technofacia

Getting to the top of the SERPs ain’t easy. With over 200 factors in the Google ranking algorithm, it’s hard to stay on top of what factors actually influence rankings. I want to give you a leg up heading into the new decade, so let’s take a look at some factors that may end up influencing rankings in the future.

Page Load Speed

As Mike Calabrese posted last week, page load speed has a definite affect on conversion rate. Numerous studies have shown that faster load times increase user retention and activity.

There have been whispers over the last few years that page load speed would be added to the ranking algorithm, and it’s looking more and more like a possibility. After all, it already is a factor in the calculation of quality score for AdWords.

Before yesterday I might have put this probability at 80 percent, but Google just announced that average page load speed now appears within their webmaster central dashboard. I’d say its nearly a certainty now. Look for this to take effect as soon as 2010.

What You Can Do Now

• Head to Webmaster Central and see how your site stacks up. The report is called “Site Performance” and can be found in the “Labs” section
• Follow recommendations from Google. Some common fixes include enabling gzip compression, minimizing DNS lookups, and combining JavaScript and CSS files
• Download YSlow for Firefox and put your site through the test
• Start saving for a faster host and content management system!

W3C Validation

W3C validation is all about using proper web grammar in your markup. Achieving full W3C validation is not all that easy, especially for many eCommerce stores on complex platforms.

The SEM folks weren’t positive about whether or not this already was a factor until Matt Cutts cleared things up earlier this year. At the moment, whether or not your website validates according to W3C’s standards is not a factor.

Google’s reasoning for not factoring this into search rankings is that there is a bit of a disconnect between compatibility and validation. In short, they would rather a site is compatible in all browsers and mediums, than if it just validated. After all, Google.com does not validate…

What You Can Do Now

• Head to the W3C Validator and see how your site stacks up
• Don’t go nuts investing time and money in validating, but if your site has a ton of errors compared to your competitors, you may want to take some action

Web References

If links to your company’s website counts as a “vote”, shouldn’t a mention (without a link) on NYTimes.com mean something? That is the idea behind a web reference. Basically, it would be another factor that determines “buzz”.

Google already factors these link-less references for their local results, so to assume that it will be utilized for regular search rankings at some point isn’t that much of a gamble. That said, this data may end up being useless when viewed on a wide scale. You can imagine a scenario where site A’s difference in web references over site B is pretty proportional to the difference in links.

What You Can Do Now

• Generate discussion! Essentially anything you would do to build links would work in building web references

Social Media Factors

If 2009 was the year social media took center stage for the user, 2010 is already shaping up to be the year it gains some traction with the search engines. No one denies that Twitter and Facebook hold some valuable information in the user-generated content found within those sites. The problem is sorting through the muck.

The big two have made efforts to rank statuses and tweets internally with features like Facebook’s “Like” and Twitter’s “ReTweet.” These may end up being a precursor to determining the importance of an individual status message, which could pave the way for incorporation into the ranking algorithm.

In a sense social results are already included in Google results within their social search experiment. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this implemented on a grander scale, as seen below:

What You Can Do Now

• Get Social. Build up a following of customers and friends and start communicating
• Include links to your company Twitter and Facebook page on your website, encouraging people to connect

Click Through Rate

CTR is a gigantic factor in the AdWords quality score algorithm. Google values well written ad text very highly for paid ads, and though it isn’t yet a ranking factor, they may very well be tracking CTR for organic results already.

Including CTR as a factor makes sense. If 95% of searchers skip the first result for a particular query, Google could assume that the first result is not as relevant as originally determined.

What You Can Do Now

• Spruce up those titles and meta descriptions!
• Make sure to include some of your unique value propositions like free shipping, or brands carried

Search Wiki Edits

Search Wiki is the Google feature that allows users to shoot results to the top, make comments, or delete them all together. It is on by default for all accounts and caused a bit of an uproar when first launched for fear that Joe User could influence results.

Google was quick to state that edits made by users only affect that user’s results. However, with Search Wiki being live for just over a year now, you might imagine that they’ve amassed a large amount of data. If an alarming amount of people delete a result for a particular query, shouldn’t Google take action themselves? Maybe Search Wiki data isn’t used to determine all out result removal, but rather fits into the algorithm as a small adjustment.

What You Can Do Now

• Provide valuable content!
• Take inventory of your pages in the index. Are there old or unwanted pages? Perhaps some pages aren’t included that should be?

In Conclusion

Keep in mind that my probability percentages are just my best estimates, and I could be dead wrong. However, many of the action items above are great things to do for your site at anytime, regardless of whether it will have an affect on your rank.

Update

I wanted to quickly add another factor that I’m not sure how I left out! That is:

Bounce Rate

Google is more than capable of tracking bounce rate from a search result page. You can imagine a scenario in which a significant portion of searchers bounce off the first result and stay on the second for a particular query. One could hardly blame Google for ultimately bumping the second result to the first spot for this.

Smart webmasters keep a close eye on their bounce rates because a high bounce rate should raise a number of red flags. Some of the factors that contribute to a bounce include slow load, irrelevance, perceived untrustworthiness, or the lack of a clear next step.

Money transfer to India being one of the major issue of Indians from decades was worsened yet by the blocking of all Paypal transactions to and from India.

A few paypal account holders payments have been returned to the payee’s while a few have received an email that the money transfer will take time to reflect in the bank accounts.

The U.S. online payment company PayPal has suspended transfer funds, and private users will not be able to transfer out of India, and transfer to the Indian’s Bank.

PayPal on weekend at the company’s Web site blog said service was suspended on 28th January. It’s now more than a week. The company’s spokes person also told that “we are working with business partners and stakeholders to resolve some of their problems.”
EBay auction site owned by PayPal, did not disclose further details. PayPal said that the customers can still transfer to India accounts, but local banks, businesses can not withdraw from the Indian rupee.

Paypal online money transfer facility was one of the easiest ways of money transfer to all IT experts and other freelancers.This move from Paypal which is not only blocking all their money transfer but also not letting the Indian account holders the basic withdrawal facility has given a major shock to many Indians,.

Mr Anuj Nayar the spokesman of Paypal said that the blocking started on 28th Jan 2010. Paypal owned by the famous E-bay Inc is working to resolve the current situations in “the shortest span of time.”

PayPal, said: “We are trying to resolve the current situation as quickly as possible, we are sorry this may give India and other countries, customer inconvenience.”

Paypal suspended the regulation of Payments in India-A few weeks ago story about Paypal suspending the account of Wikileaks, and blocking it from removing money in the account, many people pointed out how risky it is to leave any money in a PayPal account.Now Paypal targeted India by suspended incoming and outgoing of payments and aren’t allowing merchants to remove money from their accounts.

PayPal has suspended personal payments to and from India.The online payment service did not give a reason for the suspension, or say how long it would last. Along with personal payments in and out of the country, PayPal suspended transfers to local banks in India.

The situation has continued now for a week and no resolution is in sight. Paypal is not revealing any date on the release of the payments of the Indian accounts holders.

Measuring Success:Business Website

The means of measuring the success of a business Web site are decided using the ‘Business Analysis’ section of the development life-cycle of a business Web site. More traditional metrics include:

• An increase in market share
• An increase in sales
• The proportion of sales coming from the e-commerce section of the Web site
• An increase in brand awareness
• An decrease in calls to a helpline (if, for example, a business has put its support information online)

The above factors directly impact on the success of the business.

In addition to the above many businesses also examine the access logs on their Web server as a way of determining how ’successful’ their Web site is. Unfortunately statistics from server logs are essentially meaningless and, in reality, can tell you nothing more than how busy the Web server is (also called server load). Some reasons why Web statistics can under and over-represent the popularity of your Web site are:

• Caching – A Web cache is a store of the HTML pages, CSS files, images, etc. for the Web pages you have viewed. Subsequent visits to the same page (within a certain time) will result in files being read from the cache rather than downloaded again from the remote Web server. The pages will be quicker to load but the Web browser will not request pages from your Web server everytime they visit your Web site. Consequently these accesses won’t appear in the server logs or statistics. Caching can occur at the Web browser or at the ISP level – users can control caching at a Web browser level (by changing the cache settings) but not at the ISP level.
• Users – The only way you can accurately determine the number of users your Web site has is to make them register and then log in each time they want to use it (assuming they don’t share their log in credentials with colleagues/friends). Programs designed to analyse sever logs often estimate the number of users based on the number of unique IP addresses appearing in the logs (1 unique IP address = 1 user). Unfortunately many Web users browse the Web from behind a proxy server (a server, usually run by the ISP, that sits between the user’s PC and the Internet) which makes requests for Web pages for them. Many people can sit behind the same proxy server so lots of users will appear to have the same IP address – programs analysing the server logs will count this as 1 user when in fact it is many. In addition, AOL (America Online), for example, use multiple proxy servers. When people using AOL as an ISP make a request for a Web page the requests for the HTML, CSS, images, etc. can come from any of the proxy servers. Therefore, Web server log analysis programs can interpret an AOL user as many different users. An additional problem is that when a user connects to some ISPs the ISP assigns them a dynamic IP address. Each time the user connects they may get a completely different IP address so again you cannot asume that unique IP address equals 1 user.
• Visits – Most server log analysis packages class a ‘visit’ as activity from a single IP address that is followed by a period of 30 minutes inactivity. As we have already discovered, it cannot be assumed that 1 IP address equals 1 user. Consequently this ‘definition’ of a ‘visit’ is completely flawed. In addition 30 minutes inactivity is a completely arbitrary length of time, a user may be answering some email, making a phonecall, etc. and so 30 minutes inactivity may not represent the end of a ‘visit’.
• Other data – Some server log analysis packages will also provide additional information on how they ‘think’ the site is being accessed. This information can include paths through the site (which can’t be determined due to users backtracking and using cached pages), time spent reading a page (a user may have been doing something else during that time) and a user’s entry point to a site (if the homepage is already cached then then entry point will appear deeper than it actually is).

A brief note about ‘hits’ – hits are the number of requests for individual files a Web server receives. Obviously caching will have a large effect on this value but it is also an often misused figure. Assuming there’s no caching, a single Web page containing 25 images and using 1 stylesheet will produce 27 ‘hits’ (1 for the HTML document, 1 for each image and 1 for the CSS). Therefore graphics intensive Web sites will have high numbers of ‘hits’ but may be considerably less well used than a Web site using far fewer graphics (which consequently has a lower number of ‘hits’). A much more useful figure is that of page accesses (or page impressions, page views), this figure represents the number of requests received for HTML pages. The page access figure is much lower than the number of hits and so is used less often since, to people who don’t understand how the figures are derived, it’s a less impressive number. However, all these figures are easily skewed by caching as we saw above.

Other ways of assessing the popularity/success of a Web site include:

• Site ranking within Web search results – “In a search for ‘business education’ on http://www.google.com our site is first in the list of results.”
• Link Popularity – comparing the number of other Web sites that link to you compared with your competitors can be a good indication of how popular your site is. This can be checked using an online  (http://www.linkpopularity.com/)

All software has source code. Open source software grants every user access to that code. Freedom means choice. Choice means power.

That’s why we at technofacia believe open source is inevitable. It actually returns control to the customer. You can see the code, change it, learn from it. Bugs are found and fixed quickly. And when customers are unhappy with one vendor, they can choose another without overhauling their entire infrastructure. No more technology lock-in. No more monopolies.

We believe open source simply creates better software. Everyone collaborates, the best technology wins. Not just within one company, but among an Internet-connected, worldwide community. New ideas and code travel the world in an instant.

As a result, the open source model often builds higher quality, more secure, more easily integrated software. And it does it at a vastly accelerated pace and often at a lower cost.

In the proprietary model, development occurs within one company. Programmers write code, hide it behind binaries, and charge customers to use the software–then charge them more to fix it when it breaks. The problem worsens when you become tied to a company’s architecture, protocols, and file formats. Bruce Perens calls this the addiction model of software procurement. And we think a model that puts customers at such a fundamental disadvantage is conceptually broken.

Open source is not nameless, faceless, and it’s not charity. Nor is it solely a community effort. What you see today is a technology revolution driven by market demand.

And the revolution is being recognized. Red Hat has teamed up with the Georgia Institute of Technology to look into the causes and the worldwide growth of open source. They created the Open Source Index to better measure its progress.

Imagine if all past knowledge was kept hidden or its use was restricted to only those who are willing to pay for it. Education and research would suffer. Publishing books or sharing information of any sort would become difficult. Yet this is the mentality behind the proprietary software model. In the same way shared knowledge propels the whole of society forward, open technology development can drive innovation for an entire industry.

All-in-one

This is the simplest possible model. Everything goes on a single Home page.

It’s interesting to see many more sites using this approach, to simplify the experience and to reduce maintenance.

Flat

A flat pattern is where all pages are arranged as peers, and every one is accessible from every other one. This is very common for simple sites, where there are a few standard topics, such as: Home, About Us, Contact Us, Products.

This may also be called a ‘monocline grouping’.

Index

An index structure is like the flat structure, with an additional list of contents.

An index is often organised in some way, to make stuff easier to find. For example, a list of files in a web directory (the index page), or could be an index of people’s names ordered by last name.

Dictionaries and phone books are both giant indexes. Look at the corners of the pages, where the data ‘index’ is: it may be the first few letters of the word, or a marker that shows the alphabetical range on the page.

Indexes work well when there is a medium amount of data, and also when that data can be ordered in a way that makes it easier to scan to what you want.

How many items can an effective index contain?

Quite a lot. Would it be quicker to use a search engine or a phone book to find a particular number? I’d guess that if the search engine works well, it would probably be a little bit quicker, but the phone book doesn’t do a bad job. For a clear difference, you’d need a large amount of data, such as a multi-volume encyclopaedia, where you would find alternative mechanisms more useful.

Hub-and-spoke (or daisy) pattern

This model is useful for multiple, distinct linear workflows. A good example may be an email application, where you will return to your inbox at several points, e.g. after reading a message, after sending a message, or after adding a new contact.

Sometimes, I find the term ‘daisy model’ more helpful, for architectures that use a number of transactions that share a common start/end point. The transaction loops can look like petals on a flower.

Strict hierarchy

A strict hierarchy describes a system where you can only access a lower-level page via its parent.

This could apply to a real-world model where there is a strict parent-child relationship between objects, such as arranging pages for company offices by their country. An office cannot be in more than one country.

Many data models also have strict parent-child relationships, such as Message boards, Threads and Posts. Every thread belongs to one message board; a message board can have many (child) threads. Each thread can have one or more subsequent (child) posts.

The important thing to remember about this is that, even if there’s a strictly hierarchical real-world model, that doesn’t mean that a strict hierarchy is the best way to represent it online. You should consider your users’ goals and contexts of use. For example, while it’s possible to arrange all your products by product category, that might not be the most intuitive way for a user to find it. Supermarkets often place the same items in more than one place, knowing that consumers will think about them and look for them under more than one category.

Multi-dimensional hierarchy

A multi-dimensional hierarchy is where there are many ways of browsing to the same content. In a way, several hierarchies co-exist, overlaid on the same content. The structure of the content can appear to be different, depending on the mode you’re looking in.

A typical example is a site like Amazon, which lets you browse books by genre, or by title, and also lets you search by keyword. Each of these hierarchies corresponds to a property of the content, each of which can be useful for people in different situations.

Search

Many users and sites rely on the ability to use it to get to content quickly. While it’s strictly more a navigation tool than an architecture, a search tool is often built in to a site’s architecture, like an elevator is built in to the architecture of a building.

Search functions present a dynamic view of a set of content, and offer instant links to each result. This allows users to jump straight to content, without having to browse through hierarchies or indexes.

When search works well, it can be a huge benfit. Generally, the more content there is, the more value search can offer.

That means that you can manage your own content from your end, through an administration system that is part of your website. This site is the perfect solution for most medium to large scale businesses websites. Why? Because it gives you the control over the content and graphics. Customers and search engine like new content and you no need to have to pay your web designing company each time when you want to change content and graphics for your website.

The basic advantage of the content management system – CMS is that you can quickly and easily make modifications to your web site at any time. You don’t need to go to a web designing company or no need to use any web design software. With the CMS you can ADD, MODIFY and DELETE a page, or EDIT a page that you wish to. You can upload documents, pictures, add links to other pages with in the website or other websites, and edit the formatting of the page.

Who need CMS Website?

If you are a company or an individual, willing to maintain your website from your end i.e either from your company or from home to avoid web maintenance expenditure every year and don’t want to contact the web design company for any modifications like new content updations or new page additions, then this CMS solution is the best way to maintain your website without any programming needs. And, you can do it from any computer located at home or office with a internet connection, anywhere in the world! You can change one word, or the whole page. Just click “save” and the change is immediately live. A content management system is just like using a word processor

Once the CMS completed and ready to use in your website, you can have full control over the website content. You can make your site as large as you want it to be. You can keep adding pages until you run out of things to say! Search engines like it when your site is regularly updated – and a CMS means you can do it yourself, as often as you like. Technofacia offers CMS design and development in New Delhi India.

CMS benefits
• Streamlined Authoring Process
• Faster Turnaround Time For New Pages And Changes
• Greater Consistency
• Improved Site Navigation
• Increased Site Flexibility
• Support For Decentralised Authoring
• Increased Security
• Reduced Duplication Of Information
• Greater Capacity For Growth
• Reduced Site Maintenance Costs

How to get a CMS website

If you wish to convert your existing static website into a CMS, please send an email to info@technofacia.com requesting proposal for CMS website development. CMS is best suited for the following business categories.

• News Websites
• E-commerce and shopping cart engines
• Dynamic form builders
• Business or organizational directories
• Document management
• Image and multimedia galleries
• Forums and chat software
• Calendars
• Blogging software
• Directory services
• Email newsletters
• Data collection and reporting tools
• Banner advertising systems
• Subscription services

You have heard about it quite often. You know very well about it as well. But did you know what wonders they can do to your business? Yes, I am talking about our very own Blogs! The word that’s seen almost anywhere and everywhere now, with its popularity and admiration only increasing by the minute! No matter what kind of business you are indulged in, blogs, when written well and with useful content, would definitely attract large number of visitors to your website, thus increasing your revenue.
So where and how do I start from? This is the question that many have in their minds. Some businesses might already have a blog site, but might not know how to write or what to write. As I mentioned before, it is not enough to just write blogs. It is also important to write useful and business-relevant stuff in order to attract the attention of your audience and promote sales.
Out of my experience as a content writer and an SEO professional, I have formulated certain strategies that help construct effective blogs. Following are few tips that you can follow in order to blog efficiently:

1. Identify who your business audience are and deliver content accordingly. Once the target audience for whom the blog is written, is known, you can deliver relevant content that proves useful and interesting to them

2. Design your blog appropriately. Make it simple yet appealing, so that it is pleasing to the eyes. The first impression is formed by simply looking at the blog page. So make it look neat and organized.

3. Make the blog more business specific. This makes it more powerful and effective to convey your business thoughts and ideas up to your visitors.

4. Talk out your views. Ok so you have set up a blog for your website. Next talk out all that you feel is relevant to your business. Your ideas, views and thoughts on new and existing facts applicable to your business, all can be expressed via blogs.

5. Prompt acknowledgement and reply to user comments. Acknowledge comments and suggestions that your visitors have left in your blog and reply to them promptly. This gives them the feeling of importance and makes them comfortable in your website. Well, I practice the following:

• I have a folder in my email, with the question and comments received and the response that I have sent.
• Ones that are replied are in a folder, and the ones pending are in another. So no chance of letting any comment unnoticed!

6. Get, Set, Blogroll!! Blogrolling is a very useful method to get more traffic to your website, from other popular or similar blog sites, that are related to your business. You can write comments in blogs that relate to your kind of business and link it to your website.

7. Search engine friendly keywords. Include keyword phrases in your blogs that match your business. Choose phrases that your audience is highly probable to use in search engines, so that your blog lists among the first few results, thereby increasing relevant visitors.

8. Think fresh write fresh! Your visitors are expecting fresh content and not those stale and repeated ones that can be got from any other site. Think fresh and write fresh and current topics

9. Read a lot. Read many blogs and articles, related to your business. The more you read and understand others’ ideas, the more you will come across new and innovative thoughts, which ultimately benefits your blogs and thereby your business!

10. Get ideas from others. No two people have the same thinking. So the more you interact with people, the more you get ideas. I usually make a note of all ideas and views that I get, as I do not believe my remembering capacity on this!

11. Ignite interest by starting a Blog Series. This not only would be informative to the readers, but will also generate a spark of interest in their minds, and they would religiously come back to your site to read the remaining part of the blog.

12. Guest Blogger. This is more commonly used practice, but I believe this also helps to a certain extent. Getting someone who is famous among bloggers, to write a blog for your site, not only creates hype about the blog, but you can also benefit from the immense experience that the guest might have.

13. Get RSS and Bookmarking tools. Load your blogs with RSS and bookmarking options. This not only proves to be useful for your visitors, but also helps spreading the good word of your blog, among many like-minded audiences.

14. Mind your traffic! Keep a close watch on your website traffic. A fall or a rise, informs you if a particular strategy or blog of yours is a hit or a flop.

15. And finally, The 5 To-dos: I have always followed 5 steps that I consider important, while writing a blog. They are:

• Research extensively
• Compose relevantly
• Analyze perfectly
• Modify accordingly
• Promote widely
These above mentioned topics are few of the routine things that I follow. These are tried and definitely tested tips that are no rocket science, still can make a great impact on your blogging. So go ahead! Start blogging!

I heard this question from a business owner the other day: “Should I redesign my site or can it be fixed?

The site wasn’t creating sales nor was there as much traffic to it. When the site was built, they had it optimized for the search engines. However, they did little additional online marketing. The content on the site hadn’t been updated in years. This is not unusual. Many businesses have limited time and budget and plan to do more when they can.

When a site isn’t getting enough traffic nor converting the traffic it does get, a website redesign is often thought to be the answer. But before you go spending the time and money on a redesign, it might be a wise investment to look at your website from several perspectives, including some based on the concepts of usability and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Does your current site address:

1. Specifically who are the targeted visitors who will be coming to your site? What are they hoping to accomplish and can they easily find this information or product? Is your information up-to-date?
2. Why are your visitors there? Why did they feel the need to find your site in the first place? What motivation are you providing them to stay at your site? How are you persuading them to buy your product or service; how are you helping them to make that decision?
3. Has your website been built so that the search engines can “read” and index it? Has it been optimized?
4. How are people going to know about your website? “Build it and they will come” only works in the movies. Do you have a strategy for how to improve your website’s visibility and presence in the search engines and in the off-line world? Have you taken advantage of local search opportunities such as Google Local, email campaigns to current clients, social media opportunities and online press release services? Do you have digital assets, such as pictures or press releases that can be used in new ways to promote your site?

If your current site doesn’t do these well, a newly redesigned site won’t work much better unless you plan on addressing these issues. In many cases, a new website design isn’t needed. What is needed is a fresh look at your site from your visitors’ point of view and an assessment of your current online marketing, much of which costs more in time than in actual dollars.

Often an investment in better content – copy, images, video clips, that addresses your audience’s needs and wants will provide a better result as will a targeted plan to increase your website’s visibility through the Web.

Incorporating search engine strategies into web sites

Developing a web site strategy is imperative to a successful web site. Any website design or redesign should incorporate:

* search engine optimization
* user-centric design principles (usability)
* plan for online marketing

A combination of quality, white hat search engine optimization techniques (SEO) and search engine marketing helps companies see results in both the short term and the long term. A web strategy helps you plan for the results and the needed resources of both time and money.
Search engine optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can increase the traffic to your website. Through content and code, a web site can be made search engine friendly without compromising the experience of your web site’s visitors. We use no spam techniques, just quality, proven best practices.

Search engine optimization should take place as early as possible in the design / redesign process and adjustments will be necessary to achieve the best results.
Visitors are key – Usability with Persuasion

Usability can improve your conversion rates. Recognizing the visitor’s role is key in creating a good web site. A site must be approached from the visitor’s perspective and the development of personas is an important step. Understanding who your site visitors are, what they’re searching for and why they’re interested provides direction for the web site’s content, structure and navigation.
Web design, redesign and development

All web designs are developed from the perspective of your web site’s visitors. If they cannot navigate your web site or find quality, relevant information, then the site will not be effective.

Using graphics, video and/or audio, a web site is developed that meets your goals and reflects the quality of your product or service.

Websites that make their customers work to read them are not the best way to get business. Miniscule fonts, text in colors that make it hard to see against the background color, and lines that are piled on top of each other are problems, but they’re easy to correct. Let’s jump right in and look at five easy fixes:

1. Format your text using CSS.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the way to go – use one style sheet and control how text looks on your entire site. Make a change to the style sheet and your whole site is updated. It makes life a lot simpler.

2. Make the font size big enough to read.

Consider your target audience. Even if they are a group of teenage girls looking for new shoes, it’s never a good idea to use tiny type. It doesn’t have to be enormous, but up to a point, larger type is better. 12-pt Verdana is better than 8-pt Verdana.

3. Make the text contrast with its background.

The more contrast, the better. Black-on-white or white-on-black are examples of the highest contrast you can get. Use colors if you like, but if you squint at the page and your text basically vanishes, there’s not enough contrast.

4. Give the lines room to breathe.

Don’t stack lines on top of each other. Use the line-spacing directive in CSS and give it some space; I’ll often set line-spacing to 140% of the height of a typical line.

5. Break text up into chunks.

No matter how good a writer you are, people don’t want to read endless pages of text. Break it up by using headlines that reflect the subject of the paragraph(s) to follow so people can scan down to the parts that really interest them, or use bulleted lists to change the pace of the writing and slow down the scanning.

And finally (not one of the 5 Easy Ways to Improve Legibility but still quite important) check your spelling. Nothing irritates me more on a web page than spelling errors – it simply makes you look like you don’t care enough to get it right. Use that ubiquitous spellcheck tool.

Making your website’s content more legible is easy. It doesn’t take a lot of time, mainly common sense. The payoff will be text that’s more readable, customers that stick around long enough to get your message, and improved credibility with your visitors.