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Author: Gen Federico
Maybe you’ve done some search engine optimisation, you’ve got your site polished up and it’s ready to roll. In your initial tests though, you’re finding that for some reason people seem to prefer your competitors. In fact, when you take a look at the two sites, even you can see that there’s something about your competitors that gives them an edge.
Sites that are similar in almost every way can still give very different impressions, and often it’s the smallest things that make this difference. Your search engine optimisation campaign should be able to give you the edge over your competitors, but you can’t always count on internet users clicking on the site that’s at the top of the listings. If your competitors are in the top ten, they’re still tough competition, and it’s up to your site itself to secure the victory.
There are countless little things that count toward the impression your site gives. Your choice of colours in your design, the font you’ve chosen, the amount of space around the text and the images you use; they all work together to give the internet user a certain impression. Often, your industry will provide a good standard that will level out the playing field somewhat. When this happens, and when your site looks pretty much the same as everyone else’s, even smaller things will count. Here are a few:
*Regional spelling: The region of spelling is often overlooked as a matter of style. If your site serves only one region, it’s important that you maintain a standard of English suitable to that region. There’s a lot of hidden snobbery about English. Many internet users get irritated when confronted with what they consider ‘foreign’ spelling.
Regional spelling isn’t a simple matter. If your website serves a number of international regions, you’re marketing to a variety of versions of English. Even if you serve only one country, it’s likely that you’ll have to swap the odd letter in order to get the right variety of keywords in for your search engine optimisation. SEO companies, for example, often have to slip in the odd ‘search engine optimization’ to reach the right customers. This can get annoying if the spellings are altered within the same piece of text. Try to keep different regions separate if you can.
*Word styles: Another thing that is often overlooked, and at the same time very simple, is word styles. Do you say ‘no one’ or ‘no-one’? Is it ‘website’, ‘web site’ or ‘web-site’? What you may consider standard could be very different to your employees’ standard. It can be a good idea to set up a style sheet and give it to each person that contributes content to your site. This can be handy if you’re sourcing content from your SEO company as well, and you can talk to us at SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk about content provision.
*Punctuation: Most people would think that punctuation is a standard thing, but it’s not. Little things like hyphens, which can be – or -, and keeping commas inside or outside quote marks, should be part of your style choice.
The Article is written by searchengineoptimization.co.uk/ providing SEO and
Article Source: http://www.articlealley.com/article_1622091_62.html