I recently read this nice article about testing your website. It’s pretty good and I highly recommend it. A couple points i gleaned from Daniel Waisberg, the author.
1. Your site is a laboratory, not a sculpture. Sometimes we’ll have a client that wants their site, or a page to be 100% perfect before it goes live. Sometimes, this is also when their old page is either hideous and SEO and visual cryptonite, or it doesn’t even exist at all. I like to get the new page live as soon as possible, then tweak it as we go.
2. Calls to action. He emphasizes the importance of these on a page.
“Too often calls to action are hidden, by a loaded page with too many graphic elements, by appearing below the fold or by a bad design choice (too small, faint color, or a button that does not look like a button). By improving the call to action and making it prominent on the page, you can sometimes boost your conversion rates drastically”
At TK, we really push new, unique, fresh and relevant content. Getting ideas for content, understanding the do’s and don’t and knowing what content to write is a bit daunting for many. SEOmoz, in their weekly whiteboard video, address some of these issues. It’s great for helping content writers, or those that try to add content, get ideas and get a framework for laying out their content strategy. Enjoy this short video:
A couple points I want to emphasize. First, manipulating the search engines with fake-unique content may pay off short term, but you are basically playing a dangerous game and your pitted against the smartest computer scientists in the world at Google, that are trying to come up with ways to stop your content-gaming. My advice is to keep the content real and relevant by generating it yourself, or with a writer that is creative and most importantly is an actual person.
Also, getting user-generated content can be very difficult and shouldn’t be the initial strategy. It’s something that usually has to grow organically- with little forced upon it. Trying to force feed it can get expensive and exhausting. Most sites that have huge user generated content are those that started very small and naturally caught on (viral), or had the advantage of an existing large community (eBay reviews, for example) that they could leverage. Trying to anticipate and build an entire marketplace around this, can get pretty expensive. Start something cheep on the side, spend little and see if it catches on.
