Showing posts with label How your web site can make you look bad and what to do about it. Show all posts
Showing posts with label How your web site can make you look bad and what to do about it. Show all posts

Monday

Part 5. How Your Web Site Can Make You Look like a Buffoon


This is the last in our 5 part series.

Last time we talked about the danger of broken links.

The first installment (Make it Hard to Contact You) can be read by clicking here.




Now, here’s the fifth and final installment . . . Rule #5. "Stoopid Speling Erors"

Okay, so now your prospects can contact you easily. Your most important content is on the top of your pages. Your site map is all straightened out. And your links work again.

But did you check the spellilng (pun intended) on all your web site pages? Remarkably, most lawyers don't.

Misspelled words in your content might sound like nitpicking, but it aggravates people who spot them and more people spot them than you think. Worse yet, they are spotted most often by persons with higher education (read, more discretionary cash on hand to hire a lawyer with).

All those nice pages of really good content and it wasn’t proofread carefully enough to avoid the spelling errors? And you didn’t know that the word “there” could end up as “their” in that voice recognition software you dictate with either, did you?

Worse yet, misspelling names of people or places can be highly offensive to some folks. And don’t try to proofread it yourself. After all, you’re the one who made the mistake in the first place.

Lots of studies have shown that writers often miss the same error they made when they were writing the article in the first place. So have a "second set of eyes" do your proofreading. You can use computer programs to spell-check, but there's nothing like a professional reader to catch syntax, grammar and spelling issues for you.

These 5 common problems we've been discussing are not all of the errors that a lot of web sites have, but they are the high points. And if you just fix these, it’ll put you ahead of 90% of the rest of your competition. And that is the whole point.


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Tuesday

Part 4. How Your Web Site Can Make You Look Like a Buffoon

This is the fourth in our 5 part series. last time we talked about how some web sites make it hard to contact you. The first installment (Make it Hard to Contact You) can be read by clicking here. The second installment (Stay Above the Fold) can be read by clicking here. The third installment (Forget About Your Site Map) can be read by clicking here. Now, here's the fourth installment, Broken Links Stink.

Rule #4. Let’s put up links that don’t link.

Sure, everyone just loves to see those “page not found” messages, so let’s have a web site with links that don’t work or pages that aren’t listed in the Site Map at all so the Google spider can’t find them either.

If a prospective client takes the time to find your site and then can’t find what they want in only one or two clicks, they think you could be a buffoon. Check your outbound links to make sure they all work. And then six months later check them again to make sure other people’s web sites are still out there to even be linked to.

And make sure your links are to web sites that are relevant to your site visitors. Links to irrelevant sites can actually hurt you because it can resemble a link farm. And search spiders hate link farms.

A link farm is a web page whose sole purpose is to post outbound links to as many other web sites as they can get someone to pay for. Search engine algorithms don’t like them because they have been programmed to know that it’s just an effort to make them think that the target site pages have more meaningful “real” links to them (from non-farmers) than really exist. In other words, they know a con when they see it.

There are software programs all over the net that check links on your page for free. An easy one to use, which checks the first 60 links on a web page for free is Webmaster's Link Checker. It's quick and easy to use.

So check your links regularley. And that reminds me of another common problem. We'll cover that one next time.

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Sunday

Part 3: How Your Web Site Can Make You Look Like a Buffoon Without Really Trying

This is the third in our 5 part series. last time we talked about how some web sites make it hard to contact you. The first installment (Make it Hard to Contact You) can be read by clicking here. The second installment (Stay Above the Fold) can be read by clicking here. Now, for Rule #3, Forget About Your Site Map.

Rule # 3. Make a web site, but don’t make a Site Map.

You go through all this trouble to create great content, launch the site and then realize that Kevin Costner lied. If you build it, they won’t come.

Well, not all on their own anyway. Visitors need help. That's what search engines are for. What no one may have told you is that search engines need help too, and that's what they use spiders for.

Search engine spiders are what the search engines send out, little programs that crawl through a website and report back to the search engine what they find. You can make their job easier.

Simply put, the search engine has to be able to find you if you want people to find you on search results like yahoo and google and bing, etc.

And one of the fastest and easiest ways for that to happen is to put a Site Map page on your site. Search engine spiders love it. So if you don’t have a site map page on your site, the search engine spiders will stop crawling your site and just give up and go on to your competitor’s web site.

The Site Map page is just a page that lists the names of every one of your web site pages with a link to each one of them too. It is kind of like a map to a city, the city being your web site pages. The site map makes it easy for search engine spiders to find and "index" every one of your pages, meaning to tell the search engine what the content is that is on each web site page.

And when the search engine knows what is all over your web site, that increases the odds that your content will be fully considered when someone runs a search to find you and your content. That means you rank higher in search results and all of your pages get put into that great Mr. Googler in the sky who answers all the search inquiries (or Ms. Yahoo, or whatever they want to call it).

Why make it hard for search engines to read your content when you can make it easy?

If your web site doesn’t have a Site Map, you look like an unorganized buffoon and that’s worse than looking like an ordinary buffoon (not that there’s much difference anyway).

And the links on the Site Map remind me of another common problem, but we’ll talk about that next time in part 4.

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Part 2, How Your Web site Can Make You Look Like a Buffoon Lawyer Without Really Trying

This is the second in our 5 part series. last time we talked about how some web sites make it hard to contact you (to read the first installment on Rule #1, click here).

Since then, coincidentally, I was in Novi, Michigan on a trip and needed to contact a lawyer who had just entered a case so I searched and found their web site and started looking for a phone number. Not on the front page, which is where I thought it would be. Not on this page. Not on that page. So I looked for the "contact us" link, clicked, and there it was finally.

Now it may seem obvious that the phone number would be on the contact us page, but to the average consumer looking for an attorney's help, if your phone number isn't right out in the open on every page, if it takes several clicks to find your phone number, then you are just putting roadblocks between you and that prospective client. Why do you want to do that? Consumers don't want to waste time looking for something they can't easily find.

I noticed something else about that website too. It violated rule #2, Stay Above the Fold. The front page just went on and on and on, scrolling down for what seemed like forever.

When you look at a newspaper you can see that the headline is at the top and grabs your attention. When you unfold the paper you see the rest of the front page. The top half is called "above the fold" and the bottom half of the page is what's called "below the fold" in the newspaper business.

Well, your website page has a "fold" too. Above the fold is whatever shows up on the screen when your web page loads. The stuff you have to scroll down to read? That's all "below the fold" and that's where your problem is.

Your important contact info, name, phone number, maybe your location or logo - the important info about you should NOT be below the fold for one simple reason.

You've got "15 and 2" to sell yourself to that surfing potential client. In other words, after landing on your web site, that prospective client will likely spend no more than 15 seconds and 2 mouse clicks, max, to decide if you are what they are looking for. They may not bother to scroll all the way to the bottom of the web page to find your phone number - if it's there at all. And they certainly won't click around in search of it either - or anything else they are looking for.

If you put any important info (like your phone number) below the fold, and your web site visitor doesn't take the time to scroll down to find it, they won't call you at all.

Now, we aren't saying don't go below the fold with more info at all. Indeed, there's a lot of value in having content that is complete, whether it goes below the fold or not. Just be careful what you put where on your web pages.

Below the fold is where lawyers and law firms often put their normal "business" type links, such as About Us, Site Map (you do have one, don't you?), Terms of Use, etc. And that reminds me of Rule #3, but we'll get to that next time.

For now, make sure your most important info on your web site pages is above the fold where your visitors can find it and read it quickly and easily.

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Saturday

How Your Web Site Can Make You Look like a Buffoon Lawyer Without Really Trying


I was looking for a specific attorney in another state the other day to call them with a referral to send and noticed a problem on their web site that irritated me. The site was okay, but I had to click 6 times to find their phone number. That reminded me... there are some simple tips that can help your web site make it easier for clients to find and contact you. Here's the first of five.

Even a top notch lawyer can put off prospective clients with a web site that creates friction. That’s anything that slows down moving the shopping prospect to a retained client status. Here’s some common problems.

1. Make it hard to contact you. For some reason, lawyers get so enthralled with putting together a great web site with lots of content and slick graphics that they forget the purpose of the site. Some tend to think that their web site only needs to have one place where your e-mail or phone number might appear so that the prospective client can contact you. And then they hide it.

That's not only wrong, it's silly too.

If you went thru the trouble of building a great site so it would get noticed by the search engines, and the client went through the trouble of searching for your web site and then found it, you should make it easy as possible for them to become your client.

Think of it this way: Click, Call, Mail, Stop by. That’s how easy it should be for people to contact you.

At the very least, your phone number and e-mail link should be on every web page. And not at the bottom of the page, either.

We'll continue this series with four more tips so subscribe to our coaching blog or stop back soon to read the rest of our tips on how your web site can look its best and do its best to attract new clients for you. These won't be all the common problems a lot of web sites have, but they are the high points.

And if you just fix these 5 problems we will point out, then it’ll put you ahead of 90% of the rest of your competition.

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