly fulfill those reasons or the visitor will leave. Web visitors don't just stumble on your web site when searching for products or services. Instead, they are probably doing a search for something more specific and clicked on the link to your web site or landing page. Think of your web site as fulfilling customer's specific needs based on what you offer and get them there quickly.

One of the reasons Webstream Dynamics creates custom web sites is so we can optimize the images for the search engines. Images are used on web pages to support the page's message and if done correctly can also help with search engine optimization (also called SEO).

Text and graphics within images are not easily interpreted by the search engines spiders, so we need a way to describe the image to the search engines. Luckily, the HTML Image tag has a property called the ALT TAG. This is where we add a few words that accurately describe the image in text words.

For example: See below the image from  Glueless Floating Hardwood Floors.

Notice the text within the image. That is great for the user looking at the page, but not for the search engine spiders. So with the HTML image tag I inserted the ALT tag and it says ALT="Glueless Engineered Hardwoood Plank Profile"

Now the search engine spiders have some text content that describes what the image is about. Also, the text I inserted in the ALT tag is relevant to the page content so the search engines will see I am not spamming them with keywords not relevant to the page.