Not Obvious but Effective Website Practices (Part One)

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Using a website as a way to boost your business is a smart approach. It’s quite unlikely to find a person who wouldn’t agree with this statement. However, utilising tried and tested website practices is a much smarter technique you might want to use.

The process of managing your website based on your own intuition can be fun, but no one can guarantee any positive results under these circumstances. You can add as many landing pages to your site as you wish and publish as much text on each of them as you deem fit. You can omit text altogether and cover all the pages with endless images. As you see, imagination has no limits.

We truly believe that you can cope with everything without any external help by trial and error. Nevertheless, if you are open to suggestions concerning the best site improvement practices, we are happy to provide ours in the blog posts of this series. Additionally, if you are looking for professionals to build your new site, restyle or optimise for search engines, your existing one, LocalTeam can assist you with any of the above tasks.

Effective Website Practices LocalTeam Australia Swears By

By effective website practices, we mean a number of approaches you can implement in your site development strategy to achieve better results. You can use them to improve ranking, customer acquisition, user experience (UX), bounce rate, site browsing depth, and other aspects. Some of them, like posting only relevant information, updating content on a regular basis, and not overusing keywords, are obvious. Meanwhile, others frequently remain unaddressed, even though they can bring user experience to an entirely new level. That’s why now we want to shed light on them for the benefit of all our readers. So, ready, steady, go!

Header

Let’s start from the top of your webpage. “Header” is a name for the uppermost section visitors of your site can see. Its main feature is the fact that it looks identical on every page of one site. It has clickable tabs that users can interact with for quick and easy navigation.

So, you might be wondering now what site improvement practices you can use in this regard. You probably know that it should include a clickable logo of your company that leads to the main page of your website. That’s easy. You will need to spend hours browsing the Internet in search of a site that doesn’t have this feature. However, other suggestions are less obvious, and we want to attract your attention to the following points:

• No repetitions: Adding several tabs leading to the same page can seem to be an enticing idea. Even though you can think that a target page can get more views, it is a misleading idea. We want you to forget about this approach since it’s confusing both for users and search engine bots. Having landed a couple of times on the same page after clicking on different tabs, your potential customer can leave your platform and go find the one that provides better UX. Moreover, after unsuccessful attempts to reach a new webpage, bots will also leave your website. This will result in unindexed pages, and it’s not something you want to include in your SEO strategy. This means that you don’t need the “Home” tab that goes to your main page if your logo is clickable. Additionally, you don’t want to add two tabs titled “Contacts” and “Get in Touch” that lead to the same page;
• Clear wording: Let’s look at a tab name as a button with a keyword associated the most with the page it is linked to. Think of a relevant word/word combination your potential clients will enter in the search box to find this webpage. You can use these keywords when choosing the best variant for tab naming. It should be concise; no complicated sentences are needed. Your first and simplest idea will probably be the most suitable one. Remember that users won’t search for “fancy-looking containers for plants” if they need a new flower pot for their anthurium. The more understandable a tab looks like, the more probable that a person will bother clicking on it;
• Pages, not just tabs: We are pretty sure that you’ve seen tabs whose only functionality is activating a drop-down menu. While it seems handy for users, it is not a good sign for Google bot and its counterparts from other search engines. As highlighted before, a tab is a button with a link, and if bots, after interacting with it, do not get a result of redirecting to a new page, then it is considered an empty link and a website design issue. So, make sure that every tab is linked to a specific page if you want all of your content to be added to the search engine index.

Breadcrumbs

Just below the header section, LocalTeam experts recommend including breadcrumbs. That is another navigation element your users will be happy to interact with on your platform since it is one of the effective website practices.

Let’s come back to our flower pot example. If a visitor of a website that prioritises UX finds a nice ceramic flower pot in the catalogue, they will also see a breadcrumb trail with links to the shop page, garden accessories, pots and baskets, ceramic pots, and then pots of a specific brand. This functionality simplifies the search process if a user wants to see more items of this brand or more options made of this material. Customers can just click once and access the page with all the goods they are particularly interested in. That is easier and more convenient than unnecessary and time-consuming filtering on the catalogue page.

You can implement the same practice on sites of other types. If you, let’s say, offer pet services, users will also be satisfied to see breadcrumbs from your main page to grooming, dog grooming, and puppy cuts. When the navigation is this simple, you will never know what the bounce rate is. And that is the dream of every website owner.

Incorporate Effective Website Practices Into Your Site Strategy!

That is the first post of our blog series aimed at describing practical techniques that can improve your website performance. We believe that it is better to perceive information not in sizeable but in digestible bits. That is why we are not overwhelming you with many facts at once. We’ve covered two points and will be back with new posts about the importance of tables of content, frequently asked questions sections, footer features, and other aspects. Stay tuned for our updates!

If, after reading this piece, you are thinking about using the described website practices for your business, contact us by filling out the form, calling, or emailing. It is an honour for us to address all of your wishes and help your company grow. Do not hesitate to check what other IT services we are providing that can be useful for your projects. We are always here for you. See you in the next blog post!

Nataliia Tarnavska

Nataliia is an experienced specialist in the field of SEO and a new LocalTeam member eager to optimise a website of yours. Having a set of all the necessary skills, she knows what to do to bring more traffic to your site, no matter how competitive your niche is. She is the one to turn to if you want your website to be displayed at the top of the search engine result page.