As I mentioned, I've broken this list of suggestions into two categories: things you can do at no extra cost, and things you can do that may cost you some money. While the second group will include more sweeping functionality and interface changes, the first group contains equally important, albeit minor, changes. I feel strongly, as I suspect Bucky did as well, that often our simplest option is the most effective one.
At little cost aside from your time, the list below includes the use of simple, third-party widgets for added functionality, extraordinary free measurement tools, and a bit of extra strategic thinking to help meet your SEO goals. I've listed them in order of simplicity, starting with the easiest to implement and working toward those that will require a bit more effort.
Social Media Sharing Features
Despite having long since reached the mainstream, social media has yet to connect to many active websites that could truly benefit from making their content sharable. Social media sharing tools are an assumed feature in any site we build now, but what about the many sites that were built within the last few years? Fortunately, this is something that any site administrator can integrate without needing to know any code or even contacting their developers. ShareThis is one of many free social media sharing plugins that allows you to customize the look and feel of the menu, as well as what social networks are included. Once you've configured your menu, ShareThis provides a simple, embedable code that you can paste in to your content.
Turn Mailto links to Forms
I continue to be amazed by how often I see direct links to email addresses on the web. This is a serious no-no for all kinds of reasons, most of all that it leaves your email address vulnerable to spambots that troll the web looking specifically for email addresses to add to their lists. Sure, it's easier to create a mailto link than to write the code for a functional contact form, but what if you could configure a form with some basic options and embed it on your page? That's exactly what Wufoo offers. Their web-based tool allows you to create up to three contact forms for free (for more forms, they offer four different pricing tiers) using a simple interface to assemble and name your fields. You provide the address you'd like your form data and alerts sent to, and then Wufoo will provide the code you need to paste into your page. This will take you several minutes to set up- far less than the combined hours you're likely to spend filtering out all the spam you receive because of those rookie mailto links you set up back in 2001.
Set Up Goals in Google Analytics
If you do already have forms set up on your website, getting them configured as goals in Google Analytics is a must. The way a goal works is that you provide Google Analytics with the URL for the "Thank You" page a user would be directed to after filling out a contact form. By submitting this URL, Google will be able to track the number of users that complete forms in your analytics reports. Remember, because a human user actually has to complete a contact form, Google has no other way of knowing how many times a user gets to the "Thank You" page unless you provide the URL directly. Most of the forms we build for our clients will already have two means of tracking their completion: The primary means is usually to store the completed form data in the database, and have it be viewable and retrievable using the CMS. The second way is to send out an email alert to the webmaster every time a form is filled out. These are very helpful for keeping track of these contacts and following up with them, but adding the Google Analytics goal will provide even more value long term. For example, say you wanted to build a custom report in Google Analytics that showed you only visitors who came in from Google organic search results in the month of January and ended up filling out a contact form on your site. If you haven't set up the goal, your analytics report will be missing that last metric. Convinced? Check out our newsletter on How to Use Google Analytics for instructions on how to set up a goal.
Write Better Title Tags
Before you read this paragraph, open up your website and go to your "About Us" (or equivalently named) page. What do you see at the top of your browser? Does it say "About Us?" I truly hope not. Listen, "About Us" means nothing. Guess how many "us's" there are in the world? I just Googled "About Us" and retrieved over 1 billion results. If your about us page title is "About Us," think about making it something more specific, because let's face it- nobody searches for "about us."
The title tag for a page is the primary information that a search engine will look at when indexing and valuing the authority or relevance of a web page. It will appear at the top left of your browser for the page currently being viewed, and as the linked title in a search result snippet. In the case of this article, the meta title is "Simple and Free Website Upgrades." The title tag should be different from the page title ("Things You Can Do to Improve Your Website Right Now" for this page) and should be the main subject of the page's content, or its “thesis statement.” In creating a title tag, you should consider other factors as well, such as specific industry jargon, the effectiveness of competitors' titles, location (for local businesses), and the likelihood that a phrase might actually be queried in a search engine. Also, your company name or domain name is not necessary to duplicate and include in the title tag. Remember, the title tag is there to help a search engine connect your content with a person who is searching for your product or service, but does not yet know about you by name.
Next, I'd like to review some things you can do to improve your website that require a little investment.
I know I'm biased, but I have to say that this is a great newsletter, Chris.
One thing that I find useful when crafting Meta Titles for my blog is the Google Keyword Research Tool. The tool let's you see how many searches are performed for the phrase in question, and is an excellent resource for refining your phrases. Of course, you always want to stay true to your content, but it is amazing how a subtle tweak in the wording or order of words in a phrase can affect the local and global search volume.
I'm intrigued by the advanced search tools. For a site that's already been built, wouldn't something like this require that the database be recreated? Otherwise, how would the tool know how to match your search with content?
Chris, this was a fun one to read. (I bet you've been waiting for a chance to lead in with a Fuller reference.) I also think it's smart to start with the free stuff.
@Mark Thanks! Using the Google Keyword Research Tool is a great idea. The more content we add to our site, the more important it gets, too. After all, there are only so many combinations of the keywords that are best for the subjects we tend to write about...
@Alan, Whether the database would need to be rebuilt or restructure would really depend upon the site. If a site had a database of products with an assortment of unique fields (categories, accessories, colors, etc.), then the new search tool could easily be configured to match them. This is how we built the Brahmin search tool- color is a specific field for a product, so if you type "red" in the search bar, it will immediately find all the red products.
@Maggie B Thanks for the compliment. Yes, if I don't show restraint, I could easily mention Bucky in most of what I write. He's a hero of mine for sure.
Another easy improvement is to use a service like FeedBurner to host your RSS feed. This is fairly simple to do and you gain a good amount of analytics data for your RSS feed, which, personally, is how I "visit" most of the websites I do. I'm consuming a lot of content from sites that I may never give a single page view to.
Chris, once again I really like the images that accompany this article- made me much more interested in each page.
#9 is spot on. I'm hoping to see more of this on the web. I'm surprised that there isn't more discussion online about Apple.com's design team. They definitely set the bar high and are often the first to implement UI details that become trends.
Chris, that article was extremely helpful. I took some time this afternoon to implement what you suggested. I optimized some of my tags using the google keyword tool, added a wufoo contact form, & added a "share this" widget to my blog. Good content. I'm going to go back and read the other newsletters when I have more time. Keep up the good work bro!
@JT Apple also hasn't had dropdown menus in forever. I think supermenus look cool for some sites, but I think the dropdown menu is passe.
@Nolan, That's a good point. Without something like this, the amount of readers following you from RSS is a mystery.
@Andrew, Thanks! That's definitely my goal.
@JT, Good point. I wish I knew a bit more about when specific design changes happened and how Apple goes about making UI decisions. Do you know of any Apple UI team bloggers?
@Jim, Glad to hear it! I'm also glad to see some of my Facebook friends checking this out ;-)
@Caela, You may be right in that the dropdown menu could be less and less useful as search tools get better and more people become accustomed to using them. Until then, I think there is still a strong contingent of navigation-oriented web users.
Chris, thank you for your insightful article. We are going to be redoing our website at work in January and will implement some of your suggestions. Luckily this is coming off my plate and we are going to get some professionals to redo it. I will be in touch.
Enjoyable article Chris! I love the parallel with Bucky -- the idea of making small changes that create big process improvements is one of my favorite themes.
I really appreciate that your post spanned a breadth from simple things that anyone who knows about UX would think of to oh yeah...! ideas (like the search and email comments on threads) that one doesn't really think of. A nice roundup. With nice graphics. I'm going to twwweeeeeet it!
@Nevin, Another Facebook friend! Thanks for reading, Nevin. I'm glad it was helpful and I hope your web project goes well. Feel free to ping me with any questions if you have any during the process.
@Annie, Mine too. (You can't go wrong with Bucky- what a guy.) Thanks for reading and for tweeting!
Chris, been thining about this: the images you use- they do more with less by hinting at the example but not really showing one. Something about that makes each one so much more evocative than had you used a screenshot of a reallife example. Minimizing those as smaller thumbnails was the way to go to get someone to read all the way through. Not sure if you intended that?
thanks for the great article Chris.
I agree very often that we're those of us in the webdesign world are too eager to 'redesign' from scratch what we could simply modify small portions
by the way, your newsletter is sharp!
@Alex, thanks for the compliment! I did intend to make sure that the idea was more important (for this article, anyway) than the implementation. Also, I figured that if I featured larger images of the implementation that readers might get sidetracked by clicking to view those sites.
@Jessica Wolbert, Thanks for the compliment, too!
Chris, my multicultural marketing comm firm has worked on many corporate sites for minority markets but the big boys in Corporate usually say, "We'll take it from here, hon." The only thing they couldn't do is Asian so we brought in experts. We did do a few sites & also put up our own site and did some SEO a while back. I usually work on the mkg end but of course heading in your direction. From a totally different kind of pro, yr blog was outstanding! Thank you. Now have a totally different perspective of your firm, too. Keep it up, I'll keep reading if you don't mind. Who knows? It's a small world
Enna, Glad you liked the article! Thanks for commenting.