Now that you know which pages are the most important for your site, here are some tips and best practices on maximizing your pages and delivering the best results possible.

Use Analytics

Sign up for Google Analytics or another analytics service so that you can monitor website activity. This is crucial in telling you how your website and its pages are performing. Analytics can tell you things like:

• Which pages get the most traffic
• On which pages visitors spend the most time
• At which pages visitors are leaving your site
• Whether your site’s navigation is working effectively or not
• Which pages are not getting any traffic
• Which referring sources are sending the most traffic to your site
• Which blog posts are read the most

Pay especially close attention to “bounce rate.” This is a metric that measures visitors landing on a page and immediately “bouncing” off. This is an indication that there’s something wrong with the content or navigation. These are your major trouble spots that need to be corrected.

All of the above information helps you figure out what you can do differently to maximize your site.

Design Considerations

One major factor contributing to whether your content is read and thus the effectiveness of your website is its design. Enhancing and improving the design can help to create a better user experience and thus improve your site’s performance.

A few considerations here include:

• Font: Is the font unique and consistent with your brand? Is it easy to read? What does the font say about you?
• Space: Make sure there’s plenty of white space and avoid large chunks of text. White space also helps to create balance. It also accentuates features like your call to action.
• Colors: Use a font color and background color that makes it easy to read. Avoid dark background with light text, and avoid stark black and white; use greyscale instead for better readability.
• Simplicity: Keep the design simple. It’s better for it to be too clean than too cluttered.
• Load Times: Don’t use any design elements that take a long time to load, like Flash players. Users may not stay and wait.
• Mobile-Friendly: Design your pages so that they’re mobile-friendly or mobile-responsive, or create a separate mobile version of your site.

Content Tips

The quality of your content is critical to building relationships with your customers. It really has to be exceptional. If your web pages are full of generic or poorly written content, it doesn’t matter how well you’ve planned. Your website won’t achieve its goals.

Good content is unique and high-quality. It offers a distinctive take on the subject and gives the reader information that they can use. While being informative, it is also interesting, entertaining and easy to read. Take a look at the website you frequently read and ask yourself why you read them.

If you’re not confident about writing your own content, hire a ghost writer. Take time and find someone who knows the subject matter well, is reliable and writes well. Try to choose just one or a handful of good writers with whom you can build a close, long-term relationship. Don’t choose a writer based on price alone.

Making Your Site Search-Friendly

There are many things you can do to make your website easy for search engines to find and index. We’ve covered some of them already. Here are some further tips on making sure that the search engines find your content and send users to it.

• Keywords. We’ve covered this already, but find some good keywords and use them naturally wherever possible. Choose the type of keywords your ideal customer would be searching for. Update the keywords you use or change them up from time to time.
• Uniqueness. All of your content needs to be unique. Don’t copy and paste content from elsewhere. You should use only content that’s original because search engine algorithms index content only once; if your content is copied from somewhere else, it won’t show up in search results.

Inbound Links. Invite others to link back to you and actively look for sites that will give you a quality backlink. It’s important that these are “quality” backlinks, not just links from random sites that you’ve paid for.