6) Ensure All Forms Work

It sounds obvious and it should be. If you're going to make your site interactive with feedback forms, newsletter sign-ups, guestbooks and like, then make sure they work! Double check each form field is large enough to accomodate even longest of names. Think about your international visitors when creating fields such as Zip Code. Make it clear which fields are required by marking them with an asterix. Test form to make sure it submits correctly and displays right confirmation message upon completion.

7) Ensure Shopping Carts are Functional

This is vital for any type of e-commerce site. Ensure you have adequate product descriptions, pictures, specifications and crystal clear pricing. Include information on shipping and freight costs and integrate any taxes within your price list. If selling internationally, include a foreign exchange calculator such as free one provided by XE [http://www.xe.com] for visitors to compare costs in their local currency. Make sure your shopping cart pages are protected by SSL or a secure certificate to give visitors confidence to reveal their personal and credit card information without threat or risk. Provide simple instructions for completing online transaction, give them ability to back out easily and provide a help email address or phone number on every page of process in case they get stuck. For instant transactions, provide a receipt immediately and confirm their transaction was successful. As with your online forms, test, test and test again. It only takes one bad experience for you to lose a potential lifetime customer.

8) Include Obvious Contact Details

With all scams proliferating web these days, people are understandably sceptical when it comes to online business. To build trust, you absolutely, positively need to display contact details prominently on your site. If you're not willing to provide a way for people to contact you, why should anyone be willing to buy from you? You should include your business address (preferably your street address and a postal address), a telephone number and at least one email address. If you are concerned about spam email harvesters, you can either hide your email address within a HTML encoder such as Natata [http://natata.hn3.net/antispam_encoder.htm] or use a contact form for people to submit to contact you with (although many people, including me, find latter annoying).

9) Use Easy to Understand Language

The Internet is no place for verbosity. People are in a hurry - they want to find what they seek quickly and easily with least hassle possible. You can help them in this quest by ensuring your site pages use simple language and easy to grasp concepts throughout. For example instead of "brand-building web information architects", use "website designers specialising in brand promotion". Keep text on each page to a minimum, using bullet points and sub-headings to get your main points across or to demonstrate your product benefits. Use old WIIFM (What's In It For Me?) adage when composing your body copy to keep user's interests at top of mind. Remember your international visitors by avoiding regional word usage or technical jargon that could alienate. Want your visitor to take a particular action? Spell it out for them in plain English.

10) Make it search engine friendly

Last, but by no means least, make sure your site is search engine compatible. A user friendly site is generally a search engine friendly site too. Use body text and headings in place of graphical text. Use a text-based navigation menu instead of a graphical or drop-down javascript menu. Avoid frames, Flash or any code that could trip up a search engine spider trying to index your site. Use logical Title and META tags for each page, tailoring these to match content found within. Scatter target keywords and search phrases throughout your body copy to give your pages better ranking potential on engines and directories for related searches. Don't compromise readability of your copy to achieve this - hire an expert copywriter to strike right balance if need be.

So there you have it. 10 easy steps to making your websites more user friendly. Now you have no more excuses for avoiding usability. Implement one of these per week and your visitors will repay you with loyalty.

Article by Kalena Jordan, CEO of Web Rank. Kalena was one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australasia and is well known and respected in her field. For more of her articles on search engine ranking and online marketing, please visit High Search Engine Ranking at http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com

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Next, click on 'See Traffic Details' link near top of page. Look at traffic for site and note that in last week number of visitors has increased by almost 100,000. Wow! What could be reason? The holidays? A contest? Their keywords and titles? An advertising campaign? Take a look at site and see if there is a spectacular giveaway or something very attractive going on.

Summary Alexa is a very powerful tool for researching your competitors. Also, be sure to look at your site's listing to find out how well it is doing compared to others in your industry. As you analyze your competitors, look for their strengths so that you can emulate them and also their weaknesses so that you can set your business apart.