We all know that time is money, but for an online business, your website is your storefront, particularly if you are an information publisher. In these days of spelling and grammar checkers on your computer, you should be able to produce error-free copy easily. Why then do we see so many mistakes on the Internet and in emails?
In part, it is strategic. Some business owners are actually going after misspelled keywords by putting them up themselves. In subject headers in emails, they can often do it to get attention or try to trick the spam filters.
But generally speaking, you will want to avoid resorting to such tricks unless it is clear that that is what you are up to. Otherwise, people will just think that your work is sloppy or that you don’t know any better.
Your website and all of your promotional material are selling tools which help you create a first, and sometimes a last, impression. Therefore, try to proofread your material whenever possible, and run a spellcheck. Don’t always rely on Word to underline your errors or grammatical issues. Hit the spellcheck button and run it fully, from the top of the page to the bottom.
Then read it over again to be sure that it has not missed any grammatical errors. It can highlight what you have phrased poorly but it can’t always detect words that you have left out.
Have you ever visited a website that you wished you had clicked past? What kinds of things got on your nerves? The same features that annoyed you will also annoy your visitors if you have them on your website.
Here is a list of a few things that can cost sales by making it difficult for people to make sense of your website:
* Misspelled words in your articles
* Lots of blank white space
* Hard to read fonts
* Too many colors on a page
* Poor contrast between the color of a font and the background of the page
* A black background for your pages with white, red or other text colors
* Links that don’t work
* A poorly constructed site that is hard to navigate
* Cluttered pages with too many ‘calls to action’ as opposed to a linear order flow
* No graphics that support the information or text on the page
* Poor quality graphics or ones which are not relevant to the topic
* Lack of continuity and sense from page to page
This may seem like a lot of things to worry about for your site and each page, but the truth is that your site visitors will notice these things in a matter of seconds as they click into your website. They will have an idea of what they are looking for or need from the information that they saw in the search engine, such as the title and description of the site, or from a link to your site. If what they see when they arrive at your site is ‘off’ in some way, they will click out and look for another site that appears to meet their needs more closely.
Too many rapid clicks out of your site will result in a high bounce rate. If these visitors are coming from an important search engine like Google™, this can affect your overall quality score and how high up you can get on their search engine results pages for the keywords related to your niche or industry.
Building a great website is part art, part science, and all content. Concentrate on spelling things correctly in order to score highly for the keywords on the page. This will include your page title, page description, keywords, tags, and the name of the page itself. It will also include any media, and descriptions of the media, which are on you page. For example, you should name all of your images, audio and video files with at least one meaningful and correctly spelled keyword. The search engines spider these elements as well as websites and webpages.
If you include images on your pages, you should not only name them with keywords, you should also use ALT tags and description tags for each image. These help people who are visually impaired to ‘see’ what is on the page. The description tag is not essential, but it is a good way to give people more information about an image and add to the keyword density on your page at the same time.
Keyword density is just one of the factors taken into consideration when Google™ and the other search engines scan your page and decide how relevant it is to a word or phrase that a user has just typed into a search engine. Therefore, spelling your keywords correctly will be an important part of getting a high relevance score.
Hints and tips
* Proofread all of your content and webpages
Don’t trust the spellcheck alone. For all of your most important pages, such as the About Us and Contact Us pages (the ‘housekeeping’ pages), go through content that you have uploaded line by line. These will be the most viewed pages on your site after your home page, so make them count.
*Check it over again in your Content Management System
If you have a spelling and grammar checker in your CMS, check it again. Also look for things like double-spaces or extra punctuation.
* Preview each page in a number of different browsers
Check your page carefully in your previewer, but remember that all browsers behave differently. Once you have uploaded the content onto your website, check its appearance online using the standard browsers, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome, to be sure that you have not left any tags open and that the page is appearing the way you would like it to. Check for problems with alignment (center, left, right) or the number of columns on the page.
*Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) when Possible
In terms of appearance, use CSS whenever possible to eliminate the need for a lot of tags. The cleaner the code, the faster the load time and the less chance of any errors on your page.
* Pay attention to Headlines and Subheadings
The eye of the reader will naturally be attracted to certain parts of the page. Put anything you think is the most important information at the top or near it.
Your website is the base of operations for your business if you are working online to attract customers. Your site can make or break your business in a matter of seconds. People who use the Internet have many choices of sites to visit. Sloppy layouts and grammatical errors can repel instead of attract customers.
Try to put your best foot forward and use your spellchecker in your word-processing program and in your blog interface/content management system interface if you have these tools. People should be struck by your professionalism at your site, not with the numbers of errors they can see. Also keep the needs of the reader in mind to help create a site that will be a magnet to visitors thanks to your professionalism and high-quality content.
Further Reading
Really Rapid Content Creation for More Traffic and Profits: Basics for Beginners
