Pay Attention to Your Website Images, or Face the Consequences.

A Good Website Image is Worth a Thousand Optimized Content Words.

If images are properly included on a webpage, SEO is usually improved. The image must be relevant, informational, and properly tagged and captioned. Webpage search optimization is enhanced. Importantly, relevant images vastly improve the odds of a potential client becoming a real client. Pictures and images help sell the product or service being offered.

Optimized Content and Image.

Images increase customer confidence in the company, the website, the product, and the service offered. Most people want to see an image of what they're going to buy, before they buy it. It is human nature to 'see before you buy'. No one wants to buy an unknown product or a service for which context is missing and/or appears confusing.

Relevant images provide assurance and instant information. This applies to goods and services. A good image relates to a particular product, option, service, and application. The potential customer will instantly 'get it'.

Top-notch consumer and industrial product websites like Amazon, Grainger, Home Depot, Walmart, Staples, and others pay close attention to product images. Accurate images help them sell stuff, a lot of stuff.

If a website image is worth a thousand words, why do so many websites have missing-in-action images? Cleaning up missing or inaccurate images should be a high priority. Making sure these images are optimally tagged for search is also important.

Don't end up with sad 'image not found' defaults on your webpages.... it won't end well and you'll lose orders, leads, projects, etc. Your competitors will thank you.

Don't do this:

Missing in Action: Images Not Found.

This is bad:

Image Not Found.

This is bad:

Image Not Found.

This is bad:

Image Not Found.

Don't be bad. Be good. Use precise, concise, imagery on your website. Tag it properly. Your SEO results will thank you for it.

Six Reasons to be Thankful to Your Competitors

CROSS-LINK IT - For Better Sales and Leads

Cross-Linking Webpages Helps Customer and Search Engine Navigation.
Don't Maroon Your Customers!

Marooned in a Great Unknown Website!

Millions of dollars in potential sales and leads are lost on a daily basis thanks to poor or badly designed website navigation. In B-to-B web sales, this is especially important. Customers will only sacrifice so much time and effort to find a product or service.

Once frustrated, customers attempt to back-browse (back-browsing actions often result from a failure in navigation design) and/or try the internal search engine (fingers crossed). Faced with failure and frustration, the prospective customer then evacuates the website completely and goes to Google or directly to a competitor's website. A sale is lost because the customer couldn't quickly and efficiently find what they were looking for.

Cross-Linking relevant pages help customers find the product or service they want. It will help them find related products and services. It will make their experience easier and more efficient. Cross-Linking works, if used in a logical way.

A usability goal of any website should be "Don't Make Me Think" when customers navigate to find information. Along with top and side level navigation menus, cross linking can help a customer drill down, and drill down fast.

Example of effective and efficient cross-linking:

Cross Linking Helps People and Search Engines Find Your Stuff!

Related product links are listed on related product webpages. To pull related items together into a relevant cluster of webpages, web marketers must know the product lines and their customers. If web teams don't know the market in detail, they better learn. By working with sales teams, technical service staff, and customers web teams can better capture the niche product or service universe as your customer sees it.

Example of poor cross-linking, the Dead End Webpage:

This Dead End Webpage Customer Navigation Experience isn't going to end well!

Don't Maroon your customers. In this case, if a customer wanted a different size, style, or color they will leave your site. No options were given to see related products. What's more frustrating than to land on a webpage and not have useful navigation options to continue searching? Not much. If a landing page doesn't have what the customer wanted and the website offers no related options thanks to poor navigation and poor cross-linking, the chances are very high that visitor will leave your website and try searching again on a competitor's.

So much of successful website navigation is based upon common-sense. The key to success is understanding how your customer looks at your universe of products and services, and design your website to reflect that understanding. Cross-Links are knowledge bridges for customers and search engines, and a vital part of a good navigation system. Cross-Link for success!

A to Z Lists on Websites Really Work